Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
I’ve done one of these once before, so you know the drill, let’s get into things.
Tasuketsu -Fate of the Majority-: We start out with something that was just really quite bad! The manga is ongoing and began a solid 11 years ago, so I can only imagine the incredibly fast pacing (and thus lack of any impact) for everything here is the result of running through a ridiculous number of chapters to set up a contrived death game scenario in 1 episode. This was an obvious, huge mistake on the part of whoever was in charge of adapting this and I can’t recommend it at all except maybe to gawk at how poorly it works.
The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, Trained To Death By the Most Powerful Party, Became Invincible: We’ve got a nominal comedy here, and there’s some tiny charge in the premise of our protagonist, Rick, only beginning his fantasy adventuring story at the age of 32. Unfortunately, the humor reveals itself pretty quickly to boil down to a couple stock gags. Rick being ridiculously strong because of his secluded mountain training with the party mentioned in the show’s title, Rick staring at some girl or another’s boobs, or various isekai clichés “hilariously” turned on their head to illustrate that some character or another is a loser. (Sometimes that’s also Rick, sometimes it’s someone else.)
The one joke here that isn’t plagiarized from countless other works of this nature is that of Rick’s age. This too mostly boils down to comments about how He Shouldn’t Adventure Because He’s Like 30 Or Something, or people calling him 40ish and it making him mad. It’s basically the “I’m 30 or 40 years old and I don’t need this right now” meme stretched to a whole 23 minutes. Despite being less openly rancid than the worst of its genre, there’s really not a lot to like here. Although there’s a certain rubberneck value to the almost GoHandsian way the character designs have been translated to screen. Sadly, that’s not matched by the animation, which is unremarkable aside from a nice cut when a lady-knight goes tumbling head over heels over and over near the end of the episode.
There’s a certain tedious, self-impressed nature to the humor, too. Analogous to the tedious, self-impressed melodrama of more serious narou-kei fare. Both are pretty unlikable, and Ossan Hero here is not any more likeable than its genre-fellows for its lighthearted tone. Even its misogyny feels rote and obligatory; female characters are introduced chest- or skirt-first, but the designs are too unappealing to even have any charge from that, and in any case the show’s lunkheaded nature just makes it feel lame. “Lame” is a good descriptor for this, overall.
Senpai is an Otokonoko: Do you know that meme that’s like, “am I a boy? Am I a girl? Nobody knows, and that makes everyone gay!” That’s basically the general thrust of My Senpai is an Otokonoko.
Frequent wild swings in art style are accompanied by similar swings in tone and mood. I would say that this seems like a remnant of however the manga’s written, serious moments intercut with comedic interludes. Neither really wins out as the “dominant” tone of the show, though, which, combined with its cobbled-together visuals, can make it feel somewhat incoherent. I wanted to like this, and it’s definitely not bad, but I’m not sure if I’m going to keep up with it or not. Watch this space, I guess?
Giji Harem: This is unfortunately just a flatly bad adaptation of a pretty good manga. Giji Harem was never a series with a particularly strong sense of place, so grounding the interactions in a more fully-drawn classroom (or wherever) doesn’t usually improve things and actively detracts from the original manga’s sketchy appeal. I could imagine someone liking the backgrounds, regardless, though, because they kind of have an accidental vaporwave quality to them. The bigger issue is that the half hour format completely sabotages the pacing. This just gives everything a kind of breathless clip as we move from one situation to another with no sense of rhythm and no time to really sit with any of these little bits that the main girl likes to do. I wouldn’t even say the voice acting is particularly great, which is a real issue because the female lead should ideally have a ton of range for something like this.
All told this just kind of sucks. I’m not a fan and would advise anyone who thinks the general premise is interesting to check out the manga instead.
Failure Frame: So first of all, to get what is obviously the most important thing out of the way, this show opens on a scene taking place in a bus. And I swear this is the same fucking bus as the one from Instant Death Skill back in Winter. If it’s not, I must truly be losing my mind.
Anyway, my overall impression of this is extremely negative; artless, self-pitying, relentlessly unpleasant drivel. The entire episode’s convoluted, contrived, cookie-cutter setup is an excuse to pen what is essentially shameless trauma venting. Rendered in thin metaphor via the stock isekai plot, sure, but trauma venting nonetheless. The one bright spot is Koshimizu Ami, voice actress for the disdainful goddess who summons our hero (and his entire class) to this other world. She absolutely kills the performance and one gets the sense that she just enjoyed having an excuse to turn in something this hammy.
That’s obviously not enough to sabotage something with writing this rancid, though. My main takeaway was just a strong feeling that I shouldn’t be watching this. Since first viewing the episode I’ve talked to some people who did like it and understand that there’s a sort of camp-edge value that some find in this sort of thing, but I couldn’t see it, personally. Very strongly not for me, thank you.
Dungeon People: This was okay! I do not think I will watch more of it, but it was okay.
Most of this first episode is just setup for the show’s general premise: a typical fantasy rogue is exploring a Wizardry-style dungeon, and accidentally breaks into the “back side” of the dungeon, and meets its manager, a little girl with vast magic powers. All of this amounts to, basically, a workplace comedy taking place in a JRPG dungeon, because our main character gets drafted into helping to keep the place running. It’s a decently fun premise, and the comedy is solid. I particularly like the bits that call back to this genre’s origins as a series of riffs on Wizardry, such as the wireframe-like effect when the MC senses some monsters through a wall. Also, it’s nice to see something that’s minimalist on purpose in an era where many shows can kind of feel accidentally so because they just aren’t done at air time. (See Giji Harem above, for example.)
My main issue is just that the show is so languid that it feels a bit boring. I compare this to other fantasy anime from this year with comedy leanings, like Dungeon Meshi or ‘Tis Time For Torture, Princess, both shows with a much livelier cast and just more going on in general, and it just doesn’t really measure up. That’s reductive and unfair, but it’s a competitive season in a competitive year, and I only have so much time on my hands. So I think this goes, somewhat reluctantly, into the drop pile. It’s just not quite good enough.
Narenare -Cheer For You!-: We end on a high note, because wow is this thing weird. There is a strange, perpendicular disconnect between what Nanare Hananare seems to want to be and what it actually is.
What it wants to be: an inspirational / lightly funny girls-get-it-done story about the joy and female camaraderie found in cheerleading. The obvious point of comparison here is Anima Yell!, a fun but mostly-forgotten anime with exactly that premise from about five years back.
What it actually is: A series of Sonic the Hedgehog speedrunning videos. A completely ridiculous tossed salad of diced gay vibes, a unique, soft visual look which makes the series seem to take place in a perpetual sunset, bizarre comedy, incredible feats of parkour and general People Flipping Over sorts of stuff, and a main story buried in there somewhere about a girl who’s undergoing physical therapy because of an illness and feels inspired when the main character, her best friend, cheerleads. Jokes include the fact that every character is dumb as a brick, a nonspecifically blonde foreigner named Anna [Tago Takeda Larissa] who they attempt to pass off as Brazilian and who smooches everyone she meets, the antics of a powerfully stoic freerunner / parkour ninja girl Suzuha [Nakashima Yuki], a Catholic school called “Ojou Girls High”, and on, and on. It feels near-Birdiewingian, but quite unlike Birdie Wing, this somehow feels entirely unintentional.
What a bizarre thing! What an absolute delight! I’m glad I took the time to check this out and I heartily recommend it.
Premiere season is, impressively, not over. So I will quite possibly see you again very soon, anime fans.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.” -Friedrich Nietzche quote, decontextualized and used as the blurb for my original review of Tower of God‘s first season.
Rachel pushed Bam. That’s what everyone remembers, that was the defining twist of this section of Tower of God’s story back when it was originally written and when it was adapted for anime. Bam was yanked from his quest to climb to the top of the mystical tower by a woman with complex motivations that we were only half-privy to. Naturally, the dark depths of Shonen Twitter crucified her, and she’s become one character in a long lineage to be declared A Total Irredeemable Bitch by a certain genre of anime fan. Tower of God Season 2 picks up several years later, with an older Bam [Ichikawa Taichi] alongside a new co-protagonist. Rachel was my favorite character, and still is, but we don’t learn what happened to her after her betrayal of Bam here. Not yet.
The intervening years have been unkind to this IP. Slave.in.utero, the author of the original webtoon, had a health scare, and the comic was put on hiatus for a while as a result. Rumors persist that the anime was jammed up in production issues, changing studios and directors in the process. The Tower of God that arrives to us in 2024 is a very different animal than the one we first met in 2020, when I called it a “contender for the Shonen Crown” in my in hindsight just slightly hyperbolic praise of the show’s first episode. Tower of God‘s history is tied up, in a minor way, with my own as an anime critic. It’s a truism that if you write criticism for long enough, you’ll eventually start talking about yourself, so why fight it? Let’s talk about my brief personal history with TOG.
Tower of God was the first series I was ever paid to cover, and I reveled in the opportunity to energetically break its episodes down week-by-week for GeekGirlAuthority, who I worked for at the time. I even, at one point, got to do a brief email interview with some of the voice actors for the English dub, including Johnny Young Bosch, a hero to my teenage self for voicing Lelouch Lamperouge. I remember this period of my life pretty fondly, but the intervening years have been unkind to this writer, too. I left GGA amicably, refocusing my efforts over here to Magic Planet Anime. Things have been tough, I started my own Let’s Watch series, ended it, caught COVID, which I am still dealing with the aftereffects of, spent a lot of time cooped up by myself, and on. And on.
None of this is Tower of God‘s fault. There’s a lot to be said for persistence, and watching the first episode gave me an odd feeling of camaraderie. “Yeah man, it’s been a tough four years for me, too.” Maybe that’s why new main character Ja Wangnan [Uchida Yuuma] gives himself a little pep talk about not giving up when we meet him. Maybe that’s why I was endeared to the guy even though he’s kind of a dick. Here’s a short list of things he accomplishes over the course of this first episode:
Promises a little kid that when he becomes king, he’ll give him a super awesome ramen stand. This promise is made because the kid gave him a ramen coupon.
Signs his organs away to a mob boss.
Says multiple conflicting things to multiple people in the survival exam room (more on that in a second), while they’re all within earshot of each other.
Makes a little girl cry.
Tries and utterly fails to act tough in front of the older, edgier, much prettier 25th Bam.
All this to say, he’s a dick, but an entertaining and charismatic dick. I like him and had fun following him here, and he seems to have good intentions underneath it all. I’m sure the Tower will test them mightily, as it is wont to do, but it puts him on the right side of the “jerk in an annoying way”/”jerk in a funny way” divide.
His goal is graduating the survival exam, which you might remember from an early episode of the original series. Visually speaking, the action on display here is what saves the first episode from just being a straight visual downgrade of season one. Whatever you thought of Tower of God‘s first anime season, it had a distinct visual identity that really attempted to convey the look of the comic in motion. That’s a lot less obvious here, especially with the environments, which have what a friend described in a recent post of their own as a “seasonal-style” look. That is to say; they’re definitely drawn by professionals, but lack much in the way of personality. This is clearest with Wangnan’s apartment, which looks dreadfully generic.
