Tag: 2022 spring anime season

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [6/5/22]

Anime Orbit Weekly is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

Hi folks! I don’t have a ton to say up here today. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things while still dealing with a bunch of life stuff, so happy as I am that this week’s been devoid of interruptions so far, I don’t want to make any promises about what the immediate future looks like. (Down to whether or not I’ll be able to finally cover Healer Girl on time for once tomorrow. That’s a big We’ll See.)

But in any case, I’ve gotten a lot of writing done this week, and if you’re a devoted enough fan of the site to be reading this, sincerely thank you for reading so much of it. I’m quite proud of the column this week, and I think you’ll see why as you read on. Also! I don’t want to promise anything (see previous paragraph), but I might have a special project starting up this week. We’ll see which way the winds blow.

Seasonal Anime

Birdie Wing

With episode 8, Birdie Wing closed the door on its “golf underground” storyline. The consequences were real and, in their own way, dire, despite the show’s absurdity. Eve has fled Nafrece and can’t ever go back, mob boss Rose Aleon is dead, shot in the face by a vengeful rival mob in a truly, utterly, indescribable pastiche of proper gangster cinema that Birdie Wing somehow managed to pull off flawlessly. The aftermath didn’t seem to bother Birdie Wing though, the very last shots of that episode were of Eve being goofy on a plane, literally flying away from the poverty she was adopted into, her and her family reaping the spoils of her improbable golf skill. The latter by being safe from that very poverty, the former by going to Japan to pursue her Golf Waifu.

So, in a way, this represents more the beginning of something than the end. An even slightly more ordinary anime would transpose the order here; introduce Eve as an ordinary high school girl and then eventually build up to the climactic confrontation with the, ahem, Golf Mafia. But Birdie Wing is not a remotely ordinary anime, and so, at the end of episode 9 we see that she’s enrolled in a Golf School in Golf Japan to pursue a Golf Romantically Charged Shonen Rivalry with fellow Golf Lesbian, Aoi, the aforementioned Golf Waifu. All this sets in as the sound of Tsukuyomi‘s “Nightjar”—the show’s needlessly beautiful ED theme—fills the sky and a shot of a golf ball dissolving into a full moon hangs overhead. It’s nuts.

It is still hard to know exactly how to reconcile Birdie Wing‘s ridiculousness with its sincerity. It’s been nine weeks and I’m still processing it; a show that transmutes the world’s most boring sport into high camp shouldn’t work as well as Birdie Wing does. Especially now that the series has seemingly abandoned the class element that made the first arc something worth chewing on thematically. By all rights Birdie Wing should fall apart here. But if it ever will, it’s not this week. From here, we golf sublime. If anything, I want to take Birdie Wing even more at face value than I already was. It somehow completely buys its own hype.

The first six or so minutes of episode 9 don’t even feature Eve at all. Instead, we focus on a new character who we’ve only briefly seen before. This is Ichina Saotome (Saki Fujita), an Ordinary Golf Schoolgirl whose greatest desire in life is, no shit, to be a professional golf caddy. She says things like this.

Saotome makes a hell of a first impression; among other things she’s late for Golf School because she missed the Golf Bus. Readers who aren’t watching this series may wonder if me appending “golf” to the front of random nouns is some kind of running joke or if the show is actually like that, and I am delighted to tell those readers that it is, in fact, both. Saotome’s school has a prominent Golf Club (haha. golf club), it is very serious business, and one of its members is the other character we properly meet here, Haruka Misono (Rina Satou).

Any fear that all this might make Birdie Wing even marginally more normal is dashed by the fact that Eve greets the both of these girls by deliberately driving a ball between them as they talk in order to get their attention.

Her blunt attempts to get a meeting with Aoi are pretty funny, but not as funny as the fact that Eve can somehow speak Japanese, and even she doesn’t know how. In a show that bought in less to its ludicrousness, this would be an obvious joke. Here, I almost wonder if it’s not some kind of foreshadowing about things we’ll eventually learn about Eve’s pre-amnesia life. (It can be both, of course.)

Her ability to meet with Aoi is eventually staked on a golf game (of course) by the Golf Club’s president. She gets an obvious victory over Haruka, although it’s closer than one might assume, and I suspect the now-shattered first year might serve as yet another rival to Eve.

Meanwhile, Aoi’s reaction to meeting Eve again is this.

Golfing!

Ultimately, the episode ends as aforementioned. Eve enrolls in Aoi’s school—obvious fake name and all—to the admiring gay screams of literally her entire classroom. And, well, god knows where the plot goes from here. I half expect Birdie Wing to turn into Revolutionary Golf Utena. It wouldn’t be out of character.

One thing is certain, Birdie Wing‘s total commitment to itself, an almost defiant attitude of “yeah, this is the Symphogear of golf, what are you going to do about it?” It’s hard to imagine Birdie Wing ever falling off in a serious way if it keeps that attitude up. Personally, I’ve joined the camp who strongly hope that this thing has two cours (no episode count was ever announced). Mostly just because I want to see what other total nonsense the show can come up with, but also because in spite of my general loathing of golf as a sport and everything it represents, I do care about these characters! I’m not afraid to say so, either. Much like some of its spiritual predecessors, Birdie Wing wrings emotional resonance from high absurdity, and it does a damn good job of it, too. It takes flight against all odds, a fighter jet of pure self-confidence.

Oh, and also; there’s a scene in here where Aoi gets all embarrassed because Eve stepped out of one of the locker room showers without a towel on but is also obviously checking her out. That’s pretty fun, too.

Ah, the classic “peeking through the gaps in your fingers” technique.

ESTAB LIFE: Great Escape

Ten weeks after its premiere, it’s still kind of hard to believe that Estab Life exists. Watching it, the threat that it will just disappear like a mirage on the horizon if you blink too hard feels ever-present. Yet, here we are, episode 12 is finally available in the Anglosphere, and the show is officially over. Its finale provides a suitably action-packed, pulpy, dramatic, and just plain weird exit for a show whose very existence feels vaguely like a taunt against all pop-artistic norms, a trait it shares with some, but perhaps not enough anime. (The Rolling Girls, and Estab Life‘s own contemporary, the above-discussed Birdie Wing, are a few that are on my mind lately.)

In a way, though, Estab Life‘s finale is a logical conclusion. How does a show about helping people escape their life situations end? By evac’ing the guy behind the whole system in the first place. For their grand finale, the Extractors extract Mr. M himself, their mysterious benefactor who turned out to also be the equally-mysterious Manager running the cluster system to begin with. Along the way, we get some pretty cool action scenes, some character model reuse that is too neat for me to call out how obvious a time- and cost-saving measure it is, an explanation-of-sorts for how the world of Estab Life came to exist in the first place. It’s a lot!

