The Weekly Orbit is a weekly(-ish) 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!
So, just to be very honest dear readers, this one was a struggle to get finished. I think I’m in the middle of a depressive period again and, without getting too into it, getting this together at all was pretty tough. I hope you can forgive the relative lack of images once again this week. (I couldn’t even do a banner image this time, as something is wrong with WordPress’s image processor at the moment, seemingly? Sigh.) I’m not sure if I’ll be back to do this again next week or not.
Ave Mujica – Episode 9
In this past week’s episode of everyone’s favorite fun time girl’s band party, Uika thinks about murdering her former coworker. Ain’t it nice?
At this point, I’ve sort of run out of things to say about individual episodes of Ave Mujica beyond doubling back on praise I’ve already given it. The only issue with a show like this is that saying the same things about it over and over can get a bit dry: nonetheless, I will say that the psychodrama is on point as ever this week. Uika returns, gaining some actual focus for the first time in quite a while. This pays off magnificently since, well, yeah, she does in fact get a pointed intrusive thought about throwing Mutsumi down the stairs when the two meet for the first time since Ave Mujica’s breakup. If you’re worried about Mutsumi’s safety though, you should really be keeping more of an eye on Mortis, who accidentally “kills” her in headspace this episode. (She’s probably fine. Probably. Ignore that Mortis spends the rest of the episode pretending to be Mutsumi.)
The real highlight for me is actually the final scene of the episode, where, for the first time, every single member of MyGO and AveMuji have gathered in the same place: Livehouse RiNG, naturally. This feels like an absolute tempest waiting to happen, and Nyamu gets the final word of the episode in with a visceral reaction of disgust. Not an inappropriate response to “Mutsumi” (actually Mortis) bending to Umiri’s plan to get Ave Mujica back together. When part of your show’s central narrative has been compared by its director to a “double suicide,” you have to account for these things. Next episode looks like it will be even worse. (And thus even better.) What can I possibly say at this point? It’s simply great.
Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX – Episodes 1-3*
The ridiculously-titled GQuuuuuuX is set to celebrate Gundam’s 45th anniversary when it premieres in April, but, as is common these days, the first three episodes have been stitched together and released as a theatrical film ahead of time to build hype for the series’ premiere. I happened to have the opportunity to go see this movie—a subtitled release, no less—in theaters here in Chicago. (I went with my girlfriend and we had a lovely time. Hi, CC!)
There are obvious disadvantages to the three-episodes-as-a-movie structure, but for the most part they’re not really a huge problem with the GQuuuuuuX film. But it is notable that the first third thereof is pretty different from the rest. The opening act is a broad-strokes, impressionist what-if of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, in which behelmeted antagonist Char Aznable [Shin Yuuki] steals (this continuity’s version of) the original Gundam before Amuro ever so much as shows up. From there, the entire One Year War that makes up the original series’ plot goes wildly differently, and this culminates with Char’s mysterious disappearance at the end of the first act. Evidently flung through time, Samurai Jack-style, after a plan goes awry and he’s confronted with Some Newtype Bullshit.
I’ll admit, as someone who’s very much a Gundam neophyte, the first act here was a little bit of a tough sell. It’s excellently-directed, and the faux-retro look works shockingly well, but from what comparatively little I’ve seen of 0079 I was not super attached to Char, so him being the viewpoint character for most of the film’s buildup did not immediately excite me even if I can recognize that it was well done. Instead, it is the remainder of the film that most interests me. GQuuuuuuX here pulls off the impressive trick of drawing a direct line through the original Gundam, through the “Daicon Spirit” school of anime—that’s the zeitgeist of Gainax and her stylistic descendants, if you need a refresher—up to the present day. The most surprising thing about this is that it’s not more common: a full-color illustration that “real robot” and “super robot” are just points on a graph, it’s what you draw between them that matters.