“Are you sure we should just be using the same woody gradient for every interior wall?” “Yeah, it’ll be fine.”
So the action scenes (or scene, really) having as much focus and direction as it does is good. That, combined with the strong character writing, makes me want to keep watching, which is an achievement all its own in a season as strong as this one. Tower of God may not be the same show it was 4 years ago, but it’s still here, and that does legitimately count for something. Score one for surviving.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
The opening few minutes of The Elusive Samurai are mostly setup, to establish our feudal Japanese setting, and some basic character humor. I must stress, not very good character humor. These are all cracks at the expense of one-note stereotypes; an ableist caricature that serves as a puppet ruler, a greedy, homely girl who hounds our main character because she has Mon signs in her eyes over the idea of marrying him someday, etc. I bring this up first not to criticize a Jump adaptation for having Jump manga humor (it’s an unfortunate reality of most things that run in the magazine, honestly), but to point out that Elusive Samurai pulls off a pretty nasty little trick with it, one that I can only respect. By the end of the episode, no matter what you thought of these characters and their flat interjections of comedy the first time around, you’re going to miss them, and appreciate the stabs of comedy that remain, no matter how out of place they’d otherwise seem.
The Elusive Samurai is interesting as an adaptation, essentially holding the manga open and bleeding it. The resulting effect is a series of incredibly strong tones, moods, and single scenes that work excellently in of themselves but only cohere if you take a step back. This isn’t a major departure from the manga, to be clear. Both feature a wild tonal seesaw. But the manga’s visual experimentation in the first chapter is constrained. Panels align to grids, pages are more or less orderly. Ambitious, but typical. The anime, meanwhile, is a shattered, slivered kind of chaos. Everything clashes with everything. All abrupt jolts. A procession of staccato jumps. It’s abrupt. Percussive. An analogy: Elusive Samurai is a song. Its plot beats, the rhythm. Tokiyuki, our lead, is the melody. When the action follows him, it sings and soars. He’s like a rabbit; nimble, ferociously committed to his own survival, and so cute you can’t help but be on his side. Yuikawa Asaki gives him an endearingly boyish voice, which goes a long way to elevating his already strong characterization from the manga.
I’m not trying to downplay that manga; it still does quite a lot with the 50ish pages of its opening chapter. But one gets the clear sense that it’s straining against the format a little1, which simply isn’t true of the anime. Every hook and jab designed to throw you off kilter feels intentional. Around the episode’s halfway point, Tokiyuki and his older brother—the child of a concubine—are playing with a kickball. It ends up on a roof, and it never comes back down. Instead, an ice-cold match cut turns it into a severed head, and from then on, Tokiyuki’s idyllic life is over.
Let’s rewind a little. Hojo Tokiyuki was a real person, a member of the Hojo, a house in 14th century Japan who were, in loose terms, nominal rulers of the country but several steps removed from any actual power. (The Hojo were, and Tokiyuki is the heir of at the start of the story, something absurd like the regents for the shogun for the Emperor. In turn, they, via Tokiyuki’s father, who is here the ableist caricature mentioned up at the top of this article.) The Elusive Samurai is thus, very loosely, historical fiction. Its events comprise the leadup to, and depending on the time period this series spans, possibly the actual events of, the Nanboku-chō Wars.
This friendly-looking tale of straightforward heroism is presented to us at the start of the series as an example of what we will not be seeing here.
This setting contextualizes all of these tone shifts somewhat. On the one hand, Tokiyuki is a child. He’s a boy of scarcely 8 whose tutors, throughout the episode’s bright forehalf, chastise him for being lazy, for running away when he doesn’t want to do something, and just generally being too carefree. But he is also a noble, and while his father’s position is that of a puppet, it is still a position. These expectations must weigh on him, and we get some sense of how when we’re introduced to our other main character.
Suwa Yorishige [Nakamura Yuuichi], a priest, is introduced to us, to Tokiyuki, literally beaming. The boy-prince finds himself in a tree and Yorishige appears suddenly behind him, offering portents of glory and doom in an extremely overbearing, forceful fashion.
A divinity dwells within him and seems to spill out of the screen; when he’s “on,” he emits radiant lights, dimmed somewhat only by his snarky assistant Shizuku [Yano Hinaki], who explains he’s a sham of a priest, but a real oracle. When Yorishige proclaims that Tokiyuki will, in a few years time, be a war hero beloved and feared in alteration, the prince is skeptical, and he promptly darts off once again.
Returning to his castle, we return to the scene of he and his brother playing. We return to the ball, and to the severed head.
When the violence intrudes in the episode’s second half, it is immediate, overwhelming, and oppressive. Like the smoke from a fire, but not like the smoke from a fire, as the city burns in very literal flames. The betrayal of Takauji [Konishi Katsuyuki], a vassal of Tokiyuki’s, marks a massive and irreversible turning point in the individual lives of not just Tokiyuki and every other character, but history itself. The two are juxtaposed; big, white text pops up like news headlines, proclaiming mass death, including of characters we met in the lighthearted first half of the episode. Tokiyuki’s archery teachers? Dead. His father? Committed suicide alongside his retainers. Kiyoko [Matsuda Satsumi], the girl who teases him in the very first main scene of the episode? “Violated and brutally killed,” per the sub track. These things aren’t dwelled on, exactly. They’re just presented as cold facts as the city of Kamakura burns to cinders. (Although it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that many of these characters are the very same who offhandedly called him cowardly in the episode’s first half.) The pounding drums of what’s become a war song.
One can hardly blame Tokiyuki for being completely devastated. When Yorishige appears to rescue him, he initially rejects the offer. He wants to die alongside his father. What’s more surprising is that the sham shaman obliges, pushing the displaced prince off of a cliff and alerting a group of samurai to his presence. In this hopeless situation, does the rabbit lay down and die?
Of course not. The running, ducking, bobbing, hiding, and dodging of the first half of the show comes flooding back. This time, with consequence. The samurai hack and cleave at him, but only hit each other. They go from an indistinct, merged smear of viciousness to cutting each other’s limbs off; both senses of the phrase “bleeding together” bleeding together. Improbably, Tokiyuki escapes. He, Yorishige, and Shizuku retreat into the night. The composition of the show has flipped around; now, Tokiyuki is the percussion, and the melody are the smoldering flames reaching into the night sky as he flees.
Yorishige lays out a plan. Tokiyuki can’t defeat Takauji alone, he must hide, he must flee, he must court allies and deceive his enemies. Tokiyuki must become El-ahrairah; cunning, full of tricks, listener and runner. That’s just how it goes for a prince with a thousand enemies. If it feels hard to read any glory into such a tale, that’s probably the point. A story where the hero is a coward and the villain sends armies to rape and murder townsfolk isn’t the cheeriest thing, no matter how much cheesing for the camera Yorishige might do. Then again, brutal violence is hardly a foreign element to this kind of historical fiction. That’s probably part of the point, too. The show spells it out directly; Tokiyuki is a hero of life. Takauji, his nemesis, one of death.
The series asks us to take on faith that this will be worth it, in the end, that it will tell a satisfying story. It’s a fair point to raise! All of these visual tricks are great and lovely and engaging, but does this story come together? If you take a very big picture view, you can read its dizzying fractiousness as intentional, as I’ve chosen to do here, but we’re in for 11 more episodes of this stuff, so it’s fair to ask what it will all add up to. And there is always the temptation to try to be definitive. If you forecast that a show will do this or that, and then it does, you look like a prophet. (Or, at least, someone who knows their Japanese history, in this case.) The honest answer though is that we won’t know if it feels “worth it” until we get there, and I think looking to divine the future is, in the case of something so freewheeling, probably doomed to frustration. The Elusive Samurai‘s visual element alone gives me more than enough to chew on to want to come back next week, but combined with the plight of Tokiyuki, fleeing into the night with his whole world in smoldering splinters behind him, it becomes magnetic. I have to know more.
1: Although it does experiment in its own way, eg. a raised sword jutting through one panel to pierce another on the opposite page.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
2024 might well be remembered as a quietly strong year for mecha anime. It’s not like the genre’s ever really gone away, despite constant lamentations of its death (mostly from non-fans) dating back decades, and there have been big hits as recently as Witch From Mercury. Still, so far this year—a year that’s just over halfway done—we’ve had three rock solid genre pieces; Brave Bang Bravern!, Rozé of the Recapture, and now Grendizer U.
Of these, Grendizer U is easily the least essential. It’s also the hardest to get ahold of, as its current official English language distribution is presently limited to a single streaming service called Shahid that mostly hosts Arabic-language content. But, it’s definitely part of this discussion. Even if “rock solid” might be the wrong term, given that “hot mess” is right there.
What we have here is a very straightforward incarnation of a long-dormant Go Nagai series. To give you an idea of how far back we’re reaching here, the first Grendizer anime (based directly on Go’s manga), UFO Robo Grendizer, aired in 1975. Grendizer U, despite looking broadly contemporary (I’m sure some diehard Go fans will be annoyed about the “modernization” of the character designs, which I do understand), could pass for being directly from ’75 if you were just looking at the writing. The broad strokes are; Duke Fleed [Irino Miyu], an alien, has crash-landed on Earth after fleeing some great tragedy that he himself seems to have brought about on his homeworld. He is pursued by villainous invaders, the Vega, who proceed to wreck the city he’s staying in (which appears to be Riyadh) and defeat local mecha hero Mazinger Z, also an iconic Nagai creation.
All of this is paced terribly, to an almost comical extent. It’s not clear how much time passes between Fleed arriving on Earth and the invaders showing up, but it seems like quite a lot of ground to be covering in one episode. Still, it doesn’t actually hurt the premiere very much. The details matter less than the overall vibe: extreme, pure, unfiltered cheese. Do you want to watch a robot use a rocket punch in 2024? This might be your only option. Do you want to watch Fleed have a weird nightmare where the silhouette of his fiancé starts bleeding and grimly intones that “you killed me!”? Grendizer U has you covered. Do you want to watch Mazinger itself get destroyed, only for Fleed to summon the titular Grendizer robot and blast the Vega invaders away with something called “Space Thunder”? Look no further. It is worth noting that the show’s entire visual angle is part of what settles it in for a comfortable bronze, as it lacks the standout moments of Bravern or Rozé. “Low stakes” is the operative term, here.
Accordingly, this is less of a first impressions article than a PSA. It won’t win over anyone who already thinks super robot stuff isn’t worth their time, and it also won’t win any favors from the diehards who think this stuff shouldn’t ever be touched by a modern production team. If you’re between those two extremes, Grendizer U is worth a look. Otherwise, you can safely pass it by.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Let’s start at the end. Dragons—huge, blue, frog-like creatures—attack a humble hillside village. A man, Haga [Ishikawa Kaito], despite a lack of any traditional heroic powers or skills, fights them off with his wits, a large amount of pre-prepared equipment in the form of some barrels of oil, bows, and arrows, and the help of the rest of the village. Everyone thanks him, he’s a hero, a legendary “King Seeker” of popular rumor in the flesh, clearly. One in particular is Nikola [Yano Hinaki]. An inn worker whose everyday life was disrupted—to her terror, but also her excitement—by the attacks. She thanks him. She asks to come with him on his journeys. He says that no, he can’t bring her along, with a voice full of far more sorrow than seems to befit the situation.
