Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
This week; festival stuff, beginning with the haunted house that was teased at the end of last week’s episode. Even in just this opening scene, we get a lot of interesting xx. Kaguya and her cousin Maki alike prove to be cowardly within the haunted house proper, and when we flash back to how all the spooky 3D sound (yes, 3D sound) was recorded in the first place—by subjecting Miko to it—and we get maybe the only Love is War! segment that might cause untoward awakenings in certain viewers. Seriously, if you showed some of these stills to someone out of context they would very much get the wrong idea.
Thankfully I’d never do that to my loyal readers.
More to the point, back in the present, Miko catches a couple making out in the haunted house and as a result the attraction gets separated into two lines; one for boys, one for girls. By coincidence, this also ruins Ishigami’s initial plan for getting an ideal opening to confess his feelings to Tsubame, so he has to do something else instead.
On the spur of the moment, while visiting a class cafe, he wins a gigantic heart-shaped cookie for her, with the intent that doing so would just be a nice gesture. Dramatic irony ahoy, he is unaware of the whole “eternal love” urban legend, singled out by the narrator as one of about 10% of students who doesn’t know about it. This leaves Tsubame a blushing, mess, and, flustered, she runs off screaming that she needs time to think about his inadvertent confession.
And friends, let me tell you, I am someone who is pretty sensitive to second-hand embarrassment. Ishigami accidentally(!!) confessing to his massive crush on Tsubame in front of her own class, a good 20 or 30 people, did not just make my skin crawl, it made my spine shuffle around like a deck of cards. I could feel my teeth conspiratorially whispering “get a load of this guy” to each other. My hair stood on end and metamorphed, Bayonetta style, into that one meme of girls at a college party looking awkwardly at the camera. The cringe is real, and it is inside of Ishigami. I have not felt this bad for the guy in quite some time.
Later in the episode, Shirogane and Chika wonder aloud about Ishigami’s chances. Shirogane is hopeful, admittedly because if Ishigami isn’t successful, it might ruin his ability to pull off his own forthcoming confession. Chika, meanwhile, says Ishigami “doesn’t have a prayer.” Comedic rudeness aside, she does think pretty hard on Ishigami’s chances, despite her initial assessment, including grading him on “points” and trying to put herself in Tsubame’s shoes a bit. This facet of Chika has always been pretty interesting to me. What she’s doing here—treating romance between two people as an object of amusement or for study—is fairly representative of someone with a para-romantic personality. If she’s seriously interested in any crush or anything of the sort of her own, we don’t hear about it here, and I’m pretty confident we never will. (This does have the unfortunate effect of sidelining Chika any time the anime starts focusing more heavily on its dramatic side.)
My armchair psychoanalyzing of Chika aside, she indicates that thinking on it more, she actually does think Ishigami has a chance, and it is always nice to see her being genuine.
Elsewhere, we’re reintroduced to Moeha, who you may or may not remember as Chika’s younger sister. She’s also basically Chika But Sadistic, although that angle of her personality is toned back here, since this segment focuses on her newfound crush on Shirogane.
Yes, Shirogane now has another girl who thinks his dead-eyed sleep deprived stare is the sexiest thing in Japan. There’s even a great moment where Kaguya, who is initially very hostile upon finding out about this, has a “could this be one of my people?” sort of reaction as the two gush about that very feature of his.
Before that, it’s Chika who tries to sabotage the relationship, by demonstrating how terrible Shirogane is at various things. She picks a pretty random task—juggling—and sets him to do it, assuming he’ll be as awful at that as he was at singing, rapping, playing volleyball, and however many other things. Naturally, because of the laws of comedy, he’s actually pretty fantastic at juggling. And the three or four other things Chika tries to have him do.
That particular segment ends with this, a casual reminder that Moeha has a particularly warped personality. But hey, at least she’s funny about it.
Post-credits, we find out that someone’s stolen all the heart-shaped balloons at the festival! Truly, an unprecedented crime! The heist of the century! Who could our culprit be?
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
This week on Spy x Family: dodgeball.
Yeah, dodgeball. You know. That horrible game played in elementary and middle school classes the world over where you chuck specially made pain orbs at each other. It will not surprise you, I hope, to learn that yours truly, who grew up to become a professional anime critic, does not have the fondest memories of the sport in any of its many variations. But, hey, kids getting socked in the face with dodgeballs is kinda funny. Thus, this episode, which is seriously like a solid 75% kids getting socked in the face with dodgeballs.