Once we leave the original 0079 setting behind, we set off for something that is decidedly this show’s own thing, and the obvious ambition on display here clicks into place. Izuna is a burned-out space colony patrolled by Zaku in police deco, and there’s a theme of class warfare run through the whole thing. Our main characters are a schoolgirl, Yuzuriha “Machu” Amate [Kurosawa Tomoyo], driven and curious, who is eventually drawn into a world of underground mecha fighting and hijacks a Zeon test unit, the titular GQuuuuuuX. a “courier” (read: smuggler) she falls in with, Nyaan [Ishikawa Yui], her tie to that world. Joining them for the movie’s final act is Itou Shuji [Tsuchiya Shinba], a graffiti artist who’s somehow come into possession of what used to be Char’s Gundam. The movie only just came out, so I don’t want to spoil too much beyond what I already have, so instead, I’ll just say that the presentation and atmosphere here is absolutely fantastic. Especially with regard to the action, you can really tell that the Diebuster guy [Tsurumaki Kazuya] is directing this.
Manga
Destroy It All & Love Me in Hell – Chapters 1-19
The girl band golden age has coincided with toxic yuri as a subgenre—or strain, or whatever you want to call it—of girls’ love media gaining about as much attention as it ever has. This, I feel, cannot possibly be a coincidence. While the girl band characters use their medium to entangle themselves in each others’ neuroses and, hopefully at least, eventually come to some kind of resolution, the toxic yuri manga needs no such pretense and no such happy ending.
A year and a half ago, I talked about the then-seven chapters of Destroy It All & Love Me in Hell, explaining the general idea and appeal of toxic romance as I did so. My opinion has more or less not changed now that I’ve caught back up with it quite some time later. I am really just in awe of how compelling this series makes two girls ruining each others’ lives. Since that initial post, Kokoro has gone off the deep end as well, becoming obsessive to the point of forcing herself on Kurumi at one point. We’ve also met a new character, a hanger-on of Naoi’s who is enough of a masochist that she resorts to trying to bribe the girl into treating her badly. All this to say, it’s as toxic as it’s ever been. This is really more of a PSA than anything else: yes, if you want to read the girlies despairing, it has remained very good at delivering that. There’s also something to be said, though, about Kurumi’s quest to live free of expectations, and how every step she’s taken, seemingly toward that goal, has ended her right back where she started. I may review this manga when it finally finishes, whenever that will be, since I’m very interested in how this story ends.
That’s about all for this week. As always, I ask that you make a contribution if you enjoyed this column and are able to do so.
In lieu of the usual Bonus Image, have two, taken from this unofficial translation of an event from the BanG Dream! game, where Tomori says that Taki reminds her of a coffee bean. It is cute enough that I may die.
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. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.
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.
Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column where I take a look at a single, specific anime episode that shaped my experience with the medium in some way, was personally important to me, or that I just really, really like. These columns contain spoilers.
This column contains additional spoilers for episodes 1-5 of BanG Dream! Ave Mujica.
“Because….you seem like you’re about to break apart, Sakiko.”
No one ever would, but if someone were to ask me what the biggest whiff of my career was, it was far and away not covering BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! while it was still airing. I wrote a little about it, but not nearly enough. Hilariously, in that article, I call the series “fine,” and mostly gloss over Togawa Sakiko as a character except in how she relates to Tomori. Readers with long memories will recall it actually took me until last year to even finish the damn thing. I can’t defend my own lack of taste there, but I’ve certainly come around since then. (And to anyone who thinks I’m overrating the hell out of one or both seasons of this series, well, you’re not going to come away from this article with your mind changed.)
So, think of this as making up for lost time. As I’ve watched Ave Mujica, MyGO‘s direct sequel and a significantly darker take on (and inversion of) some of MyGO‘s same themes, I’ve felt compelled to revisit the origin story of that season’s eponymous band. With the benefit of hindsight, this feels like doing an autopsy. Anyone caught up on Ave Mujica as of the time of this writing knows that Ave Mujica themselves have broken up. If they get back together, it probably won’t be for a while, and it probably won’t be in the same way. So in hindsight, the first episode they appear in, MyGO‘s thirteenth (which is essentially just Ave Mujica episode zero), feels like the only real example of Ave Mujica as Sakiko, their founder, keyboardist, and composer, intended them to be. Sakiko’s unwillingness to compromise on her vision is one of a number of factors that led to the band’s eventual dissolution, but really, we should have seen this coming.