Then, she bursts into flames.
Quality Assurance in Another World has some extent of its twist spoiled by its title. What’s more striking is this specific event, and the tone that the series takes after it happens. Haga seems cagey and slightly paranoid throughout the entire first episode. It’s only at the end, as Nikola ignites, that we learn why that is, and what exactly QA-sekai1 here is trying to do. In a riff on the old Sword Art Online setup, it is attempting to recast a simple debugger, imprisoned apparently deliberately within the VR video game he’s supposed to be quality checking, as the protagonist of a quasi-time loop-based tragi-comedy. (Or perhaps a comic tragedy.) That’s a tall ask! I’m not sure if Quality Assurance can pull it off, but seeing it even attempt it is admirable.
Nikola, at the end of the episode, shows up, staggered, at Haga’s hut as he ponders whether or not he’s ever going to get out of this bizarre digital purgatory he’s found himself in. We don’t learn how or why she’s survived, but the questions this leaves us with are obvious. Is Nikola going to come to understand the artificial nature of her reality? Will Haga ever find a way back to his own world? Is the show attempting to directly draw a line between the feudal lords that Haga works for in the game’s universe to his uncaring bosses, exploiting him, in the real world? In a very smart move for a premiere, Quality Assurance raises a lot of questions, a lot of questions that can be answered in many different ways, and which raise more questions of their own. The more you think about it, the better it gets. A friend2 described it as a “disempowerment fantasy.” Time will tell if that descriptor holds up, but when we consider Haga as he is here in episode one, it definitely makes sense. The man’s been broken by his experiences, and in spite of some lighter moments throughout the premiere, I wouldn’t be that surprised if this gets pretty dark.
It’s worth pointing out that the show’s plot firmly notches Quality Assurance within the isekai genre. Which really does drive home the point that the issue with the genre as it stands is not its fundamental underpinnings but just a general lack of desire to do much with them. I have watched the premiere of, and subsequently dropped, several other isekai this season (and far too many over the past six months on the whole). What Quality Assurance has that they do not is some apparent desire to earnestly engage with its own concept. Yes, it’s still funny to hear someone try to voice act a line that calls for the word “debugger” to be delivered with gravitas, but QA-sekai is trying, and I think it deserves credit for doing so.
We should briefly mention the visual style here as well. The show’s looks are solid, and I appreciate the imaginative “dragons.” I am interested to see how convincing the in-game world of Kingseeker Online actually is, once Haga and Nikola venture outside of the village we meet them in here, but I’m optimistic, both in regard to the visuals specifically, and overall.
1: I only found out after writing this article that the series is apparently known as “KonoFuka” for short. I think my abbreviation is better! Oh well.
2: Specifically, sometime-podcast cohost Julian M., of THEM Anime Reviews.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Something’s in the air. Maybe Dress-Up Darling was the warning shot, but to hear Megan Thee Stallion tell it, the era of the Otaku Hot Girl is upon us. If we are not prepared, that’s probably on us.
Look upon your god and despair.
2.5 Dimensional Seduction, another entry in the “girl with a gimmick” subgenre of romcom, opens with insert narration. Here, our female lead, in voiceover, waxes rhapsodic about cosplay as the ultimate form of transformation and devotion. I don’t know about all that, but it’s certainly a very involved hobby. I don’t have the figure for it, myself, but I can imagine someone caring this much about it pretty easily. When we meet this person a few minutes later, we will find that she cares this much about basically every aspect of otakudom, so it’s certainly in character.
The first character we meet after the OP plays isn’t her, though. It’s Okumura Masamune [Enoki Junya], the president and sole member of his high school’s ‘Manga Research Club.’ Which is to say; he spends his free periods holed up in a club room watching OVAs by himself. In introducing himself to us, he tells us, charmingly, that he doesn’t like real women and only cares about anime girls. In telling us this, he recounts a remarkably quick series of mini-vignettes of romantic rejection and ostracization from his peers. This is as good a place as any to pause.
I already talked at length about the girl-with-a-gimmick setup on the 4th when I wrote about Roshidere, so I won’t repeat myself too much. But it’s worth briefly contrasting these shows to bring up a main difference between them. In Roshidere, the male lead seems to have a reasonable amount of self-esteem, despite being a huge nerd. In 2.5D, this is clearly not the case, or is only the case in that sort of weird sideways way that nerdy people tend to do where we convince ourselves we’re somehow better than everyone else for having slightly unusual interests. The geekboy persecution complex is a whole thing I don’t have the space or desire to get into here1, but there are two key things we should take away here. A. Given everything else we see in this episode, Masamune talking about how he only likes 2D chicks is clearly a coping method for managing rejection. B. Related to that, he is not a reliable narrator of his own feelings. This makes him a bit interesting, because it means, despite his misogynistic sentiments which they are clearly meant to be able to relate to, that he is not just a cipher for the audience to project onto. You’re not as much supposed to think that you are this guy, and more that you’re at least kind of like him. (Even if you’d handle the situation better. Maybe especially if so.) We’re led to both empathize with and look down on him, a perspective that bears some distant relation to the strange, schadenfreude-driven ethos of manga like Rent-a-Girlfriend. Thankfully, despite that, there’s nothing so heavy here. Our main boy is mostly just kind of a twit, and I’m pretty confident that we’re supposed to be laughing at him at least a little, even if the show does assume you’ll also root for him as a sympathetic (and presumably also nerdy, teenage, male) audience.
This becomes more obvious when our female lead, and in many senses our actual main character, Amano Ririsa [Maeda Kaori], barges into the clubroom and into Masamune’s life. They quickly bond, to Masamune’s own frustration, over a shared love of the character Lilliel, a magical girl from a series called Ashword Wars. From Masamune’s own point of view, this is a perfectly Shakespearean tragedy. Here he is, having proudly sworn off real women, only for one that he can’t ignore to crash into his life. Even without that other element that I’m deliberately dancing around this far up the page, this would already be a perfectly serviceable romantic fantasy for this show’s target demo. The two talk about minutiae in the Ashword Wars OVAs. Ririsa compliments Masamune’s frighteningly extensive collection of Lilliel figures, including the one with an exploding outfit. They play a fighting game together. What’s not to love?
In fact, if Masamune were more confident and well-adjusted there almost wouldn’t be a story here at all. There’s a real “Man vs. The Self” element to his inner monologue, which runs throughout much of the episode, in which he denies any attraction to this girl. He acknowledges that she’s attractive, and can even bring himself to say that “despite her gender” (goodness), she’s a true otaku. Were it not, he thinks, for the fact that she just has one too many dimensions, she’d be perfect.
Thus enters the cosplay angle.
I might describe the overall plot of the first episode as “guy gets incredibly freaked out upon learning a girl is way, way more of an otaku than he is.” Ririsa, you see, loves the same sexy heroines that Masamune does, claiming she projects herself onto them. This is—I hope I’m not shocking anyone by saying this—a real thing. Tons and tons and tons of girls, the world over, love and adore female characters who are, in some sense, made to cater to some kind of male fantasy. The world we live in is, unfortunately, patriarchal, and thus dominated by male fantasy. One plays the hand they’re dealt, and active reappropriation of these characters is a thing that any woman engaging with a male-led fandom2 learns to do. It’s second nature at a certain point. I found myself vibing pretty hard with Ririsa here, essentially proving the show’s own point! We’re not otherwise particularly similar people, but I love magical girls a lot, too! If I looked good doing it, I would probably cosplay at least occasionally. All of this is taking the long way around of saying; it is not actually surprising or unrealistic that Ririsa is who she is and loves to cosplay. Her sheer boldness in undressing in front of a male classmate is surprising and unrealistic—as is her taking him at his word when he says he’s not attracted to actual girls—but we can excuse that, as you please, as either naivete on her part or just a necessary narrative greasing of the wheels to make this setup work at all.
Ririsa explains that she truly fell in love with cosplay when a nascent fascination with the idea led her to attend an in-person event. Seeing all the other beautiful girls there dressed up in sexy outfits awakened something in her (I have rarely so quickly decided a character is bisexual), even after she was gently shooed off for being too young to attend. (To give you an idea, one of the cosplayers describes it as a “softcore” event. These girls are selling photoCDs filled with suggestive pictures of themselves, and that’s not something the show avoids talking about.)
Driven by the, ahem, beauty and passion on display she saw that day, she’s determined to eventually sell a photo CD of her own. Honestly, despite the ostensibly saucy subject matter, her attitude toward the whole thing is mostly just cute, but her passion for the hobby is clearly genuine. She ropes Masamune into taking pics of her in not one but several Lilliel outfits, and predictably he gets really into it. Enough so that he conks out from Ririsa calling him “Ashford-sama” (another character in the manga, you understand). Some further developments aside, the episode ends with Ririsa wondering why her heart is pounding so fast when remembering the photoshoot later that day, thus setting us up for future romantic adventures that will presumably involve a lot more photos of Ririsa in kinky outfits.
The fairly straightforward resolution may make one wonder. All of this subtext, the stuff about reappropriation and whatnot, that I’m reading onto the show, is any of it actually intentional? Without a direct line to the mangaka, it’s hard to say, but it also only half matters. A funny side effect of the show’s focus Ririsa is that, despite everything I said earlier about Masamune not being a simple audience stand-in, and despite not being the one with a running inner monologue, she actually comes off as having more interiority than he does, especially given that the interiority he does have is not particularly flattering! Ririsa is certainly the more sympathetic of the two, and I would not be at all shocked if this series picks up a decent-sized periphery of female fans who relate to Ririsa in some loose sense, even as the show, going by various promotional materials, gears up to get racier. This wouldn’t even be the first time such a thing has happened in recent memory.
My Dress-Up Darling, the other hot 2020s property about a guy and his hot cosplayer gf, is the obvious point of comparison here. But what’s striking to me is how different the shows feel. Dress-Up Darling has a lot of delicate character work, but it’s also actually more salacious than 2.5D has been so far. (In terms of the respective anime at least. I’ve read neither manga.) The two halves of that show can, in fact, feel like they fit together uncomfortably, when it’s doing closeups of lovingly-animated boob sweat in one episode and melancholic-romantic train rides home in the next. I can only speak for myself, but when watching that anime I often wished it would settle down a little. It really sings in its more character-driven moments, so the ecchi elements can feel like a distraction except in the rare occasion that they gel just so with everything else that show is doing. Even so, Dress-Up Darling is pretty straightforwardly the better series, and not just because Gojou is a much more likable male lead. I would be very surprised to see 2.5D even attempt to access some of the more complex emotional currents that MDUD consistently manages to, even in its weaker episodes.
2.5D is a series of much more limited ambitions, in general. The goals here, as of now, are to gently push Masamune and Ririsa together and have them engage in Convoluted Horny Situations, goofy antics, or both—in alteration or combination—the entire long way. There’s still a character arc visible from the start here, but Masamune is a much simpler character than Gojou from MDUD, and because he is also an otaku, he and Ririsa are instantly much more on the same page than Gojou and Marin are. Masamune denying his attraction to Ririsa, and then justifying it by claiming she’s a “2.5D girl”, is a bit. Something to make You, The Horny Teenage Boy Watching This Show, think he’s a lucky bastard but laugh at the same time.
