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.
As we stand in the blistering spring wind,
we are resolute, humble, and decorous.
We are Pentagrams,
and with the pride of flowers,
we learn and study hard.
I really must, before saying anything at all about this series, direct even site regulars to the warning in the header. Arsnotoria is the sort of thing I’d recommend going into as blind as possible. (Even saying that much is a bit of a giveaway, but there’s a certain amount of that which can’t be helped.)
But let’s get into it, shall we?
You get them a few times per year; anime whose premieres just make you go “huh?”
Often, they start out as one genre and then take a left turn into another. Or their tone does a total headstand somewhere in the first episode or two. Something like that. By me even mentioning this, you can guess that Smile of The Arsnotoria: The Animation—clunky title and all—is an example of this, but it’s worth explaining why even bringing that up is noteworthy. These days, these kinds of swerves don’t have much impact anymore. Somewhere after Gakkou Gurashi people started to almost expect them, and most modern examples don’t even bother waiting until the premiere to tip their hand, with, for example, one of Arsnotoria‘s contemporaries Lycoris Recoil not even keeping up the facade for all of its preview trailers. So, if nothing else, if the entire rest of the series is a total, out-and-out bomb that drops off the face of the Earth after it finishes airing, it should at least be noted for its restraint.
There are 22 minutes in Arsnotoria‘s first episode. About 20 of them are extremely pleasant, almost iyashikei-esque slice of life coziness. Let’s talk about those minutes first, since they form the bulk of the episode.
Right from the top, we’re dropped to the goings-on in a magical academy of some sort, and into the lives of five schoolgirls. These are Arsnotoria herself (Misaki Kuno), Mell (Miharu Hanai), Ko Alberta (Miyu Tomita), Picatrix (Eri Yukimura), and Abramelin (Eriko Matsui). No, I don’t know why Ko is the only one with a last name either (although there is brief mention of a Grand Alberta, also. Maybe they’re related).
They fall into familiar and broad character archetypes; Arsnotoria is the cutesy and naive one, Mell is rambunctious and michievious, Ko is a sleepyhead who’s more aware than she lets on, Picatrix is an ojou complete with ending most of her sentences with “desu wa”, and Abramelin is the serious, responsible one. These aren’t the most compelling or deep characters, but they work in the sort of easygoing, slice of life mold that most of the episode traffics in.
“Easygoing” might be underselling it, really. Much of the episode is positively languid, and it’s telling that a solid 10 minutes are taken up by the characters discussing tea. This admittedly gets a little boring toward the end, but it’s to Arsnotoria‘s credit that it manages to actually keep this fairly engaging for most of that time. Discussions of what side one butters their scones on recall the (in?)famous chocolate coronet scene in Lucky Star. And at one point, Ko tries to bash a sealed jam jar open with some lavishly-animated and quite powerful looking magic wherein she summons a huge, bandaged hand to punch it.
Aside from this, there are a few setting details. The school this all takes place at, the “academy city” of Ashlam, seems to basically be a furnishing school for young arcanists, which is perfectly fine as a setting and it’s one plenty of other things have done (in anime alone you have everything from Tweeny Witches to Little Witch Academia to Mahou Girls Precure to, perhaps most relevant for this part of the episode, Mysteria Friends). A fair bit of proper terminology gets lobbed at us here. Not quite enough to be a Proper Noun Machine Gun, but maybe a Proper Noun Slingshot.
And mixed in with all this are some interesting bits about London being on “the surface”, which seems to both imply (somewhat surprisingly) that this takes place in a version of our world, and that Ashlam is actually physically above the ground.
All of this may seem irrelevant, given the total tonal 180 that you’re all aware, if you’ve gotten this far in the article, is coming, but there is one other detail that seems significant; the opening of the episode sees our characters return from a “watch” shift. A watch for what is not a question I thought to ask while first viewing the scene, but it’s certainly on my mind at this point.
Because, yes, in its final two minutes or so, Arsnotoria completely tips its hand, in perhaps the most dope slap-blunt way possible. A cut to black, the word “WARNING” inexplicably written across the screen in bright red, and then this.
A scene of total, apocalyptic ruin. (Complete with some very nice billowing fire animation.) Inquisitors patrol streets and slaughter citizens for being “Negatives,” explaining nothing with their cryptic comments as they do so. It does not even look like it’s from the same universe as the entire preceding 20 minutes, and with just that little bit of footage, Arsnotoria goes from being enjoyable if predictable to a total fucking wildcard.
None of this necessarily means that Arsnotoria will be good. It is entirely possible to have an interesting structure but fail on any number of other counts (or even all other counts), but it’s at least a good sign.
The Takeaway: Really, this one is pretty simple. If you enjoy throwing caution to the wind and gambling on something that no one has any real idea as to where it’s going, you want in on this. If not, you can probably skip it.
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