The high-tech castle facility that the Extractors infiltrate here is probably the best environ the series has ever shown off at all. It fits the high tech aesthetic inherent to an all-3DCG series to a tee. All three of the main Extractors get good turns here, and it’s interesting to note that Feles and Equa spend most of the climax by themselves; Martes seemingly sacrifices herself by exploding into many mini-Marteses (Martesi?) to fend off a swarm of angry drones.

When they finally encounter The Manager, Equa and Feles get hit with a truckload of exposition, perhaps the only part of the episode that doesn’t entirely work. (Something about how his builders created him, a nigh-omniscient supercomputer, to develop a utopia, but this is an impossible task because the natures of different people conflict too much. Sure, fair enough I suppose.) What does work is that “Mr. M” wants out of his situation as much as anyone else the Extractors have ever spirited away. He reformats himself, becoming the second character in as many episodes to change their gender presentation; this time on screen.

I will not pretend to know what this says about the people who made Estab Life, but I will take the representation—intentional or not—regardless. Before that, The Manager turns into a giant Facebook like symbol in order to thumbprint the extraction document. This is art, folks; the world’s first CTTTF (Computer to Thumb to Female) transition.

Her new body and name in tow (now it’s just “M.” No “Mr.”), she helps the Extractors escape from the facility, and in the process, we get to see her mind control a bunch of drones. Also, Martes has a huge hammer now.

The post-credits scene shows the Extractors back at their usual job, getting ready to rescue a cameoing Hachiro, who is finally ready to leave his own situation. M, now with a new look, supports the team over smartphone, and the series ends on an open, exciting note.

Incredibly, this isn’t the end for Estab Life on the whole. A mobile game is in development—though god knows if we’ll ever see it over here, see the still-in-limbo takt op. Destiny game for an example of that whole mess—and a film called Revengers’ Road. But until we meet the Extractors again, this is an excellent farewell.

Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club – Season 2

“Don’t hide your brightness.”

At its core, Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is an extremely simple anime. Almost everything it does is in service of its gleaming, utopian vision; a world where truly anyone can be a superstar, if only they wish to be. This is, I think, the Nijigasaki sub-franchise’s entire appeal, but it does leave only a fairly limited tract of ground on which to grow actual conflicts. One of the few that have come up over the second season is the friction between Lanzhu and the Idol Club themselves. Lanzhu’s solo performances have been a running background thread throughout the whole season, and her unwillingness to play ball with the Idol Club is one of the show’s few actual “unsolved problems,” as it were. In episode 9, the issue is laid to rest, in a decidedly Nijigasaki fashion.

We should talk at least briefly about Mia Taylor (Shuu Uchida), the American-born idol who serves as Lanzhu’s songwriter. The two are clearly close but exactly what their relationship is has been a little fuzzy, at least to me, up until this point. Likewise, I’ve personally had a little trouble connecting to Mia as a character. She’s rather arrogant, which is fine, but given that she herself doesn’t hasn’t sung up until this point (spoiler), it’s felt a little hollow to me, as opposed to Lanzhu’s very well-earned cockiness (which is itself a defense mechanism, but we’ll get to that).

Mia’s character is actually explored in detail for the first time here, and we learn that she feels the crushing weight of expectations from being in a legacy music family. The reason she doesn’t sing herself is that she’s afraid of not living up to those expectations, and in a flashback, a young Mia is literally drowned out by applause as she steps on stage to debut as a pianist before she can play even a single note. It’s effective stuff! And her dealing with her own issues helps Lanzhu deal with hers.

A line that comes up here is “as long as you desire to be a school idol, everyone will accept you.” This is, if generalized out, basically the entire thrust of the series. It’s a little awkward—at best—if applied to the real world, but within Nijigasaki‘s own unpoppable bubble universe, it makes perfect sense. All feelings spring from music, so there is no problem that music cannot solve.

So, when Mia performs her insert song, the entirely-in-English “stars we chase”, and it breaks down Lanzhu’s defenses and she is revealed as, at her core, a very lonely girl who struggles to empathize with or even understand other people, it makes an internal sense. Lanzhu is convinced not to leave Japan (which, yeah, that was her reaction to being shown up at the idol festival, to leave the country. Girl’s a bit dramatic!) and it’s strongly hinted at that this season, possibly even next episode, will see the debut of Lanzhu, Mia, and Shioriko’s unit. Personally, I cannot wait.

She said the line!

Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie

Until now, I’ve largely considered Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie a pretty good show. If I’d had to pick an operative adjective, “pleasant” would be it. Like a summer breeze or a sweet flower. Not something one is inclined to think about terribly deeply, but definitely a positive presence in one’s life.

But sometimes shows that are “just pretty good” get episodes that are much better than that. (Highlighting these was the original M.O. behind Twenty Perfect Minutes, although I abandoned that narrow premise fairly quickly.) Singling things out like this does always feel a little unfair to me, because it’s not like what Shikimori has been doing up to now has been at all bad, but it’s been fairly straightforward. Other than a certain sweetness and sentimentality, Shikimori-san has lacked terribly much emotional resonance. That’s not a flaw per se, but it’s notable absence.

This week’s episode, the show’s eighth, is a different story.

Last week we were introduced to supporting character Kamiya (Ayaka Fukuhara), a friend of Izumi’s from some time ago, and, as we then learned, also someone who harbors feelings for him. Kamiya, honestly, sort of seems like she’s in the wrong show, or maybe the wrong genre entirely. Reflecting on romantic feelings she now knows are hopeless, she imagines herself as an impostor Cinderella, with unfitting glass slipers and who never finds her Prince Charming. Near the episode’s midpoint, she says that some girls are inclined to wait for a savior on a white horse, and it’s pretty obvious that she’s talking about herself.

During these parts of the episode, the visuals take an overcast turn. Washed out and grey, reflective of Kamiya’s own feelings, and complimented by rain of a sort when she breaks down in Shikimori’s arms in the episode’s climax. It’s extremely dramatic, and even more notably so because this is still Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie that we’re talking about. You know, the silly gimmick romance anime where the whole plot is supposed to be that the girl with pink hair is “cool”? That one? Maybe it’s tragic, Doylistic destiny that she could never be the lead in this particular love story; her hair is a rainwater blue, after all. And the show isn’t called Kamiya Isn’t Just a Cutie.