A less cut-and-dry way it’s less ambitious lay in its visuals. 2.5D’s first episode has essentially one standout moment—the “headshot” when Masamune sees Ririsa in costume for the first time—against a general temperature of looking pretty good. But it’s not quite as striking as Dress-Up Darling or even Roshidere, so that does count against it a little. Even then, it’s hard to care too much when even “not as good as those other two shows” still looks pretty good. It also doesn’t seem nearly as interested in the finer details of cosplay and costuming as MDUD is, so I could see that being a negative for folks who want an authentic depiction of the experience. Certainly, I found myself missing it.
Overall, though, while I don’t know if I’d call 2.5D a particularly great show, I’m forced to respect its craftsmanship, as an honest critic. I can appreciate that, on some level, it is doing everything in its power to get these two dating. I will also admit to just having a weak spot for shameless audacity, and because 2.5D’s audacity isn’t tying a romance narrative I like a lot more down (so far, anyway), I am more charitable toward it than I might be if it were trying to do more things at once. Is that unfair? Yes! But that’s just how these things go sometimes. I think this show is alright; long may the Otaku Hot Girls reign.
1: For one thing, it’s not unique to otaku, at least not in the loanword sense of that term. When I was in high school, people were just as willing to get this kind of defensive over liking comic books, D&D, fantasy literature, alternative music, even video games well past the point where those had gone firmly mainstream. I imagine the boys at the younger end of Gen Z are fighting this particular fight even still, as we speak.
2: Which is most fandoms. Because the patriarchy privileges men in any given hierarchical system, you see.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
The girl-with-a-gimmick romcom is a staple of the modern seasonal anime environment. Several times a year, we are given the opportunity to watch an earnest but somewhat emotionally dim boy attempt to win the affections of a girl who has some standout quirky trait. Some of these traits are quirkier than others.
Being honest, I rarely touch this kind of thing. Occasionally, as in the case of My Dress-Up Darling, I will develop an affection for them because the characters work well together. Sometimes, as in The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, they are simply strange in a way that is only tangentially connected to their setup. A lot of the time, though, as in the case of say, Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, I just find them vaguely grating, usually because the quirk isn’t actually that interesting. To go back to that comic we just mentioned, Shikimori, which began life as a Twitter comic, tried to hitch its entire series to the fact that Shikimori herself was nebulously masculine in some way, which mostly just meant that she was athletic and nominally good at keeping her extremely feminine boyfriend out of danger. The best parts of the series had nothing to do with her.
Since Shikimori, I’ve mostly avoided actually talking about these shows on this blog (again, with the exception of Glasses Girl, may it rest in Hell), because more than most anime, I’m keenly aware that I am way out of the target demographic of these things, which is teenage boys who are just discovering love and attraction for the first time. Most other popular genres of anime are also aimed at teenage boys, but most of these; battle shonen, for example, have a sizable peripheral demographic that also enjoy them, because things like “people with cool powers fight” transcend experience somewhat. In those cases, I’m at least somewhat a part of that periphery. That isn’t the case with gimmick romcoms. I’ve just never been able to get there.
Nonetheless, I’ve made an active effort this season toward pushing myself to write about things I’d normally pass over, and Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian, alias Roshidere, is part of that. Ultimately, all of what I’ve called gimmicks when discussing these anime are actually aspects of some kind of romantic (and/or sexual) fantasy. You want an otaku girlfriend, you tune in to Dress-Up Darling. You want a cool girlfriend who’s more assertive than you, you put on Shikimori. You want a weird baby-creature that looks like she was drawn by an alien, you watch The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses. All of this is pretty straightforward, and Roshidere centers a trope that’s so obvious that I’m a little shocked I’ve never seen one of these anime use it as their main thing before; the fantasy of dating the hot foreign chick in your class. Most classes in my experience do not actually have hot foreign chicks, but having been a boy up to a certain point, I can attest that unfortunately, teenage boys will make do by being exoticizing weirdos about almost anyone who looks different from them. Thankfully for the basic palatability of this show, Kuze Masachika [Amasaki Kouhei] does not have to be an exoticizing weirdo. He is our lead character, and, quite unlike every teenage boy I personally knew growing up, the hot foreign girl in his class is actually interested in him. (The Hot Foreign Girl In My Class is Actually Interested in Me?! would be a workable alternate title for this anime. I’m glad it’s not called that because its real title is better, but in a nearby reality that’s just slightly worse than ours, that’s the name of the show I’m writing about today.)
Alisa Mikhailovna Kujou [major Russophile Uesaka Sumire, in what I must imagine is a dream role], nicknamed Alya, is our title character. She thinks Kuze, a complete nerd who spends his time playing gacha games and watching late-night anime, is pretty cute. It’s easy to be uncharitable about this kind of series, and I think I’ve been a bit hard on them so far, so I want to head an easy non-criticism off at the pass; this is not “proof that the writer has never talked to a woman” or whatever in of itself. I met my girlfriend on a message board because we were talking about Gundam 00, and our case is far from unique. Girls can like nerdy guys, and given who this series was written by and for, it makes complete sense that Alya is one such girl. To give her further credit, while Kuze does not have the most striking design in the world, he’s passingly handsome, fairly funny, and is considerate of others’ feelings. Together, the two have a nice, snarky repartee going. As the viewer, I can put myself enough in her shoes to understand what she sees in him.
Our basic premise is very simple here. These two sit next to each other in class. Alya is very straight-laced and is on the student council. Kuze is an otaku who doesn’t give much a damn about school. They have a lot of comedic back and forth. Kuze will do something foolish or nerdy; fall asleep during a chemistry lesson, start playing a gacha game during a between-class break, etc. Alya will chastise him, and they will have some mildly witty exchange. After which she will say something to herself in Russian that reveals her true feelings, hence the show’s title. So far, so simple, and even on this level the two do have a nice little rhythm going. But there’s a complication; unbeknownst to Alya, Kuze also speaks Russian. He can’t bring himself to actually admit this, because he assumes Alya would be deathly embarrassed that Kuze knows that she’s been calling him a cutie or what-have-you in another language this entire time. It’s a fun little dynamic, and it comes off as a bit of a lightly Kaguya-sama-inspired element in that it makes a sort of layered mind game thing (albeit one with very low stakes) part of the narrative. The two aren’t explicitly thinking of this as a race to make the other person confess their feelings first, but there’s something loosely like that happening as a result of this twist.
(Incidentally, I’ve decided this deserves an entire parenthetical aside. When Kuze is rolling on the gacha in something that’s clearly Fate Grand Order, he pulls the in-universe game’s version of Tsukuyomi, who looks basically identical to Alya aside from having fox ears. Alya questions the design, wondering why she has silver hair, and Kuze replies that it’s probably an allusion to the color of the Moon, but brushes the question off as unimportant because the fact that she’s cute matters more. Alya mutters to herself, in Russian, that she has silver hair too, and calls him a “cheater.” This matters to me because it’s a rather rare example of an anime explicitly calling attention to, and confirming the in-universe reality of, unconventional hair colors. This is maybe the most fascinating thing in the show, and I don’t say that as an insult. It’s especially odd because most of the other characters have very realistic hair tones. Before she said that line, I assumed her silver-white hair was intended to be a stylized blonde and didn’t really question it. A later scene even implies that this might actually be the case, so, what gives? It doesn’t ultimately matter, but it will distract me. Anime hair color is one of those things that is just endlessly interesting to me.)
A recurring thought I had while watching this is that both Kuze and Alya struggle to honestly express themselves, and in attempting to do so, lapse into extremely goofy behavior, hiding their feelings not so much in any specific language but in jokes, and just generally screwing around with each other. Sometimes this is cute, sometimes this sees the show lapse into shameless cliché. Something that very much teeters on the edge is the requisite Fanservice Bit, here toward the end of the episode, where the situation contrives itself such that Alya is sitting with one of her stockings removed in a classroom that only herself and Kuze are present in. She teases him (again) and things end with the camera spending way too much time on her foot and a panty shot that was so sudden that it felt like a jumpscare. (She also kicks him in the face, but that’s a lot less surprising.) I’m not going to criticize the show just for attempting to be salacious, but there’s something about the integration of it into the other material that feels jarring. Then again, as I keep saying, I’m not the horny teenage boy that this kind of thing is aimed at anymore. I dimly remember being like that, a period of my life where I would’ve defended Love Hina to the death as an important work of art because there’s, like, dude, there’s totally a scene where you can see Motoko in a hot spring, but not only is it hard to return to that mentality some 15 years later, I don’t really have any desire to. Does this stuff work for its target audience? I have no idea, if it does, good for them. I don’t wanna see Alya’s feet.
On the other hand, that light mind game element is still present even during this scene, and I think if they had played the whole thing a little more subtly it might have felt a little less out of place. In the middle of all this, and in between freaking out about Girl Legs, Kuze has a stray thought where he basically psychoanalyzes Alya and tries to get to the bottom of why she’s doing this whole muttering-in-Russian thing in the first place. Are his conclusions correct? Who knows! But I like that even during what’s probably its scene that is most easy to object to, the show still treats Alya as a character.
On the other other hand, there are also areas where the show feels more like it’s objectifying Alya, and really the female half of the cast in general, than treating them like people.1 During a scene in the school cafeteria, one of Kuze’s friends, a kid with a shaved head named Maruyama Takeshi [Sakai Koudai], is a fountain of what sometimes gets called locker room talk. He talks about Alya and two other characters and how badly he wishes he had a shot with them, he ranks the three, preferring Kuze’s childhood friend Suou Yuki [Maruoka Wakana], and just generally acts like an ass. My initial impression was that we were supposed to sort of think this guy was a loser. In light of the scene described above, and just the fact that Roshidere lingers on this guy’s yapping for so long, I’m less sure. This, to me, was much grosser than the whole foot thing. A series does not need to explicitly condemn characters like this in order to be good, but in context with everything else, it does make me see Roshidere in a slightly less charitable light.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I can appreciate a fair number of aspects of this show, certainly. I haven’t talked much about its presentation, but said presentation is quite solid. “A high school” is perhaps the most ISO standard setting in anime, but Roshidere‘s feels distinct and has a genuine sense of place. This is also true of the flashback scenes, late in the episode, that depict a young Kuze hanging out with a person who is probably a young Alya in a park at dusk. The “chase sequence” that ends the episode is also pretty strikingly directed and animated, and I’ll admit to being a sucker for strong action sequences in non-action shows. It feels worth noting as well that the OP is a ridiculous, incredibly elaborate thing that promises all sorts of fantastical scenarios that, barring some sort of full-on genre shift (wouldn’t that be interesting), we will never get in the show itself. The ED—apparently one of twelve, they’re giving this the Monogatari treatment—is similarly grandiose. These sequences are fun on their own, but their presence feels telling, in a way, as though the story’s actual charms weren’t quite considered enough to carry it. (Some might remember I had basically the same thought with regard to Shikimori‘s elaborate fantasy OP. These two shows come from some of the same people at Doga Kobo, which may have something to do with it.)