I mean, it’s kind of right there in the title, isn’t it?
The episode actually opens, at least after a brief and ominous prelude, by focusing on MyGO‘s own core cast. This only makes sense, It’s MyGO!!!!! the band are MyGO‘s main characters, and this is the immediate aftermath of their moment of triumph. Things are, for once, relatively clear, and the anime’s opening song is as clear and shining as the sapphire sky in its visuals. Of particular interest to us in this first half of the episode is a scene between Soyo and Tomori on the bridge near the latter’s home. Soyo says plainly that initially, when they were both members of their previous band CRYCHiC, the emotional rawness of Tomori’s lyrics was never something she was entirely comfortable with. But now, she says, she realizes the emotions expressed in those lyrics weren’t Tomori’s alone. They were hers, too.
Through Tomori’s music, she and Soyo are able to relate to each other. This of course is MyGO‘s last great expression of its thematic core, music as a tool of communication, openness, and honesty. In this, MyGO is overall not entirely dissimilar to the show that replaced it as the girl band anime of the moment the following year, Girls Band Cry. (A fact both franchises took notice and advantage of.) The two have one major difference though, Girls Band Cry wraps its story up around the time that main band Togenashi Togeari’s members begin to truly understand each other, and in this way it’s actually fairly straightforward. (Not even remotely a knock on it, I must stress.) MyGO does not do this. It knows it has to set the stage for its successor, and it knows that it has further work to do.
Thus, when Tomori attempts to reconcile with the last former CRYCHiC member she’s yet to reach out to, it doesn’t go nearly so well, and she finds Sakiko, her former bandmate, holed up in her school’s piano room banging out the sinister classical music like the Phantom of the damn Opera, a final indication, if anyone really needed one, that this is not going to all work out so neatly.
After Sakiko coldly brushes Tomori off, Anon, the somewhat airheaded guitarist of MyGO, attempts to cheer Tomori up by taking her out and about. At a planetarium, they run in to Uika, who Tomori has met before but doesn’t really know. The three have a nice chat, although after Uika leaves, Tomori notes that it’s odd that she calls her by her name, given that Tomori never told her it. All of this is significant because immediately after this conversation, Uika gets in a black cab, and is driven to the first night of her new job: the vocalist for Ave Mujica.
Again, hindsight makes two things really obvious: one, we almost immediately flip the “music is a tool of honesty and open communication” thing on its head. Sakiko’s plan for Ave Mujica requires deliberately obfuscating everything about its members, naturally including Sakiko’s own involvement. As far as she’s concerned, this is her show, and the rest of the band are actors within it. Which leads us to two: this band was never going to stay together. It’s at a fairly tame level here, but even this early on it is very obvious that Ave Mujica do not really “get” each other. Nyamu records behind-the-scenes footage on her phone, which Sakiko confiscates since if it ever got out it would destroy the band’s mystique.
There’s also this little exchange which….honestly, good question?
Nyamu also directly mentions rhythm guitarist Mutsumi’s famous parents, something she’s insecure about to put it very mildly, while Mutsumi ignores her and continues stone-facedly practicing her guitar. All of this was easy to dismiss as light bickering during the episode itself. Five episodes deep into Ave Mujica, where Mutsumi has retreated into herself, Nyamu has publicly unmasked the entire band, Uika’s obsession with Sakiko is starting to bubble to the surface, and Sakiko’s own self-loathing is at an all-time high, it reads as some truly spooky foreshadowing. This is also where the episode gets its title, upon presenting the girls with their masks, Sakiko says that on stage, the only person one can trust is themselves. A little under halfway into Ave Mujica, we can see how that attitude worked out.
And yet, for all that, the closing minutes of this episode are still such a trip. Ave Mujica are introduced to the world with a stage play about dolls discarded by humans who come to life under the light of a certain moon, and following that, a grandiose, fuming fire of a debut tune named after the band itself. Obviously, the idea of the discarded doll reflects back on Sakiko herself, but Ave Mujica’s audience have no way of knowing that. To them, and really, to us, while we’re under the anime’s spell, Ave Mujica’s purple and red gothic smoke is something enticingly dark and obscure.