There are solutions to this that could please all three people. Mostly those solutions involve the sort of honest communication that teenagers are unlikely to engage in, and concepts like polyamory that they are unlikely to know much about. Failed teenage romance is hardly the end of the world, but then again, when you are that age it certainly feels like it is. This episode resurrected in me feelings I have not properly contemplated in a long time; and I think everyone has those moments. What-could’ve-been’s that haunt the less-accessed corners of our mind like lonely ghosts.

As an icon of them, Kamiya slips through the school’s doors and between its classrooms, a tragic figure in a story that isn’t her own. There is warmth and humor and all of Shikimori‘s usual strengths throughout this episode too—this isn’t She, The Ultimate Weapon or anything—but in a way their presence just makes Kamiya’s story stand out all the more, a lone storm cloud in an otherwise blue sky.

The episode’s remainder focuses on Shikimori’s own dealing with these events. She gives Kamiya what comfort she can, and Kamiya makes a sort of peace with her situation. That, at least, is good, but even through all this, it’s never in question who the main character is, here.

It’s an impossibility, but I wish Kamiya happiness in life somewhere far removed from Izumi and somewhere far removed from both Shikimori and Shikimori. She deserves to be in a series that can accommodate her massive heart and her strength of emotion. She deserves an Utena or a Revue Starlight or at least a show that’s willing to do this sort of thing more often. But, of course, that’s silly. You can rerun the tape a thousand and one times, the footage on them will never change. She is Rosencranz or Guildenstern in a play that, as much positive as I’ve said about it, is certainly no Hamlet.

Watching this episode, I was made truly, presently aware of Shikimori‘s shortcomings—or at least what is absent from it—for the first time. Paradoxically, I think that’s only made me like it more. But even so, I am not sure if I’d be more hurt if the show never returned to Kamiya’s issues or if it did so again. I suppose I will find out eventually.

Elsewhere on MPA

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 9 – The Best Guarantee • Buy the CD

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 9

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 9 – Show Off How in Love You Are

And that’s about all. See you around, folks!

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 9 – Show Off How in Love You Are

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Last week’s Spy x Family, which I didn’t have the time to cover here, saw us introduced to Yuri Briar (Kenshou Ono), Yor’s weird overprotective brother. He didn’t really trust Loid, and very much still doesn’t at the start of this episode. All the absurd jealousy eventually boiled down to the bizarre cliffhanger last week ended on; Yuri’s demand that, well, if they’re really married, why don’t they just kiss in front of him?

I have to confess; I don’t really like Yuri. (Yuri Briar, I mean. I will never say a bad word about yuri the genre.) He’s easily my least favorite member of Spy x Family‘s recurring cast. Mostly, I just don’t really find the old “siscon in denial” trope particularly funny. To SpyFam’s credit, this is at least an earnest go at making the archetype work. I’m just not sure it really deserves that much gusto. This is without mentioning his day job as a member of Ostenia’s secret police, probably the closest the series’ politics ever get to being genuinely uncomfortable.

It is decently funny at least to see Loid not hesitate at all in his going in for the smooch, only for Yuri himself to freak out like a man being NTR’d and electrocuted at the same time. The whole convolution here eventually devolves into Yor sending him flying with a smack to the cheek for his troubles. Yuri himself ends the scene by developing some kind of bizarre tsundere complex for Loid. What’s that Kaguya-sama quote again? “Siblings tend to have similar tastes”?

In the fallout from all this, Yor becomes convinced (again) that she is a bad wife. She has a pretty sad inner monologue the following morning, only even slightly tampered by a cut to show Anya’s reaction to overhearing said monologue.

This is also roughly the face I make when someone enters a Discord channel and starts unpromptedly ranting about how sad they are.

Loid, who figured out Yuri’s affiliation with the Not-Stasi last week, also becomes suspicious of Yor as the result of all this, culminating with her planting a tracker on her as she goes to work and even, eventually, disguising himself and his assistant Franky as secret policemen in an attempt to absolutely eliminate all doubt from his mind that Yor might also be associated with the state. Honestly, it’s pretty despicable!

Sidenote; why does Disguised Franky on the left there look like an e-boy?

And the only thing that actually breaks his suspicion is Yor’s strong reaction to Franky’s (feigned, but still very much unwanted) advances, with the rebuke that she’s married. (Notably, Loid isn’t at all suspicious that a random secretary is able to effortlessly take Franky down, further evidence that his own sense of normalcy is off, or at least takes a hit where Yor’s involved.)

Guilty, he goes to meet up with Yor (out of disguise, of course) on both of their way’s home from work. There, he manages to stealthily take the tracker off of her collar, and, crushing it, throws it away. When the two return home—with cake, for their “first anniversary”—Anya notes that they seem to be getting along well, putting a cute end to an otherwise strained episode.

More importantly, we’re made aware of a key fact here, from a Doylistic point of view. At some point, the day may come where Twilight has to choose between his devotion to his mission and his devotion with his “pretend” family. Before this point, if that had happened, it isn’t unfair to the man to say that he would probably have picked the former. From here on, the answer is a lot less clear. Loid’s actions are impossible to defend, but they make perfect sense within the confines of the show’s narrative and genre, as well as the paranoia that comes from his occupation in the first place. (And which informed the fiction that Spy x Family is a pastiche of. It’s not The Prisoner or anything, but some of that palpable “trust no one” vibe is still present, and not just because Franky literally says that verbatim.) It is through these lenses that the episode manages to still work, despite the noticeable downshift in tone. At episode’s end, Loid has the revelation that perhaps his family being “fake” isn’t really that important, and the series once again draws parallels between the lives of spies and those of ordinary people, a recurring theme by this point.

In general, then, this is one of Spy x Family‘s least funny episodes, but it makes up for that with more complicated emotional shades. Loid can be hard to root for at times, never moreso than here, but certainly no one could accuse him of being a simple character.

Until next time, agents.

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 9

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

The culture festival is underway, and with it, Kaguya-sama: Love is War! drops the most lavishly-directed episode of its third season so far, with a dizzying array of style cuts and other interesting visual tricks. Despite that, we’re mostly going to be talking about the actual plot of the episode; three separate plotlines progress here, and I suspect that it wouldn’t be wrong to consider this the first part of a four-part finale. There’s a lot of ground to cover here (and for me personally, it’s already rather late in the day, whoops!), so let’s get started.

We actually begin with a flashback. An interesting choice, and one that establishes that the next few episodes are going to cut this plotline—set a year prior to where the series is at now—with the show’s present day. Here, we meet a far more bitter and burned-out Shirogane than the one we’re used to. One who hasn’t yet met the girl he’ll eventually devote so much of his time to, and one who is understandably fed up with Shuchiin Academy’s student body of rich kids, future heirs and heiresses, and so on. He isn’t wrong to feel this way, something I don’t think the show quite gives enough attention. But it is clearly hurting him emotionally, and he needs something to bring him out of that slump.