On the writing side, I like a majority of Alya and Kuze’s dynamic, and some of the ancillary characters seem like they’ll eventually be fun to follow even if Takeshi is absolutely unbearable. I bring all this up to say, I might actually finish this! It’s entirely possible I don’t, we have a busy season ahead of us and most of what I’m looking forward to the most still hasn’t premiered, but it’s not impossible. Even if I do, though, this series isn’t for me, to an even greater degree than most of what I cover on this site. So I again have to come back to my keen awareness that what I think of it just doesn’t matter that much. Ultimately what I specifically think of any anime doesn’t matter that much. (If it did, Healer Girl would be widely hailed as a modern classic.) Still, much more than usual, I find myself with a shortage of strong opinions here. I’m sure it will do fine in a broader sense. But will it appear on Magic Planet Anime again? Who knows, stranger things have happened.
1: Some people would read this line and ask, “isn’t that what every anime like this does?” To which I would reply no, it really is not.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Certain typographical features of the below post are intentional.
The uneasy thickness of a nightmare permeates the scene, and a synthesized voice pushes a dinner tray into view. Singed metal and corrosion lay on a plate, served like a tidy meal. It’s a head; a human head, or at least something in the shape of one, smoldering and smoking, a revolting bon appetit for an unwilling customer. This is the kind of thing that would send anyone screaming awake, so when Takuma [Toyonaga Toshiyuki] does, it’s no surprise. For him, jolting awake is a moment of relief. Proof that he was just dreaming, that this jarring and disquieting interlude wasn’t real. That’s the problem though; with Takuma’s thoughts and with My Wife Has No Emotion in general. I’m not sure he’s right about that. (edited) [4:02 AM]
This moment, a surreal and genuinely disturbing dream sequence, is hidden in the middle of My Wife Has No Emotion‘s first episode like a knife between book pages. It colors everything that follows, and makes us see what came before in a different light, its influence spilling out from both chronological sides of the event. Look carefully, though, and it’s clear that the seeds for it were planted before the footage even began rolling. Go look at that key visual; note how Takuma’s eyes are closed and his hands squeeze his robot-wife in an apparent expression of domestic bliss that is nonetheless decidedly paternalistic and controlling. She, meanwhile, stares out at us. It’s a cold, creepy stare, but not necessarily a judgmental one. It almost seems like she just really wants to know. “Do you like this? Is this what you’re here for?”
In a sense, all of this is subtextual. Run the tape back and revisit our basic setup and you’ll see the familiar ingredients of a friendly rom-com with a sci-fi twist. Even then, though, simply describing the premise raises alarm bells. Lonely salaryman buys—has bought, this happens before the start of the show—an “appliance” as he calls her, a human-shaped robot to cook and clean for him. He is an overworked, pitiable mess of a man inhabiting a desolately empty apartment, and Mina [Inagaki Konomi], the robot maid in question, responds to him with, accordingly, pity, but also a towering amount of passive aggression. Assuming that’s not just me doing what Takuma may very well be doing: projecting our own thoughts onto a being that is, at the end of the day, not actually sapient. Akin to trying to “date” ChatGTP. In a show presented even slightly differently, I would have no trouble at all thinking this was supposed to be straightforward wish fulfillment despite all of these complications. Maybe it is, for a certain kind of person, but the second the show raises the possibility that this entire domestic setup is cover for something sinister, it’s impossible to stow the notion away, even if the anime itself might like to.
My Wife Has No Emotion should not, by all rights, be causing me to have these thoughts. Questions of meant—is this what the author meant to do here, is this how the author meant to make me feel—can be a trap. Without speaking to the original mangaka directly, we cannot know for sure what is meant by any single thing in this show’s first episode. Previously, I’ve treated questions of whether or not a show is Doing Something as a puzzle to be solved. We can do that here, too. We can observe how, despite the ostensibly simple setup of boy-meets-robo-chef, there is a strong air of the denpa all over this thing. A pronounced unease, a sadness that is at one point said aloud but is obvious from the outset. We can look at Takuma’s mostly-empty apartment. We can nod thoughtfully at his drinking problem and Mina’s attempts to curb it later in the episode. (Out of genuine concern, or is she just obeying her programming?) We can consider this setup in the context of the oft-slandered “rehabilitation” genre (I’m hardly a fan myself). We can compare it to past works in the medium to tackle the sapience of artificial, robotic humanoids; Chobits, Mahoromatic, Time of Eve. All of this, ultimately, might be like trying to search for sharks in a swimming pool. [4:13 AM] Speculation is speculation. We’re not going to know for sure if My Wife Has No Emotion will go there unless it does.
The nightmare in the middle of this first episode is strange, but to even go so far as to say it’s intentionally disturbing is to speculate. This is ultimately a work with an ambiguous, or more charitably, a very multilayered tone. Takuma lives alone and openly laments being lonely, so he projects this loneliness onto Mina. (Since the entire show is wholly from Takuma’s perspective we don’t know, and maybe can’t know, if she reciprocates.) He mentions having once had a girl over, but that this did not work out. We can make the reasonable assumption that being shot down made him not want to even try anymore. He’s clearly also at least a little scared of Mina, though. Is that a fear of the unknown—of not knowing how much agency truly lies behind those big, cameralike robotic eyes—or is it a much more basic fear of women? Is it both? Conflating the two wouldn’t be out of character, given what we learn of him here. [4:16 AM]
There’s also the presentation to consider. Mina’s character design is decidedly in the uncanny valley, even by the bug-eyed standards of moe designs, a feeling only reinforced by the moody staging, lighting, and backgrounds, and ramped up even further by the in-spots minimal, all-Casio-presets soundtrack. It switches to a fuller, more traditional romcom OST late in the episode, and that somehow feels even more artificial. Likewise, that scene sees the show gets “raunchy” in its final few minutes, and in doing so, it feels even more awkward. Like an intentional bit of self-sabotage. Message #anime-notes
My Wife Has No Emotion is a weird series that may or may not at some point bring that weirdness to the forefront for an extended time. But ultimately, that’s a gamble, and it’s going to be difficult to not feel suckered if this uneasy tone is a fakeout, bar an extreme strengthening of the series’ writing chops. Usually, I end these articles by offering a pithy summary and a blunt “should you watch this” yes/no recommendation. I’m not going to do that here, I think you already know if this bet is one you’ll take.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
Hello, anime fans! We have a quiet lineup this week, but that’s only because we’re in the between-season doldrums where last season’s shows have all ended and this season’s have mostly not yet premiered. We’re here to cover one of the few that already did and an ongoing annual that I’m fond of. (Also one last finale, but to be honest I had little to say about it.) There’s also a new section of the column, here. Keep scrolling and you’ll see what I mean.
Before that, I do just want to once again plug my reviews for Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night and Girls Band Cry, the twin music originals that aired this past season. Honestly, they started out fairly different and ended up miles away from each other in every important respect, but the sisters-by-circumstance will probably always be compared just because they happened to air at the same time. I feel a little bad for the former in that I can’t help but think it might have been a bit better received if it had aired back in Winter. Still, for my money, both have their strengths, and Girls Band Cry is basically an instant classic.
Anime
Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture – Episode 2
I have a lot of positive things to say about this episode, but before we get to any of them we have to address my one big criticism of it. The main sour note here is just, man, do we really have to call the prison that the Japanese resistance are being held in a “concentration camp?” I’m not sure if the use of that term is to be blamed on the subtitlers or the writers (a bit of on-screen text actually says *relocation* camp instead, although I think that’s just a euphemism for the other thing anyway). Usually, I make some effort to excuse Code Geass‘ generally reckless use of politically-charged imagery, but it very much is possible to push these things too far, and that is definitely the case here. (The original series sometimes did so as well, so it’s not like this is a sin unique to Rozé, but still.) It’s very much a down note in an otherwise pretty good episode, and it put a damper on my mood. Not mentioning it would also just feel irresponsible. So! There it is. I don’t know why they did that and I’m not going to attempt to excuse it.
Anyway, the actual prison liberation itself is pretty good and very action-packed. The show’s establishing a pattern here with Ash taking down arrogant Britannian knights that is admittedly a cheap thrill but one that I’m pretty into. I like his little speeches when he inevitably bests them.
There are two main things we learn in this episode. One; Sakuya and Sakura don’t seem to actually be related and instead have a royal body double situation going on. What does this open us up for? Why, Code Geass Yuri, of course. I’m not going to blow anyone’s mind by praising wlw romantic tension in a show when the blog that I pull these weekly posts from has the URL “yurisorcerer.tumblr.com”, but nonetheless, I am going to say; good job with that, Rozé of the Recapture. May your bounty of lilies be endless.
The other thing is that hey, it turns out that Sakuya-as-Rozé doesn’t have as straightforward a relationship with Ash as we were initially led to believe (who could’ve seen that coming?). Given the flashback we’re shown, the case seems to be that Ash is under a very complicated iteration of Sakuya’s geass, and in fact plans to kill him after she’s completed her tasks of rescuing Sakura and freeing Area 11 from the Neo-Britannian yoke, to “avenge her father.”
We’ll learn more about that in the weeks to come, I’d guess. It really feels like Sakuya is a very complex character that we’re only getting to look at one layer at a time. I like that, it makes her notably distinct from Lelouch whose whole deal we basically understood right away even if it later became more complicated.
So, yeah, in spite of my major complaint, this was a solid episode. (I could complain about the fanservice too if I wanted to, but honestly I’m disinclined to do so. That’s always been a thing Code Geass has gone over the top with, and I feel like anyone still onboard with the series has to know that by now. Code Geass Ass Shots make a proud return here after being absent in the first week, in fact.) I’d put it about on par with the first episode overall.
Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 12 (Finale)
This sure was a final episode of a TV anime! I really don’t have a lot to say about this. The voice acting was good, Fairouz Ai and the cat boss youkai’s VA (who I can’t find for some reason) give their all here. This is a perfectly fine end to an extremely middling adaptation of a manga that is good but not like, that good, to begin with. Also it’s completely unrelated to any material in the actual manga! They just made a whole new ending up! This used to be a very common practice but it’s not anymore, and I’m surprised to see it brought back for an adaptation as underwhelming as this one.
Suffice to say, I’m glad to put this one in the books (har har har). Not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and even this year I’ve seen much worse, but I’ve seen much better, too.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 56
Normally when I write these, even the less serious ones for the weekly column, I try to keep in mind that my audience is not me and I am not my audience. Obviously, what you’re ultimately always getting is my opinion, but I normally attempt to give some consideration to how others might feel, too.
All this to say, I can’t do that here. This is an episode with a lot of Rika in it. I cannot be normal about Rika. I have tried in the past and failed.
It should’ve been me.
She’s beautiful, fantastic, gorgeous, amazing, dazzling, attractive, and her voice [provided by Saiga Mitsuki] makes my head spin. She speaks to a nervous Liko with empathy and humor, she lightly talks herself up during the (amazing) fight, but honestly she could be a lot more boastful and it still wouldn’t feel unjustified. I spent enough of the episode having a gay meltdown that I probably missed some of the finer details, but can you really blame me? She’s just electric to watch.