Also this.
The core conflict that makes these particular 22 minutes go are dead simple; someone in Anya’s class starts a rumor that getting MVP in a gym class game can get you a stella star. Anya wants a star, so she’s going to do her best at dodgeball. Damian wants a star too, because it might get daddy to notice him (that’s called building a sympathetic motive, friends). The obvious thing for Spy x Family to do here might be to have Damian and Anya on opposite teams. But instead, they’re on the same team, and the real threat is this fellow.
Yes, Bill Watkins. Age 6. Built like a brick wall and whose father is, as we briefly see in a flashback, apparently M. Bison from Street Fighter. Bill Banner here is an absolute volleyball monster. He’s the Scott Steiner of first grade volleyball, and no one else in class is even playing in the same league. (Obviously! This is Spy x Family, not Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.)
Both Anya and Damian have been training though, in very different ways. Yor tries to teach her daughter some—ahem—killer techniques. With enough enthusiasm that she almost blows her cover.
The “training” scenes are a particular highlight of this episode. Both the goofy shit that Yor puts Anya through and, later on, Damian training with The Boys are absolutely hysterical. In the former, Yor chucks a volleyball so hard that she casually prunes a tree by doing so.
In the latter, Damian and co. imagine themselves on what is very clearly Namek, while in real life they’re just messing around with a tire swing.
None of this actually helps when it comes time to face Bazooka Bill, who downs most of Anya and Damian’s team with comparative ease. (The only thing stopping the carnage from being worse is that they’re playing whistle dodgeball here, which is a slower, basically turn-based variant that, somehow, is even less fun than normal dodgeball.) There are plenty of “dramatic” (comedic) scenes of characters taking the bullet for one another here. Here, for instance, is Emile, one of Damian’s friends, leaping in front of him to block one of Bill’s shots with his face.
And here’s Damian doing some Naruto shit to defend Anya—yes, Anya. Remember, he’s a tsundere—from the same.
Anya’s “killer move” doesn’t do much either. She definitely throws the ball hard, but messes up at the last moment and ends up chucking it at the ground, and she’s promptly eliminated moments later.
None of this even ends up mattering, as Master Hendersson explains, there is no Stella star awarded for something as minor as winning a single game in gym class. Thus, the entire episode is a gigantic, lavishly animated anticlimax that progresses basically nothing. Even any development of Anya and Damian’s ‘relationship’ is pretty muted. They immediately have a fight after the match is over.
But such a stretching of legs suits Spy x Family just fine, especially after last week’s comparative seriousness. Next week marks the penultimate episode of the first cour, I imagine something a bit more dramatic will begin brewing 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 Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
“Perhaps the next time you read about Oshi no Ko on this blog, it will be about an upcoming anime adaption.”
I don’t want to say “I called it.” But I’m actually lying, because I totally do want to say that.
To be fair it did not take a genius to know that this day would come eventually. Oshi no Ko is popular, well-liked, written by one of the new greats in his field and drawn by another in hers (Aka Akasaka, also of Kaguya-sama: Love is War! and Mengo Yokoyari, of Scum’s Wish, respectively). Nonetheless, I’m glad that it has. Oshi no Ko is like very little else; a dark, intense examination of the entertainment industry and what it means to be famous from almost every angle on one hand, and a strange, and occasionally even off-putting supernatural mystery on the other. As a kaleidoscope of tones and emotions, Oshi no Ko goes significantly farther, even, than that other manga Akasaka is known for, and Yokoyari’s illustrations really sell the series’ more out-there elements. It’s not flawless—what is?—but I love it a lot.
But of course, we’re not here to talk about the manga, which I will not spoil over the course of this brief article. (I did that pretty thoroughly when I wrote about it last year, so fair warning if you end up reading that article.) We’re here to talk about the upcoming anime. Let’s go over what little we’ve learned over the two days since its announcement. (I’m quick on the draw for this stuff, ain’t I?)
First, the studio; Doga Kobo. Those familiar with DK might think them an odd choice for a series like this, and, honestly, that was my first reaction, too. Doga Kobo are more known for laid-back slice of life series or lightweight romance anime. They are not the first studio that comes to mind when one thinks of intensity or drama, but the pairing makes a sideways sort of sense.