It’s here that we’re introduced to Shuchiin Academy’s previous Student Council President, an androgynous fellow that the anime gives a stylish purple undershade to his otherwise plain black cropped hair.

The former Council President is a mysterious guy, and we don’t really get the full picture behind him here. What’s important though is that he wants to recruit Shirogane to the Student Council. Why? Well, he describes Shuchiin Academy as a walled garden (true) and thinks that having someone who can look at the wider world with a “level gaze” would be an advantage. He probably isn’t wrong, there must be a reason, after all, that Shirogane eventually succeeds him. (In spite of the prejudice against “outsiders”, ie. people who didn’t come to Shuchiin directly from its associated elementary school, that we’re informed of here.) Shirogane is understandably skeptical, a skepticism expressed by an interesting visual detail; Shirogane idly picks at the decoration on the expensive ceramic the President serves him tea in when the two have their little meeting.

Before Shirogane’s even agrees to being recruited, the President has him help clean out a mucky pond on school grounds, and Shirogane understandably wonders if he isn’t just being taken advantage of. He doesn’t have time to wonder for long, though, as a genuine near-tragedy strikes as one of the girls cleaning out the pond falls in. Apparently the water is deep enough that drowning is a real risk, and everyone present wrings hands over what to do as the girl thrashes in the water. Everybody except, of course, a passing-by Kaguya, who leaps into the water without a moment’s hesitation and rescues the girl handily.

And so, Shirogane falls for Kaguya.

Kaguya-sama leans on the shadowless technique for emotional moments so often that it’s practically an internal cliche for the series. And yet, I love it every time.

Not because of her status or looks, but because of her decisive and bold nature. That may seem strange to us, the audience, given that we know Kaguya as much for her flustered pull faces, her hilarious but self-defeating exercises in denying that she has a crush on the Shirogane, etc. But the fact remains that this is the Kaguya that Shirogane first fell for; the sort of person who’d leap to rescue someone else without a second thought. And it makes sense, in a way. To step into the show’s narrator’s shoes for a moment; people are often attracted to those who possess characteristics they themselves lack. Shirogane seeing Kaguya as someone more driven and strong-minded than himself and eventually striving to meet her on that level makes perfect internal sense.

There is some interesting immediate aftermath here. Shirogane chastises himself for being indecisive and makes a mental comment to himself that it “doesn’t matter” if one was born rich or gifted, what matters is the ability to take action when it’s necessary. I’d argue this little aside is the one thing in the scene that doesn’t really work. One of Aka Akasaka‘s few notable weaknesses as a writer is an implicit conservative streak1 in some of the basic assumptions his work is built on. Here, he seems to have neglected that those born into comfort or otherwise advantaged have much more ability to learn the skills to become “decisive” in the first place. Shirogane, as a working-class student from a poor family who has nonetheless accomplished quite a lot from sheer drive, would be well aware of this.

Nearby, Kaguya tries to brush her own heroism off. Hayasaka praises her, but Kaguya claims it was just the obvious thing to do; the girl she saved is the daughter of a newspaper mogul, and being able to call in that favor someday might be important. It’s not impossible that Kaguya is telling the truth here and she really was acting out of, essentially, selfishness, but to me it seems more like the sort of mental gymnastics we’d eventually come to know her for. We could, if we wanted to be uncharitable, read her last comment here—to the effect of, “no one really does anything for anyone else without wanting something in return”—as the writer’s own beliefs. But to me, it seems more plausible that she’s again just denying her own feelings. Akasaka does seem to keenly understand how growing up in the sort of environment Kaguya did can mess with you.

All that in a flashback, which contrasts heavily with the Kaguya we see when the show returns to present.

A Kaguya who is wearing a Taisho-period traditional Japanese woman’s costume as part of her class’s cosplay cafe, yes.

Shout out to Mocksune Miku in the back, there.

This segment, which primarily focuses on Kaguya’s misadventures in said cosplay cafe, is probably the least “important” of the three here. But it does feature the return of the Ramen Guys, an advantage that cannot be so easily discounted. It also features Hayasaka “cosplaying” as a maid; ie., her normal, actual self.

And they interact, too, of course. The Ramen Guys insult Kaguya’s coffee pouring technique while complimenting Hayasaka’s (in one of the show’s oddest visual gags to date, they’re drawn as though badly greenscreened onto a backdrop depicting a galaxy. I think this may be a spoof of old educational programming, but I don’t know enough on the subject to comment.)

Ratio.

Kaguya counters that she can pour an expert cup of tea, at least, and is promptly taken up on her offer. All this causes Kaguya to miss interacting with Shirogane, which was her entire hope in working for the cafe in the first place.

But, one of the Ramen Guys (yes, I will keep capitalizing that) notes that Kaguya’s tea is so good that clearly she’s been perfecting it for a single specific person. He notes this very loudly, while Shirogane is relatively nearby, to Kaguya’s immense embarrassment.

As they depart, the taller of the two Ramen Guys wishes Kaguya well in her love story. He even briefly meets Shirogane, noting that he is “the one.” (Of course, Shirogane has no idea what he’s talking about.)

Kaguya, meanwhile, notes that she’d really like to get a bit of lead up if she’s going to confess her feelings to Shirogane at any point during the festival. Similar thoughts, meanwhile, are had by someone else.

Shirogane’s segment is the briefest of the three here, but it’s also the punchiest, and the only one in which a substantial development occurs. Before that, though, he gets to pal around with Maki, who spends these couple minutes just being a complete bummer in a very funny way.

But she also offers some genuine advice; suggesting that Ishigami ask Tsubame, who’s apparently into scary stuff, to the rather intense Haunted House one of the classes is putting on. (There’s an amusing, but also kind of sad, “I lead others to a treasure I cannot possess” sort of dynamic going on with Maki the Matchmaker here.)

There are some more shenanigans crammed in here, including a deeply awkward scene in which Maki’s former crush and his girlfriend show up. (Ishigami mentions that the latter gives him “sinister” vibes. I’m not sure if this is a callback to that whole business from early in the season where she thought her boyfriend was cheating on her, or some sort of foreshadowing. Given the bizarre visual style shift that accompanies the immediately preceding scene—that’s it in the header image—I think it might be the latter? But it’s hard to say.)