You guys have no idea how hard it is to not just post thirty examples of her winning smile in a row.
Right, the battle itself. Liko’s battle partner is Katy, the usual first gym leader in the Scarlet / Violet games. She puts in a good showing for the first half of the episode, with her Lokix really standing out in giving a Pokémon that isn’t particularly prominent in its home game some shine. The little guy comes off as every bit as cool as his Kamen Rider inspiration.
When the battle comes down to just Liko and Floragato against Rika and her Clodsire, things really fly off the rails, and we get the delightful experience of watching Liko undergo some character growth in real time when she (perhaps inevitably) loses. The Liko we see here, properly invested in the outcome of her battles because Floragato is, and she wants what’s best for her partner Pokémon, is a far cry from the shy little bean we met over a year ago in episode 1.
Over in the B-Part of the episode, Penny [Hirohashi Ryou] makes her on-screen debut, and she’s pretty great, too, terse and a little mysterious. What little drips we get of her backstory seem to vaguely imply that this anime actually takes place after some version of the game’s events? Which feels like it can’t possibly actually be what they’re going for, but it’s an interesting thought, regardless. (It would definitely explain the rather strange name of ‘The Explorers’ for our villain group. Thinking on this the day after I initially wrote it, maybe what’s being alluded to here is actually the earlier explorations of Area Zero.) Either way, we’re definitely getting into some interesting stuff here, Penny and Dot come across a mysterious “Scarlet Book” with what’s clearly Koraidon on its front cover. Mysteries upon mysteries! And really a good reminder that for all that’s happened over the past year or so, we’re still really just getting started with Pokémon Horizons. Not that I’m complaining! It’s quietly become one of my favorite ongoing anime.
Around The Internet
So! Here’s a new section of the columns that I haven’t figured out exactly how I’m going to handle in the archives. Essentially, I wanted to give a shout out to both to fellow anime bloggers and also just to various other critics I’ve been reading recently. Some of these people also write about anime, some of them write about other things entirely, but my hope is you’ll check some of them out if you like my own work.
Short Reflection: Spring 2024 Anime, by Anime Binge-Watcher – A tumblr post of decent length by fellow anime blogger (and Magic Planet Anime Discord Server member!), Anime Binge-Watcher. I don’t agree with all (or even most) of ABW’s ratings for the anime we both watched this past season, but I appreciate their perspective on things regardless, and it’s always interesting to read a well-thought-out opinion from someone who you don’t entirely align with. Even more interesting to me is their opening recommendation of the Dead Dead Demons’ Dededede Destruction anime (retrofitted from a film, not entirely unlike what’s happening with Rozé of the Recapture), that was just not on my radar at all but sounds (and looks, given their screencaps) pretty arresting. I’m also super happy to see another person really give it up for Girls Band Cry. And they even draw a connection between the traditional “rival group” in idol anime and that series that I hadn’t really considered before, but makes sense now that it’s been pointed out to me, especially when taken in context with eg. the rock-inflected stylings of a group like Saint Snow. In any case! It’s a good article, and I recommend it.
Aard Labor, by someone seemingly going by just “Tom”, at FreakyTrigger – Here’s something that’s both way out of my wheelhouse and could also easily eat up a whole afternoon. I’m not super familiar with UK-based pop culture criticism site FreakyTrigger, but it seems that earlier this year, a person there tasked themselves with the monumental and unenviable task of reading, and then reviewing, volume by volume, the entirety of Cerebus the Aardvark, the legendarily unhinged Canadian comic book epic that plots the evolution of its title character from a simple “funny animal” placed in a Conan the Barbarian parody up to frothing-at-the-mouth, ranting antifeminism and existential terror of its final volumes. Cerebus itself was (and I assume still is?) pretty infamous for many years as an early example of the kind of pure-id getting lost in the weeds that we now mostly associate with webcomics. I will cop to having never read the series myself, its massive length and reputation as moral bugspray have kept me away, but I’m more than happy to see someone else dive into it, especially if they’re as observant and thoughtful as article author Tom seems to be.
That’s all for this week, anime fans! The coming week proper is probably going to be pretty busy over here, although it’s hard to say for sure, so keep an eye on your inbox so you can know when any first impressions articles or such go up. Also! I will once again ask that if you like anything I’ve written in this column, or on the site in general recently, please consider dropping me a tip on Ko-Fi. Due to various life issues, I don’t have a regular job, so these donations help me afford basic necessities like food, medicine, clothes, yadda yadda. (And occasionally less essential things! I would really love to buy one of Togenashi Togeari’s albums, but I’m getting into Christmas Wishlist territory there.)
See you soon, anime fans!
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
“We believe there’s a place where we belong. That’s why we sing.”
There is something fitting about the fact that, as of the time I’m writing this after the anime’s just ended, there is no way to legally watch Girls Band Cry in the west. It’s completely meaningless to call anything, much less an anime—the end result of many, many corporate machinations at the end of the day—“punk” in 2024, but there is something at least a little rock ‘n roll about how if you wanted to watch Girls Band Cry as it aired and you lived in North America, the UK, or many other parts of the world, you had to pirate it. Steal This Anime, they’ll call the documentary.
It’s appropriate because Girls Band Cry is a thirteen episode ode to the power of rock music, of youthful indiscretion, of the power of spite—of doing something just because everyone tells you you can’t—of love, of rebellion. I’m 30 years old, now, so I can’t speak to how Girls Band Cry may or may not be resonating with the actual teenagers of today, but I can say that for myself, for a generation that grew up on the pop-punk explosion, perhaps rock n’ roll’s last gasp of any real cultural relevance in the United States, it hits like revelation. The very short version is that this is an absolutely kickass tour de force, a complete triumph for Toei’s burgeoning 3D department, proof that Sakai Kazuo (also of Love Live! Sunshine!! fame, among other things) still has it and that his best work is ahead of him. This is a show that cements itself as an instant, iconic classic, and a series that other anime will build on in the future. If you haven’t watched this, you need to. Go look around, or ask a friend in the know if you don’t know where to search. You’ll find it, and it’ll find you. It’s a story about teenage rebellion. It’s a straightforward underdog rock band story, the best we’ve gotten in years, and a rare recent example to feel truly connected to the real world. It’s also, if you’re paying attention, a love story. Suffice to say, as is obvious from my effusive praise, I think Girls Band Cry is great. I could nitpick various things, and I don’t think it’s literally flawless, but it’s about as perfect as anime gets for me, at least. It’s an admirably dense text for its genre, too; thirteen episodes of the most emotionally resonant shit you’ve ever felt in your life. It’s an electric, nervy thing with a ton of heart. I love it.
Would you believe it all starts with a middle finger?
There’s an entire sub-article to be written about how Girls Band Cry makes use of the middle finger gesture. It starts as a running joke in the first episode, before being traded off for its more polite counterpart, giving someone the pinky finger. But then that becomes an in-group thing, something Togenashi Togeari, the band in Girls Band Cry (the name means something like ‘spineless spiny ant,’ I’m told), use to identify themselves, each other, their fans, their supporters. It becomes a fandom thing, a scene thing. A sign of belonging.
But before even that much, there’s Nina [Rina, in her first-ever anime role. All of Girls Band Cry‘s voice actresses go by mononyms and are new to the industry], a lonely girl keenly aware of her place in a world that is much, much bigger than she is. As our story begins, she’s just arrived in Tokyo, leaving behind a complicated home situation that we won’t learn more about until near the end of the series. The more specific reasons aside, the main sense we get early on is that the real reason Nina struck out on her own in the big city is just a sense that she felt like she didn’t belong in her hometown. Given some stuff later in the show, it is really easy to read Nina as a closeted (maybe even to herself) lesbian, but more generally, she definitely at least feels like a stranger in her own home. Getting away from it all makes an amount of sense. Much, much later in the series, we’ll learn that this all stems from trying to stick up for a girl in her class who was being bullied and being smacked down hard by the school system (and more literally, the actual bullies) for doing so. It quickly becomes clear that Nina is a pretty angry little thing, and that most of this anger is a justified expression of disgust with a deeply unfair world. That kind of anger can ignite a fire in a person, and I’ve always found these stick-to-your-guns-at-all-costs types admirable. I have a few friends like that, and they’re some of my favorite people.
Something that gives Nina relief from the general, well, pain of being herself, is the music of rock band Diamond Dust. Or at least, Diamond Dust as they used to be, before they replaced their lead vocalist Momoka [Yuuri] over what we later learn was a falling out about a shift in style at the behest of their label.
Nina, a real head, is a fan of their older stuff with Momoka, particularly the original version of their song “Void”, which makes things pretty astounding for her when she meets Momoka on a street corner, putting on a street performance. Nina introduces herself, starstruck, extremely awkward, and maybe a little smitten. The two hit it off pretty well, but Momoka plans to leave town the next day and quit the music business entirely.
Suffice to say, that doesn’t happen. Over the course of the remaining 12 episodes, Togenashi Togeari (who only actually get that name a fair ways into the series), gain three additional members; drummer Subaru [Mirei], keyboardist Tomo [Natsu], and bassist Rupa [Shuri]. All are fantastic characters, although they don’t get an even split of focus, as this is mostly Nina’s story, at the end of the day. Before we get more into that, though, we should actually talk about how this story is told, since the presentation is so important here.
Any anime is to some extent defined by its visual identity, and the sound work is always important as well, but both of these are particularly crucial to Girls Band Cry, which is genuinely attempting something new on the visual front, and sonically requires its viewers to buy into the idea of Togenashi Togeari as a credible rock band. The look of the show is the most notable thing about it, I’d argue (aside from that other elephant in the room we already addressed, anyhow). If you are one of the people who has held off on GBC because “it’s CGI” or “it just doesn’t look good,” this is me telling you, as politely as possible, that you are having an Goofball Moment and need to gently shake yourself out of it. I’ve long been a defender of 3D CGI in anime, but this is not a case like say, Estab Life, where the series is using CG to emulate the traditional “anime” look. Instead, Girls Band Cry focuses on capturing the feeling of being an anime, as opposed to clinging to techniques that don’t necessarily work in its particular format. This is obvious in details as basic as its apparent framerate. The common 3D CG shortcut of halving the final product’s framerate to make it look more like a series of traditional anime cuts is not present here, as Girls Band Cry‘s visuals are able to capture that look without relying on doing that. In general, the CG is fluid, cartoony, and wonderfully expressive. Not every trick it tries works perfectly, but it has an astoundingly high hit-rate for something that’s basically extending anime’s visual language on its own as it goes.
In more general terms of style, the show manages to pull off keeping things relatively grounded on a presentational level while still feeling cartoony. Some of the usual anime hallmarks are absent here—no one but post-Momoka-split Diamond Dust have any of the usual anime hair colors, for instance, and in their case there’s decent reason to think it’s dyed—and the backgrounds in particular lean toward the realistic. Despite this though, GBC is perfectly willing to break that illusion of restraint whenever it has a reason to. This can be as simple as a character making a goofy pull-face (something the show is shockingly good at considering how hard that is to do in 3D), or giving a character a literal aura that radiates off of them and impresses the other characters or telegraphs an emotional state to us, the audience. In one scene, for example, Momoka is given a gentle, cool lavender aura. We don’t need Nina to directly tell us that she thinks Momoka is beautiful and admirable. The entire series is loosely from her perspective, and devices like this let us directly see how she feels. This is even more obvious in the “rage spikes” the show draws around Nina when she’s angry; she literally brims with red and black needles, representing the barely-contained boil of her temper flares.