Over the past few years, they’ve begun branching out a bit with somewhat more serious endeavors like Sing “Yesterday” For Me and Selection Project. But interestingly, even some of their “fluff” has gained a visually compelling edge recently. Just last week, an episode of the pleasant but normally unremarkable Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie shaded the show over with rain and intense emotion by focusing on the story of a minor side character, and that show’s opening animation depicts a dimension-hopping adventure that is totally unreflective of the show itself. To me, these are possible signs of restless talent, a notion backed up by the fact that said opening animation’s director—Saori Tachibana—will be the assistant director on the Oshi no Ko anime. I am eager to see if I’m correct about all this or not.
As for who she’s assisting, here it’s worth circling back around to the Selection Project connection. (The Connection Project.) Because that show’s director, Daisuke Hiramaki, is also directing this show. I will admit to not having been terribly taken by what little I saw of Selection Project, but I did appreciate the show’s visual moodiness. Something that, if Hiramaki brings to the Oshi no Ko project, I think will suit the series well. Character design—a broad role despite the simple name—is being handled by Kanna “kappe” Hirayama, who also helped direct the Shikimori OP. I don’t envy her for having to help translate Yokoyari’s art style to motion, but my impression is that she’s up to the task. The only real question mark for me here is Jin Tanaka, mostly known for scripts and whose other series comp credits don’t have much in common with OnK. Still, needless to say, I am optimistic about the staff in general.
I’m honestly not super much of a production hound in this way most of the time. (I usually prefer going into an anime with as few preconceived notions as possible, but for an adaption of a manga I’ve read a good chunk of that’s already impossible.) But I will take anything as an excuse to get excited. There is a lot wrong with the anime industry, but when things align just so, there is a lot of fascinating, compelling art that comes from it as well. I am hoping the Oshi no Ko adaption can contribute to that tradition.
We don’t know a ton else about the series yet. Trailers, release dates, etc. are all things of future concern. For now, all we have is our hopes, our dreams, and the single picture of Ai that graces this article’s banner, where she stands alone under a smoldering spotlight, one finger pointing to the sky, singing her heart out to an audience of anonymous faces who lift cherry red glow sticks like antennas to heaven.
This is not the last time I will write about Oshi no Ko on this site. I intend to cover the anime weekly once it starts airing, at the very least, and I may well make another “hype” article like this when the proper trailers start dropping. I have one character in particular I’m eager to see adapted to the silver screen (those of you who’ve read my previous article on the manga already know who I’m talking about, most likely). But mostly, I am just happy that an excellent manga seems like it’s going to get a worthy adaption that lives up to—perhaps even elevates?—the source material. It’s the least Oshi no Ko deserves.
See you 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 Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
This week, Healer Girl goes Halloween. Yes, it’s time for the fall festival at the clinic, and must of this episode’s real estate is taken up by charming slice-of-life scenes. The girls planning a Halloween event for the clinic, shopping for treats to give away, etc. But it’s also an episode about Hibiki, the first to center on the white-haired healer since episode five.
We also get the very important sight of Baby Hibiki.
This episode paints her as someone plagued with chronic self-doubt, something that’s been broadly alluded to a handful of times but hasn’t really been explored until now. The episode is fairly nonlinear; we cut back and forth several times to Hibiki’s childhood as well as her first day leaving for Tokyo to study to be a Healer. The episode also dives into her own bad habit of comparing herself to Ria, whom she often feels as though she falls short in comparison to.
The Halloween party itself ends up being a huge hit, of course, but there’s a notable bit where Ria seemingly has to intervene because the song the girls are singing is just that powerful. It’s not spelled out explicitly, but it does seem to imply that the whole “image song” technique can potentially be deleterious somehow. That this is snuck into an otherwise pretty unassuming episode is fascinating and is another example of Healer Girl‘s clever repurposing of typical slice-of-life tropes. (Alternately; I’m reading too far into it and it’s just a nice episode in which not a ton of importance happens. That’s fine too.)
But! After the credits roll, we get an interesting little conversation between Ria and her assistant / probably-wife. It’s cryptic; full of mention that the girls need to learn proper “control,” and that “time is limited,” and that soon Ria’s own “time will come.” What any of this means is deliberately left opaque; we’re an outside party looking in for this conversation, and these are simply mysteries to be solved in the two weeks that remain of the show’s run.
Until then, anime fans.
Song Count: 3, making this one of Healer Girl‘s more musically dense episodes. I’m particularly fond of the third song.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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 Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Magic Planet 