But in the end, Ishigami actually does ask Tsubame to the haunted house. Not without effort and not without some awkwardness, but hey! He did it! And she even agrees to go with him! (Whether she’s aware of his intentions or not is an entirely different subject, of course.)

Look at him, he’s like a happy puppy.

We don’t see that haunted house date here. (Although what little we do see of the haunted house looks pretty cool, and is shot like a found-footage horror film.) The episode ends on what’s essentially a cliffhanger.

So, until next week, Kaguya fans.

1: I here mean the term only in a general sense. I do not know the details of eg. Akasaka’s voting record, etc. Nor, frankly, do I wish to.

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 9 – The Best Guarantee • Buy the CD

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

As I continue to struggle with getting things sorted out in my life (and consequently, on this blog as well), I’m blessed with an episode of Healer Girl built around a central visual showpiece, which makes writing about it pretty straightforward. Hooray for small miracles! Even if you’re probably still only seeing this at least a few days after the episode airs.

Episode 9 is, in a way, what the whole main “plot” of the series—in as much as Healer Girl has such a thing—has been building toward. The girls and their mentor aiding in a successful, full operation. You might note that this is in some ways an echo of episode 4’s central conceit. You’re right about that, but the tones and focuses could not be more different. Episode 4 established the limits of vocal medicine, and we nearly saw someone die. Episode 9 is more or less its total opposite; this is what the technique can accomplish at its best. (And of course, it further cements Healer Girl‘s central themes of connection, and music as a balm for the world’s woes.)

The patient is Ria’s onetime mentor, since we here learn that she was a traditional medical student before switching track to vocal medicine. The surgeon in question, interestingly, also has a connection to Kana; he prescribed her an inhaler for her asthma when she was very young, leading to her wanting to be involved with medicine in the first place. In this way, the episode neatly ties together three generations of medical professional. It also helps the episode feel a bit more meaningful than if it were just Some Guy.

The operation itself forms the episode’s centerpiece. Here, we get to see Ria work her magic for the first time, and it’s pretty damn impressive. Lasting for a solid six minutes, it is the longest “image sequence” in the show so far, and serves as a fitting launchpad as Healer Girl transitions into its final stretch.

More than that though, it’s fascinating how the sequence manages to convey so much without ever using actual dialogue. We know from earlier in the episode that the patient has some pretty serious problems; polyps on his intestines, chiefly, a very real and very unpleasant medical issue. Thus, when we see Ria flying her students down into a massive valley and removing alien-looking growths from the stone with the power of song, we know what those are and what’s going on. Nothing is said because nothing needs to be.

The images, it’s clear by now, allow the healers to enact physical change by manipulating visual metaphor, which is itself born from their songs. This is, in a less literal sense, exactly what music does to us in the real world; it can cause real, present changes in our mood and even our outlook on life by working with abstract, non-real material. Healer Girl‘s image sequences are, thus, a longform metaphor for the impact of music (and more broadly, all art) itself, a neat little thematic mobius strip that suits the series’ ambitious but low-key nature perfectly. Art that contemplates the nature and impact of art itself can seem indulgent or even pretentious, but Healer Girl never gets anywhere close to that. If it’s self-impressed, it’s only minorly so, and with good reason.

On a more literal level it is also worth noting the character development on display here. While they’re worried before the procedure starts, none of the girls freak out or lose confidence in the middle of the operation like they did back in episode 4. They’ve gone from total novices to having some real experience under their belt, and indeed this episode is iyashikei-esque in its lack of any real danger. Most everybody thinks everything will go fine, and it does, in lovely-soothing technicolor splendor.

There are also a few jokes scattered throughout, which is key to keeping the episode from feeling self-serious. At one point early on the patient jokes that he only got sick so he could hear Ria sing, to which she rebuts that he should just buy one of her CDs. (This exchange raises SO many questions about the world of Healer Girl that I’m well aware the anime has zero interest in answering.) And another early scene where Ria assures all of her students that they’ll do fine while giving them big, gentle hugs. Yes, including Reimi. She damn near dies in the process.

There’s also an absolutely adorable Zoom call between our main characters in the episode’s post-credits, where among other things, the girls discuss Hibiki’s collection of wrestling manga. This all puts a very cute bow on what is overall one of the show’s strongest episodes.

Song Count: Just one, but at a full six minutes, saying that feels unfair. There are also a few pieces of non-diegetic vocal music throughout, so you can raise the count a few if you want to include those.

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 8

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

I’ll level with you, dear readers. (And hopefully do so without belaboring the point.) My life has been very hectic lately and I do not know how consistent my Let’s Watch columns will be in the coming weeks. But! I want to still write them when I have enough time and energy to get them together, especially when they’re about important episodes. And this week’s episode of Love is War! is very important. (Arguably, from this point forward, they all are.) It’s also just pretty damn good, but that’s par for the course with Kaguya-sama.

We’ll be pretty much skipping the first segment this week, which is a funny-sweet little vignette about Shirogane’s terrible fashion sense. It’s cute, but it’s not hugely important to the rest of the episode.

Instead, the latter two segments of the episode form a fairly distinct whole. Throughout, we must keep in mind one central fact.

Yes, the heart. Symbol of romance throughout the world, it plays a key symbolic role in both the in-universe Hoshin Culture Festival and this arc of the series itself. We learn why in the second segment of the episode, where Tsubame happily explains the frankly rather grim legend that the festival draws its iconography from, in which a sick princess is cured by a prospective lover sacrificing his own life in order to give her his heart to make a poultice.

Still, in Kaguya‘s world, as in ours, a story’s meaning can change over time. In-universe, Kaguya speculates that the legend might’ve emerged as a way for a ruler to validate her own rule, to which Tsubame lightheartedly calls her quite the realist. Her tune changes, of course, when Tsubame also explains that giving someone a heart-shaped object at the festival is said to ensure eternal love. She gives the example of her own brother, who recently married someone he first met at the festival. By this, Kaguya is swayed.

Almost immediately, she begins to puzzle out how to slip Shirogane a heart-shaped object, something with a heart pattern on it, anything that would both “count” for the legend but also not give her away. She ponders some truly silly stuff, here.

These are the usual Love is War shenanigans, until, suddenly, they aren’t.

Kaguya reflects here and is able to actually admit to herself for the first time that, yeah, she does actually have a thing for Shirogane. More importantly, she’s able to admit it to Hayasaka, who is shocked at her actually owning up to her own feelings for once. She wonders what exactly she’s afraid of; she knows Shirogane likes her, after all, so really this should be a simple thing. Eventually, she flatly rejects the very premise of the series itself as she mulls over some of Hayasaka’s advice.