Girls Band Cry can and does use traditional 2D animation as well, but only in very specific contexts; the idealized, crystallized memories that we all have as part of our core personalities, very occasional flights of fancy when the show dreams up what “real rock stuff” looks like, including the opening theme, and for minor characters. If we interpret the show as being from Nina’s perspective, we can think of the 2D segments as her romantic notions filling in the gaps as she’s telling us her story, even in remembering minor characters she has no real extended contact with. It is certainly not a compromise or a concession, which is what a lot of people—myself included—might’ve initially thought, as it’s important that these are the only times when Girls Band Cry uses these techniques.
In terms of sound, Togenashi Togeari are surprisingly believable as a rock band. Obviously, despite the show’s gestures toward an independent rocker spirit—gestures that become more and more important as the show goes on—this is an anime series, and those need to be backed by corporate money, so they’re not, like, The Clash or anything. They’re pretty fucking good, though! It takes several episodes for their sound to really come together, as it doesn’t entirely click until they pick up Tomo for keyboards and Rupa for a real bass about a third of the way through the series. In the great Girls Band Anime Power Rankings I’d put them somewhere above (don’t kill me here) honestly most of the BanG Dream groups, and Kessoku Band, but below Ave Mujica, Raise a Suilen, and Sick Hack, bands whose very existence kind of feels like the series they’re from is getting away with something. (Even accounting for the last of these having only one song.) TogeToge aren’t that, but they’re great as the protagonists of this kind of thing, since they make straight-down-the-middle, fist-pumping, angst-shedding alt-rock of a kind that’s basically extinct as anything with any real cultural currency in the United States but remains a viable commercial and artistic force in other parts of the world, obviously including East Asia. Their biggest asset is Nina’s vocals; clear, piercing, incisive, bright as a shooting star. She sings like her vocal chords are trying to climb out of her throat to strangle everyone else in the room, and while she lacks the complete knockout punch holler of someone like, say, real-world rock star LiSA, she more than makes up for that in knowing her instrument and in her sheer on-mic charisma. This all rounds together as TogeToge being a pretty damn good band, I’ve found myself spinning their songs both from the show and from their album Togeari a fair bit, which is more than I can say of a great number of in-fiction acts from anime in this genre.
The important thing to note here is that TogeToge don’t have to be better than every other rock band from every other series, though. The main thing they have to do is be better than Diamond Dust, as over the course of its central narrative, Diamond Dust become TogeToge’s main rivals despite appearing only very rarely; TogeToge’s opposites in approach and philosophy, and also subject to a personal grudge from both Nina and to a lesser extent Momoka. This, TogeToge easily pull off. To the point where I feel a little bad for the actual people behind Diamond Dust, as DD’s music is just not nearly as good or interesting. (It’s polished and professional, certainly, but it lacks the magnetism that TogeToge eventually develop, and their own lead is a much less compelling vocalist.) The deck is clearly stacked in TogeToge’s favor in this way, but that’s not a bad thing. I think stoking a bit of fannish partisanship within its viewers is likely intentional, in fact. As though you’re supposed to hear Diamond Dust and think “what, people would rather listen to this than our girls?!” Given that Girls Band Cry clearly takes place in some version of ‘the real world,’ it’s distressingly plausible! It’s a fun little story-hack, and it makes GBC a nice exception to the trend of band anime main character bands being the least interesting groups in their own shows.
There’s a level of cognitive dissonance here that merits a quick aside. TogeToge, despite the show’s own themes, are, in fact, exactly as much a commercial product as Diamond Dust. The main reason this doesn’t really matter is that getting you to buy into the illusion that they aren’t is something the show goes through great lengths to accomplish, and I’d actually argue this is the main reason the show works at all. (It’s also why it took a few episodes to click for me! Nina is such an incredibly polished and talented vocalist right off the bat that I found it a little unbelievable. Imagine my shock upon learning that her voice actress is actually a year younger than she is.) I will confess that I think I’d like TogeToge even more if they had a little more grit in their sound, but that’s a personal preference.
In any case, the story of Togenashi Togeari has elements of a traditional up-from-the-bottom rock underdog story, but more important is the band’s members using music to process their personal traumas. Nina has the whole bullying situation, as well as an overbearing family and an equally-stubborn father who are not supportive of her sudden decision to drop out of school and pursue rock music when they learn about it. Momoka has the lingering pain of leaving the original Diamond Dust, and ends up projecting her own experiences onto Nina who she clearly sees as a slightly younger version of herself. Subaru is the granddaughter of a famous actress, and is expected to follow in her grandma’s footsteps despite her own disinterest in the profession. (She calls it “embarrassing”, even!) Tomo is living separated from her family for reasons we only get a very broad picture of, and has previously dealt with people cutting her off when they can’t handle her frank personality. Rupa, Tomo’s roommate and easily the most mysterious character of the main five, is originally from Nepal, and lost her mother in an unspecified tragedy before moving to Japan with her father. A common thread here is that of seizing your life, every minute of it, to do what matters to you, not bowing to anyone else’s whims. In one of the most casually-devastating lines in a series full of those, Rupa lays things out in one sentence.
In other words; Girls Band Cry will be romantic, because it clearly cares about that starry-eyed rocker girl shit a lot, but it’s not going to bullshit you. The window for anyone to make an actual rock band and have it work out in any way is very short, and Girls Band Cry is keenly aware of that. This frank attitude extends to the characters’ personal problems as well, and each has an issue they struggle with over the course of the show. Nina is a cute anime girl and she’s ridiculously fun to watch, but her prickly personality makes it hard for other people to get along with her and she tends to retreat into her anger when in difficult situations. Momoka is genuinely a beautiful and cool rocker lesbian1, but she also actively uses that persona to deflect tough conversations that she doesn’t want to have, and as mentioned she tends to project her own hangups onto Nina. Subaru is easily the funniest character in the series, a lovable goofball who gets most of the show’s most comedic moments, but her screwy attitude seems to stem from feeling repressed in her home life, and it’s downright uncanny how she acts around her grandmother. Tomo is similar to Nina in a lot of ways, as her blunt, often critical way of talking about things with people can make her seem rude or thoughtless to those not attuned to how she thinks. Rupa, lastly, actually seems to be the most well-adjusted member of the group, but there are a few moments when the façade cracks and it’s clear that something, perhaps the loss of her mother, is still weighing on her. It’s also worth noting that she drinks a lot, and while the show mostly plays this for laughs, it’s hard not to read a certain level of coping mechanism into it. The show’s command of characterization is just excellent overall, and it reminds me a lot of another anime original with a script by screenwriter Hanada Jukki, A Place Further Than The Universe, which also had a cast of strong characters and a deft hand with staging conversations.
Our central story is actually fairly straightforward, compared to all of this complex characterization. For the most part, we’re tracking TogeToge’s formation, relative rise, and as it turns out, very brief time on a major label here. I don’t want to bleed the anime of its specifics, but the short version is that the first 2/3rds of the show focus largely on Nina and Momoka’s relationship, which goes from that initial meeting to a sort of strained friendship before the two come to accept each other in episodes seven through nine.
We need to talk about one other character here, Mine [Sawashiro Miyuki], a singer-songwriter whose time in the show is brief but makes a huge impact, especially on Nina. In episode seven, Mine, who is an indie musician getting by even if she’s not famous, explains to Nina, after a joint show, that the reason she still does music for a living even if it’s very hard is that it feels like she has to. She goes into some detail about how she tried to compromise with herself, to take up a teaching position or something else more “stable”, but she couldn’t do it. Making songs, performing those songs, connecting with people via her art. It was too important. Nina seems to really internalize this. I’d argue it’s also basically the thesis of Girls Band Cry itself. Everything else is extraneous, what matters about making music—or any kind of art—is that you’re getting something of yourself, your soul, across to your audience. That’s what Nina got from the original version of “Void,” and that’s what she hopes to do with TogeToge.
Momoka can’t quite see that. She spends most of the early series convinced that Togenashi Togeari are destined to fail. Not just fail, crash and burn. Because she failed with Diamond Dust, and can’t seem to consider that the only data point she’s working off of is her own. Given what little we see of Diamond Dust, who mostly seem to be happy with their new direction, it’s entirely possible that Momoka splitting off was actually the best thing for both her and the band, but Momoka just can’t see it and continues to insist that she’s going to quit TogeToge in the near future. At one point, Nina is so fed up with all this that she just slaps Momoka across the face.
Would you believe that doing so actually makes their relationship much stronger? In fact, you can pretty easily argue that shortly after this, they become more than just friends. Nina, in episode eight, straightforwardly confesses to Momoka in the middle of a very hectic scene that I can’t bring myself to spoil the minutiae of. If you see people call Girls Band Cry a yuri series, that’s why. Does Momoka reciprocate? Well, she never actually says so, and I know that the lack of verbal confirmation will disqualify it in the minds of some, but based on what we actually see throughout the rest of the show; the two affectionately leaning on each other at various points, the fact that Nina has Momoka’s name circled on a calendar and a note reading “spend time with Momoka after practice” jotted down at one point, etc., I think the situation is fairly obvious. Maybe more than any of that is Momoka’s constant reassurance that she loves Nina’s voice. It’s clear that she’s not just talking about her literal vocals—although probably those, too—but Nina’s point of view, her passion, and her inner fire.
In fact, after this point the entire band seem to form a really coherent unit not just musically but as friends. I saw another fan of the series mention that the way you can really tell that TogeToge get along is that they’re comfortable being jerks around each other. And that’s honestly, completely true! TogeToge love to mess with each other, but it’s also obvious that they really do care. This is most obvious, at least it was to me, in episode ten, where Momoka has to be stopped from driving all the way back to Nina’s hometown by herself to pick her up. You don’t do long highway trips for people you only kind of care about.
About that; episode ten sees Nina return home to try to explain her situation to her parents, mostly her dad. Nina’s father is another great character who really shines despite a limited lack of screentime, and I’m absolutely in love with how the show stages the first conversation between the two where they’re not really listening to each other. How does Girls Band Cry communicate that? By sticking them on opposite sides of a sliding door. Subtlety is for losers.
The entire episode is fantastic, but the key points touched upon here, particularly where Nina says that the original Diamond Dust’s music saved her when she was feeling—she says this explicitly—suicidal in the aftermath of the bullying situation at school. That is the real power of art. That’s what TogeToge are seeking to channel, and episode ten is where Nina really starts understanding that. The self-acceptance she shows here is hard-won, and this is the sort of thing I refer to when I say that Girls Band Cry is really Nina’s show at the end of the day. I have rarely felt proud of an anime character, an emotion-object combination that just objectively doesn’t make any sense, but Girls Band Cry got it out of me.