But years of being trained to bury one’s feelings are not so easily undone, so she does not make a move here. Not yet, and not now.

She does hear about someone else’s moves, though. Ishigami is planning to ask Tsubame to the festival, even if the much-mythologized “love confession” comes a bit later, the truth of the matter is that Ishigami very much realizes that Tsubame’s graduation marks a deadline for any hope of his telling her how he feels. Kaguya is up against a similar time limit, although she doesn’t yet know that. (Ishigami has also only just learned that Tsubame is even single, which is a whole small subplot in of itself that’s tied up here.)

Average 11th grader realizing they might get to hold a girl’s hand.

The scene here is wonderful, and I maintain that Kaguya and Ishigami’s friendship is actually one of the best parts of Love is War full stop. Even if Ishigami is rejected, he will have gotten his feelings out. No more regrets for our favorite gamer boy.

And perhaps that lights a fire in Kaguya as well. But we’ll have to wait for next week to learn more.

Until then.

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Some Very Brief Thoughts on Episode 8 of HEALER GIRL

Spoilers Below

I would love to talk at length about today’s Healer Girl episode, but frankly, I simply don’t have the time or mental energy. I encourage you to watch the episode, it’s great. I mostly just wanted to take a brief moment to reflect on the melancholic nature of the story here, where Reimi has to part with her maid / surrogate older sister / only person who believed in her dream of becoming a healer, Aoi (Yumiri Hanamori), as she leaves Japan to pursue a career as a pianist.

I could talk about the imagery for this week’s song. How Aoi’s piano becomes a cage, a brick road for her to walk on, and film strips replaying happy memories all at once until eventually, the piano prodigy-maid sprouts fucking angel wings.

I could talk about Reimi’s heavy emotional reaction when Aoi finally does leave; how both she and her now-former maid are crying as the episode smashes to its end credits. There’s also the, admittedly, a little contrived, but also genuinely sweet post-credits scene where circumstances make themselves such that Aoi can resume living with Reimi and continue to pursue her piano playing.

But ultimately all of these are variations on a simple core point; the reason people love Healer Girl—or really any anime for that matter—is because they see part of themselves in it. I doubt many people reading this have ever had a maid, but almost everyone has experienced someone leaving their lives for one reason or another, simply because of circumstance. Two paths diverge in a wood. It’s classic stuff. I’m not totally settled how I feel about the ending yet. As I said, I find it a little contrived, but it’s also heartwarming. It’s hard to be too upset when something ends ‘too perfectly’ in this sort of show, I feel. In the end, “dreams” are the theme the show returns to here, and it’s always something I’ve found fascinating about popular art. I never really had “dreams” growing up, or if I did I, do not remember them. Did you? Did you have an Aoi in your life?

In any case, I’ve probably said too much already. I must be going. Until the next revolution of the record we call life, friends.

Song Count: 2.

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [5/22/22]

Anime Orbit Weekly is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

Hi friends, I’ll be brief. This AOW marks the start of what’s going to be a fairly spotty period for my writing for a while. Starting tomorrow I’m not sure how much of my regular weekly writing I’m going to be able to get done, I have some stuff going on at home, and unfortunately that takes priority over writing Takes about cartoons. (Trust me, I wish it didn’t.)

It won’t be a full-on hiatus because I will still try to put at least some of my usual articles up, if only intermittently and sometimes late. But do just expect turbulence in the weeks ahead. (Regrettably this also means that some fun bonus articles I wanted to write probably aren’t happening for a while. To say nothing of the commission I’ve been slowly working on for the past month.)

But for now, here’s some talk about the season’s two weirdest anime.

Birdie Wing

This week: Eve faces off against Rose Aleone.

Things start out in the pretty standard “shonen protagonist duking it out with their first true challenge” mold, and it’s pretty great. Eve breaks out her Rainbow Bullets. Rose using a “Bullet” shot of her own is given the same reaction that Cell got when he used the Kamehameha Wave. It’s ludicrous and wonderful, and that’s really only the start of the episode’s silliness. See; this is the first time Eve’s had a lengthy match with an opponent who’s actually on her caliber, and Birdie Wing absolutely milks that for all its worth. On a writing level, Eve and Rose have similar styles, so the two have a lot of great psychological interplay. A good sign of how in the weeds (in a good way) we are here is that Viper is the one that points all this out, via internal monologue. Witness her reaction to Eve being shaken after Rose pulls off a particularly impressive shot, for example.

Always a good sign when the chick named “Viper the Reaper” thinks you’re being a bit dramatic.

The underground transforming golf course returns here, repurposing the twisting and turning henshin sequence as stock footage in true anime fashion. Eve and Rose go shot-for-shot to the point that they end up tying eight holes in a row. Even Eve’s new trick—a proper slice shot taught to her by Aoi, who she has of course named it after—can’t break the tie.

Eve pulling out what is, to my knowledge, a pretty basic pro golfing technique, and it being treated as a huge reveal is amusing. But given everything else about Birdie Wing, it only barely registers as strange.

Indeed, we don’t actually see the match end here, as the episode ends on a cliffhanger after both Eve and Rose manage incredibly long drives down an extremely long course. Eve, of course, thinks of her family, which is nice but mostly reminds me that they seem to be pretty firmly relegated to a supporting role at this point. (If I have a single serious criticism of Birdie Wing, it’s that a show that cares about class this much—and this series, campy as it is, does care about class—really cannot excuse having its POC cast in such minor roles. I doubt anyone needs me to explain that class issues and race issues are inextricably connected.) It is worth noting that Eve’s old mentor, Leo Millafoden (Shuuichi Ikeda, yes, Char Aznable himself) does show up at Klein’s bar, which at least gives the family some screentime. His reasons for doing so are cryptic at this point, and he makes no direct contact with Eve over the course of the episode.

So, things seem like they’re about to close on a solid, exciting note with Eve and Rose neck in neck….and then in the post credits, this happens.

Yes, Rose golfs so fucking hard that her prosthetic arm flies off. And she screams in agony, because, you know, yeah.

I don’t know if that means Eve wins the match by default. You’d think it would, right? Her opponent’s sustained a serious injury. But Birdie Wing is so goddamn bonkers that it’s really hard to say.

Estab Life

In episode 10 of Estab Life, Equa, who’s been basically perfect at her job for the last nine episodes, is off her game. The girls’ normally bright, poppy designs are marred with grime, dust, and cuts. Their cafe, an island of stability in Estab Life‘s world gone mad, is shredded to mulch and rubble in only a few minutes. All of this is unsettling, given that even the darkest of Estab Life‘s previous episodes have ultimately left a lot of room for jokes, and it’s never felt like The Extractors were in serious danger. What happened? Estab Life‘s tenth episode swerves the series into tenser and more serious territory than any previous episode, and the Extractors are firmly on the back foot throughout.

The source of all this is that Equa’s precognitive powers—which the show nicknames ‘Fatal Luck’—have abruptly stopped working. At the same time, their home cluster undergoes an “update”, a process that normally involves fairly mundane things like fixing sewer lines or power grid issues. Here, it seems to mean that a target’s been painted on the Extractors’ backs. A few minutes into the episode, a comparatively sedate little anecdote where our heroines fail to acquire donuts from a donut shop is immediately pulverized to splinters as their home is invaded by the machine gun-equipped security drones that have been quite literally floating around for the entire series so far.

Their run through the underground of their home cluster is tense, and it’s seriously destabilizing to see Equa so unsure of herself and what to do. She even faces the challenge of performing her usual role in the team—wire cutting—without her abilities, and only gets it right by, presumably, sheer chance.

It’s not like the Extractors can exactly hide, either. The “update” that somehow disabled Equa’s powers has also led to the cluster hunting for the Extractors with what are pretty strongly implied to be shoot-on-sight orders. Equa has no real explanation for any of this; we learn here that the mysterious Manager who acts as an overall administrator for all of the clusters and the equally mysterious Mr. M who’s served as the girls’ anonymous benefactor are, in fact, one in the same. A piece of foreshadowing so obvious that I’m smacking myself on the forehead for having missed it. This leads to some tension after the girls escape to Akihabara, as Feles asks Equa point-blank if they’ve just been doing the Manager’s dirty work instead of helping people of their own free will. Equa denies anything of the sort, and Feles believes her, but at this stage in the game it has gotten hard to know what, really, to believe.

The episode ends on one hell of a cliffhanger, as the girls’ temporary hideout on an Akiba rooftop is discovered and then swarmed by security drones. The best thing about Estab Life has always been that it’s like very little else, and that continues to be true as it enters its final episodes, but more than ever I am a little worried for our girls. Who knows where this is all going?

Elsewhere on MPA

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 7 – A Culture Festival Full of Surprises

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 7

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 7 – The Target’s Second Son

And that about covers it for this week. I’ll be seeing you when and where I see you, anime fans. Take care.

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 7 – The Target’s Second Son

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Kids are funny. This is a fundamental truth of comedy, and it’s where Spy x Family gets a decent chunk of its comedic juice from. This episode, which mostly centers on Anya’s first real day at school, is pretty much just 22 solid minutes of “kids are funny.” There’s some other stuff in there, especially toward the end, but that’s what the focus is on.

Frankly, I’m pretty happy with that. Anya’s friend Becky and, we’ll say for now, rival Damian form a sort of secondary trio of lead characters. They take the spotlight when the rest of the Forgers are off-screen, and Anya’s friendship with Becky is already adorable, even this early on.

Anya’s goal throughout this episode, such as it is, is very simple. She just needs to make amends with Damian before the end of the day, before the bad blood from their fist-first first meeting has time to curdle. That makes perfect sense in theory but ask anyone who’s ever been a child; when you’re a kid, apologizing to other kids is hard. Especially if you actually did do something wrong. (Not that I or, I imagine, most of the audience, can really fault Anya for decking Damian, but it is technically against school rules.)

So, to make sure his daughter actually does apologize, Loid spends most of the episode “encouraging” Anya from the shadows. Mostly, this makes it seem like Anya is in a particularly bizarre grade-schooler take on The Prisoner. It’s admittedly pretty funny, although probably not great for her mental health.

Speaking of that; Anya’s outburst has had a few lasting effects. Everyone in her first period class avoids her now, because they think she’s some kind of delinquent. (Becky gets hit with this too but doesn’t seem to mind so much.)

And then there’s what’s become of Damian himself, which, well, he’s pretty obviously developing a crush on Anya. In fact, we see the exact moment his feelings bloom into one. How can you tell? Well, it’s pretty obvious, really.

Sorry son, you like the fiery ones.

He copes with this by fleeing from the cafeteria and shouting that his pride won’t allow this. Which is, admittedly, an accurate summary of how young boys deal with crushes.

Anya’s attempt at apologizing being roundly rejected, she slumps home understandably upset. Loid being not particularly great at helping her with her homework doesn’t improve things, and eventually she gets so frustrated that she storms off to her room, thus marking the first fight the Forger family has had over the course of the show. Loid reflects, musing that it’s the patience to tackle mundane missions like this that make him a true spy, and, along the way, perhaps stumbling into a deeper insight about himself. Yor, also, offers some genuinely good parenting advice.

Albeit, perhaps anachronistically effective given that this is supposed to be, what, the 60s? The 80s? When the hell does Spy x Family take place anyway?

Loid attempts to make it up to Anya, but finds that she’s fallen asleep at her desk and was studying on her own, determined to make her papa proud. It’s a cute end to a cute episode.

Until next time.

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 7

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Today we hit perhaps the densest episode so far of Kaguya-sama: Love is War!‘s third season. -Ultra Romantic- has not been shy about plot thickets before this point, so that’s saying something, but we’re introduced to three new characters and two new plotlines here. That’s a lot to take in all at once; enough so that this episode actually has four segments instead of the usual three. (If you wanted to split hairs, you could say the last two are more like two parts of the same segment.)

We open with a pair of familiar faces, though. Mito Iino and Yuu Ishigami are, once again, the characters we’re riding along with for the opening segment. They’ve been assigned to the planning committee for Shuchiin Academy’s cultural festival, making this the second anime episode I’ve covered in a row about that topic. (Although the one in Healer Girl wasn’t a pre-Winter Break festival like this one is.)

But this is Shuchiin Academy, home of the sons and daughters of Japan’s wealthiest and most important families, must of course have a suitably grandiose cultural festival. The planning involved here must be an absurd undertaking, and one does get that sense even though we only see a little bit of it here.

Both leads for this segment have an ulterior motive; Miko, for reasons we haven’t really had explained in full yet, really wants the festival to cap with a roaring bonfire. Ishigami, meanwhile, is trying to impress Tsubame, who is also on the planning committee. Ishigami has dealt with some of these people before, during the sports festival from last season, but Miko very much hasn’t, so she feels rather out of place.

And arguments break out over what the slogan for the festival should be, starting with several….creative suggestions from Ishigami’s ostensible romantic rivals, other boys on the committee.