As for the band themselves, they eventually sign with a real publishing company. (Or are they a label? To be honest, I am a little unclear on this point, but it doesn’t really matter.) The episode after this is where all of this buildup—the character arcs themselves, the emotional peaks, the sound, the love, the lightning—hit their climactic note. This is the best episode of the series, the best anime episode of the year so far, and one of the best of the ’20s in general. They play a festival, with TogeToge on a B-stage, in what is nonetheless the biggest moment of their careers. Diamond Dust are at the festival, too, but we only get to see a very brief glimpse of them playing, because this is not their story, and they’re not our real stars.
Togenashi Togeari aren’t up on the main stage, they aren’t playing to the biggest crowd, and they aren’t the main attraction, but for the three minutes and ten seconds of “Void & Catharsis”, their big roaring emotional fireworks display that is, in its own way, a response to Diamond Dust’s own “Void”, they feel like the best and most important band in the world. The entire series hinges on this concert scene, which is good, because it’s one of the best of its kind, and “Void & Catharsis” is TogeToge’s best song. It’s been weeks since I first saw it and it still blows me away. I might go as far as saying that it’s the best in-show rock band concert since the iconic performance of “God Knows” in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a full eighteen years ago. If it’s not, it’s definitely at bare minimum the best of this decade so far, and it’s hard to imagine it being topped by anyone any time soon.
It’s not just the visual tricks the show pulls out here; wild, zooming camera angles, cuts to 2D-animated segments that dramatize the girls’ own backstories and traumas in the way that so much great art does, some of the most raw rock poster animation I’ve ever seen in any television series, etc. It’s the song itself, a screaming and, yes, cathartic anthem about rebellion as personal salvation. Nina has no time for anyone’s bullshit. She’s busy screaming about insubordination as admiration, how telling someone they’re aiming too high is a rotten thing to do. She won’t be obedient but she’s scared to even try to resist. She doesn’t want to die. She wants to live so bad it hurts. She inhabits not just her own trauma but her bandmates’ as well, singing brief sections of the second verse from the perspective of Momoka, then Subaru, then Tomo, then Rupa. She channels the painful split Momoka endured from the original Diamond Dust, the towering expectations placed on Subaru, the forced clamping up that Tomo put herself through, and the unimaginable tragedy of Rupa’s loss of her mother. She’s not just a singer, she’s a medium. She takes on their pain as her own and lets every razor sharp line bleed her voice until there’s more blood on the stage than sweat. In a particularly astounding lyrical turn that I’m not entirely sure of the intentionality of, there’s a line in the chorus that is a completely coherent sentence in Japanese, translating very roughly to something like “because my anger can’t be stopped”, but sounds phonetically like the English phrase “so I can die young.” That kind of intentional bending of language, to facilitate a bilingual pun that calls back to and reinforces an earlier line, no less, is normally the domain of rappers. Particularly heady, lyrical ones (the likes of Kendrick Lamar or Lupe Fiasco or such), so part of me wonders if it’s not just an astounding coincidence. But if it’s not, that’s some 5D chess shit, and I feel wrong not pointing it out even if it is an accident because, holy fuck, what an accident.
It must also be said, she looks amazing throughout the entire concert scene; an honest-to-god icon of rock n’ roll rebellion in an age where the very idea should be a laughable archaism. She pumps her fist both toward the crowd and back at her own band to egg them on. She stomps around on the stage like she can barely control her anger. She glares at her audience, maybe Diamond Dust specifically, since they’re also watching, like she’s trying to kill them with her mind. All this while rocking a billowing yakuza shirt and with quick-apply teal dye that I must imagine smells like an unfathomable mix of chemicals slapped on the underside of her hair. In one particularly great moment, she makes an open-palmed gesture toward the crowd and then clenches her fist tight. It’s clear that not only is she insanely good at this, she really loves doing it. For all of her fury and thunder it’s also obvious that she’s having the time of her life on that stage, and who could possibly blame her? She gets to be in a rock band. Who wouldn’t love that? That feeling itself is embedded in “Void & Catharsis” as much as the righteous anger stuff. It’s subtextual, but it’s definitely there.
All this about Nina and barely a word about the other girls. The truth is that despite being a hobbyist musician myself I’m not much of a music theory gal, so I can comment only in generalities. Still, Rupa’s pounding, oscillating, heavy bassline grounds the song, as do Subaru’s nimble drums. Tomo’s key work—some of her best—provides some much needed texture to contrast the main sonic palette of the song, Momoka’s guitar, and have a sparkling, star-like quality that really reinforces the piece’s sky-looking aspirations. On the note of Momoka’s guitar, holy shit Momoka’s guitar. For the most part her riffs here are the song’s muscles, they give it strength and fullness and make it more than just a bed for Nina’s vocals, but there’s a really great moment where Momoka gets a full-on solo, a sparking piece of pyrotechnics that really sends “Void & Catharsis” over the top. I have it on authority from a guitarist acquaintance that it’s also fairly technically tricky, and I have no reason to doubt them.
All this to serve a song and a scene that streaks across the show like a comet. 3 minutes isn’t that long for a rock tune! I listened to the song a number of times while writing this piece and I was always astounded by how brief it is. Because in the moment, in the context of the show, it feels monumental and eternal. It’s not, though. When Nina hits that last note, the song ends, and in fact episode 11 on the whole ends. We are left with the feeling that we’ve just witnessed something rare and special. I wonder if the crowd that TogeToge attract during the show feel the same.
The rest of the show, really, is denouement. Falling action, of a sort, something that single cour anime have largely forgotten how to do. Episode 11 is the show’s peak both emotionally and qualitatively, but the miniature drama that follows, where TogeToge are briefly part of a real label, have their first single flop hard, and then quit to return to the indie grind, is compelling on its own. It’s a full extension of the show’s passion-driven spirit, and it also allows Nina to reconnect with an old friend.
Hina [Kondou Reina], the vocalist for the incarnation of Diamond Dust that TogeToge spend the entire show in the shadow of, was a classmate of Nina’s. She was there during the whole bullying thing, and she told Nina not to get involved. Nina, as we know, did get involved, and this led to a rift between the two that still doesn’t fully heal even by the end of the series. Honestly, in her sole on-screen appearance of any length, Hina comes across as a pretty nasty piece of work! Some of this is clearly affect, and the show’s final minutes state outright that she was deliberately pushing Nina’s buttons during their one meetup, but still! I would say that Hina would be the main character if this were an idol anime, but frankly I don’t think most idol anime have it in them to portray their characters with this much honesty. (Shinepost did, which is why Shinepost rules.)
The charitable read is that she’s a realist. Someone who knows how to play the game, someone who is actually interested in the monetary side of the whole industry, someone who wants to be famous. In pretty much every sense, she’s Nina’s complete opposite. Their meeting is enough to convince Nina that she was in the right back then, and she’s in the right now. This also concludes an entire plot about a dual Diamond Dust / Togenashi Togeari concert, that ends with TogeToge amicably leaving their label. Momoka, in one of her last lines in the entire series, gently teases Nina by suggesting that this whole thing was Hina trying to extend the Diamond Dust / TogeToge rivalry, partly because she enjoys playing the part, but also partly because Hina really loved Diamond Dust’s music too! Maybe not in the same way, maybe not to the same extent, but she did, and this is a commonality that connects the two similarly-named vocalists permanently, whether they like it or not.
This, then, is how the series ends, with Togenashi Togeari back on the indie circuit, a cult phenomenon at most. We will never know if they achieve success beyond this, although we do know they’ll keep trying. Either way, at the end of the day, part of the very point of this show is that success is secondary to being able to look yourself in the mirror. Nina is ridiculously, astoundingly, monstrously stubborn, but she sticks to her principles. In one of the flashbacks that dots the finale, Hina tells her that Nina’s intense “spikes” of justice make her feel like the bad guy. The thing is, in those flashbacks, Hina is the bad guy. She seems to even know this, on some level, given how she does everything she does in the last episode specifically to prod Nina into sticking to her guns. Arguably, that’s a pretty cold mercenary move too—after all, TogeToge and Diamond Dust are direct competition—but I choose to take it both ways. Yes, Hina is conveniently knocking a rival band down a peg, but she really does seem to care about Nina, too, in her own way. (Implicitly, there’s also some reason to wonder how happy Hina really is about having basically sold out, despite her own claims in the finale about how important success is. We may never know for sure.)
By design, we don’t see the rest of Togenashi Togeari’s story. We could write it ourselves, we could choose to extend the show’s text into the real world and keep an eye on how the inevitable actual touring version of the band do. You could argue, well, hey, Diamond Dust aren’t the ones with a Spotify ad or the goddamn branded earbuds. You could even argue there’s room for a hypothetical second season (there is, but I think people get way too caught up in that particular discussion). Ultimately all of that, all of the money and fame and success and legacy and popularity and on and on, is less important than the show’s overall dedication to sticking to the spirit of rock n’ roll in a time when that is a fast-fading phenomenon in even the most vestigial sense. These girls appreciate music as art, as life. They’d die without it. Even if TogeToge are never bigger than they are in episode 11, I have no trouble at all believing they will play together for the rest of their lives. In their very last concert of the series, in the middle of a charmingly awkward monologue, Nina declares her audience rebels and misfits, and while that’s true of TogeToge in a very different way than it was for rock and roll’s originators many years ago, it is still true, and it’s true of Girls Band Cry itself, too. In one very specific sense, TogeToge have a luxury that real bands don’t have. They get to ride off into the sunset and into our memories forever. The ED is something of a very short postscript, and it seems to suggest that TogeToge will soldier on together, living that indie rocker life, into eternity. That’s a bit ironic for a series that’s also in decent part about seizing life while you still can, but hey, it’s one of the perks of being an anime character instead of a flesh and blood human being.
All this said and there is so, so much I haven’t touched on. I think time might risk forgetting how funny Girls Band Cry is (seriously, it’s borderline a slapstick series in some spots). The girls have incredible costuming both in their day to day life and especially on stage. I didn’t talk at all about Subaru’s character arc, nearly as important to the show as Nina and Momoka’s. I didn’t talk about Tomo or Rupa that much even though they’re probably my favorite characters (one of the very few criticisms I could make of the show is that I wish it were just a bit longer so Rupa could’ve gotten an episode). I didn’t talk about Tomo’s pet snake or the fact that her outfit for the festival concert is an extended reference to Undertale. I didn’t talk about Rupa’s legion of gay fangirls, a real, canonical thing that we are shown in the series. Even in the parts of the plot I did go over, I skipped a lot of details. Hell, if I’m honest, I could write a whole other article about the sleazy indie rocker sex appeal of Momoka’s stupid fucking trucker hat that she wears while piss-drunk and acting like a jackass in one of the episodes. Like any good rock band, TogeToge have way more to them than any single writeup, video, whatever, could reasonably cover. The list is endless! But this review is not, and I need to stop somewhere, even if any point is ultimately going to feel arbitrary.
If this is the end of the series the fact remains that we were all here to see this, together. The moments themselves are more important than any lofty discussions of success or legacy, and if the show does find a long tail, which I really hope it will, it will be because it feels so huge and fiery in the moment. If you’re going to make an impact, make it electric. Connect with people, find your voice, live your life. Everything else is fluff.
1: Source: I’m Gay And I Can Fucking Tell, OK?
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