This is probably also the worst the series has ever suffered from the official release’s subpar typesetting.

I believe this is also our formal introduction to Rei Onodera (Yuuki Takada), yet another member of the committee and one who initially clashes with Miko.

Miko’s able to stand up for herself though—including getting everyone on board for her bonfire idea—which is a nice way of showcasing some character development on her part. Ishigami offering to help is much the same.

The second segment deals with another pair of new characters, Karen Kino (Madoka Asahina) Erika Kose (Ayaka Asai). Well, they’re not new characters exactly. Karen and Erika, in addition to being the stars of the spinoff manga We Want to Talk about Kaguya!, have actually had several small appearances dating back to the beginning of the show. And I do mean the beginning. Karen was actually the very first character to get a voiced line in the entire series, other than the narrator.

Here they mostly go about and interview various folks about the upcoming festival. This includes Tsubame, who gets a little sequence showing off her gymnastic skills, and also mentions that there’s actually a legend associated with the cultural festival.

And later, when they interview Shirogane, he alludes to another tradition associated with the festival. A “prank” usually played by the student council that involves installing a giant papier-mache orb on the school roof.

They also interview Kaguya herself, who they promptly lose their entire minds over.

As the title of the spinoff focused on them implies, the two are both down absolutely horrible for Kags. It’d be enough to make me feel a little bad for them if they both didn’t also spend time swooning over, respectively, Tsubame and Shirogane. They’re fun, and they get a lot of entertainingly wrong ideas about what Kaguya is like.

(The fact that Kaguya is an absurdly prodigal archer and has been chosen to light the bonfire that the cultural festival committee worked so hard to get approved by firing an arrow at it makes their total misfires about her personality a bit easier to understand. Still, knowing what we do about her, they’re pretty funny.)

They also interview the game club, which is mostly an excuse for Love is War to once again show off how weird Chika and her (mostly offscreen) other group of friends are. One of them goes full chuuni while explaining their grand plans for the festival, which is animated like something out of Kill la Kill for presumably no real reason other than because it’s funny.

(This joke is also a nod to the origins of Love is War! itself. It’s a commonly known bit of fan trivia that the ancestral pitch for what eventually became Kaguya-sama was a death game manga.)

And lastly, what would an episode of Love is War be without Shirogane being comically inept at something? This time it’s balloon tying.

I don’t need to tell you that his inability to make funny balloon animals leads to him wallowing miserably on the floor, which nearly guilts Chika into helping him. (A decent chunk of the scene is also shot like a moody drama for, again, no real reason but amusing stylistic clash.)

It is notable that this time, though, he actually leaves before Chika can do her whole demon trainer / mom shtick on him. Instead he keeps practicing on his own, this time in the student council room. Kaguya, who is also there, has a hard time because of this, given all the balloons popping.

Here, Love is War pulls of a neat trick of flipping this usually comedic template—which it’s used several times at this point, including once before in this very season—into Shirogane genuinely reflecting on what he sees as his own shortcomings.

But, of course, Kaguya doesn’t see it that way. To her, this is Shirogane’s charm; a dedication in the face of challenge regardless of what that challenge is, be it large or, as in this case, small. The warm, full smile she gives him (and us, given that the scene briefly switches to his POV), is probably the most sincere we’ve seen in the whole show so far. This alone would justify the entire segment even if it weren’t already pretty good.

Things swing back to the comedic for the episode’s final few minutes, in its final scene.

Initially, it seems like Shirogane’s apparent incompetence here can be explained away by the fact that he was using old balloons. But then he tries the same method with brand-new ones, and they promptly pop as well.

Hang in there, Fujiwara.

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Posted on in anime

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 7 – A Culture Festival Full of Surprises

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

And we’re back. Let’s celebrate with Cat Maid Kana.

Lovely.

This week’s episode of Healer Girl is a straightforward one. The high school festival episode is a classic format for anime like this, and it’s no real surprise that Healer Girl can knock one out of the park with minimal effort. We open with the class cafe` that prompts Cat Maid Kana up there, and some cute little gags about how the class spent so much time on the costumes that they had to go with pre-bought stuff for the food and drinks. But hey, no one goes to these things expecting 5-star dining. (If you do, you’re a monster, just FYI.)

The real focus point of the episode picks up about halfway through, where the student council president informs our leads—all of whom are accompanying an overfed Sonia to the nurse’s office—that there’s a gap in the festival schedule. You see, usually the school calls in a surprise performance by a band or something of the like. This year, the band actually got in a car accident, and while the band themselves are fine, their equipment is busted. The student council president is in a tizzy about this, but gets the bright idea that since the girls are all healer apprentices, they should perform as a rock band instead. Sonia, ever self-aggrandizing, agrees to it even in her hobbled, ate-too-much state. (Despite having to cede lead vocals to Kana because of this, which to be fair, she does willingly and of her own accord.)

The “high school rock band performance” is an old anime trope. To me, nothing will ever top the way it was done in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, with J-Rock band ZONE knocking out otaku classic “God Knows” in the process. (And in 2010, Angel Beats! seemed to have doused that particular fire for good with its showstopping third episode, “My Song,” where such a performance marks the first major emotional moment of the series.) Healer Girl‘s take doesn’t match either of those, but those are all-time great anime episodes, so that’s not really a serious knock. Frankly, I’m just happy to see one again.

The lead-up here is a pretty hilarious scene where Kana just conks out after practicing the song for the first time. Exhaustion is no joke, but her bandmates letting her sleep until nearly the very moment they have to go on stage very much is, and it provides an amusing lead-in to the episode’s emotional climax.

The girls’ performance, even all I’ve said aside, gives us another of the series’ trademark free-flowing image-spaces. I will never be unhappy to get one of these, and they are almost always the high points of the show’s episodes. The music here is a lot slower and dreamier than “God Knows”, but it accordingly fits with the Healer Girls’ style in a way that a more uptempo track might not. It’s heavier than their normal material but not in a way that seems out of their ability, and the vocal trade-offs here are pretty astounding.

(This is the first episode since the one where somebody almost died that we’ve gotten to hear the girls sing all at once, I believe. And it’s definitely the first time Sonia has joined them.) There’s also a cute trick at the end where they perform an “encore,” the opening percussion of which immediately smash cuts into the ED.

“A Culture Festival Full of Surprises” may stand as one of Healer Girl‘s less essential episodes. Certainly it’s not as much so as episode 4 or episode 5. But if that’s so, it’s certainly not a bad thing. Sometimes it’s just nice to see the band play.

Song Count: Just one, but as in episode 4, quality makes up for lack of quantity.

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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.