This is the first and best argument for the exact opposite of MyGO‘s own point of view. Maybe “communicating your feelings” is secondary to putting on a good show, given that all of these characters are, you know, in a band. That’s certainly what Nyamu thinks, and it’s why, a third of the way into the Ave Mujica anime, she asks if the band even needs to be a band. She’s probably not entirely right to suggest that even in-context, and hell, Ave Mujica’s actual music is some of the absolute best that’s ever come out of girl band anime as a format, but there’s a grain of truth in there. We are all at least a little complicit, because we clearly love the drama, and the drama is why, both on a Watsonian and Doylistic level, the music even exists to begin with. This episode was our first hint of how truly toxic this story would get, and far from being taken aback—checking on this stuff is one of the few things reddit is useful for—people wanted things to get worse. And, fair play to Nyamu’s point of view, they did! And it’s really only seemed to raise the show’s esteem in the eyes of its audience. The series has given us exactly what we asked for. As a production, it’s realized it doesn’t actually need the music of the group itself to capture our imagination and attention.
I resurrected the Twenty Perfect Minutes name to talk about this episode because I do really think the seeds of Ave Mujica the series, probably the best thing airing right now, really start germinating here. But admittedly it’s an uneasy fit for what this column is about, to the extent that it ever had a specific, rigid format. Ideally, these episodes should stand out starkly from the anime they’re part of. This much is definitely true of “The Only One I Can Trust Is Myself,” but because it’s in large part a torch-passing to the Ave Mujica anime proper, it feels a bit like cheating. And since that series isn’t over yet, I have no definitive thesis or grand prediction to make. Some forecasts feel safer than others, especially with the sheer amount of ancillary text surrounding the series (the ARG for example), but anyone who says they know where Ave Mujica is going to go is lying to you.
And right now the “myself” I’m choosing to trust in is my theory that Uika is a lesbian, but we don’t need to worry about that for right now.
But, I did build in the caveat that sometimes this column is just about episodes that I really like, and I really fucking like this episode. I like its starry, clear opening half, where it feels like everything’s been resolved and anything is possible in the best way. And—this is bad of me—I love its second half, where it becomes clear that anything is possible in the worst way. I really like more than one episode of both of these seasons, in fact. (Off the top of my head I could probably do one of these on both the third and fourth episodes of Ave Mujica, if I wanted to. And as for MyGO, my first impressions column basically already is about its third episode. I’d be remiss to not mention that the very first hints of these themes are present even there. After all CRYCHiC is only founded because of a miscommunication, when Sakiko mistakes Tomori’s diary pages for song lyrics.) Will I do any of that? Who knows. It’s been three whole years since the last TPM column, so I’m clearly not exactly in a hurry to crank these out. But, like I said, I’m making up for lost time. To me, this episode is really special, and everything that’s happened since has only made it moreso.
This is Ave Mujica in the brief, shining moment when Sakiko was still in relative control. Before the inevitable clash of personalities tore it all apart. This is about as close as she ever gets to being genuinely cool, in fact, but even she seems to know that it can’t last. One of the very first things she does in this episode, when recruiting Uika to join the band, is declare that the weak version of herself is dead, a completely untrue statement that nonetheless sounds like irrefutable fact when she says it. Her very last action in the episode, in all of MyGO, in fact, is to icily suggest that she needs to come down from the stage high of Ave Mujica’s triumphant, cult-making first concert. She changes back into her everyday clothes and takes a public train back home, a dingy little place with a small forest of beer cans dotting the floor. She grimaces, she sneers a greeting to her “rotten” drunk of a father. If you didn’t understand before where her need to be in control, to portray herself as this theatrical, literal puppet-master came from, it hits you all at once. And then, just as you’re processing the thought, it ends.
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. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.
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(-ish) 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!
We persist, we survive, and we thrive. A lot has happened since the last Weekly Orbit column, and I could spend this opening bit bloviating about how or why I’ve chosen to bring the column back now. The actual answer is much less romantic: for the first time in a while, I not only had something I wanted to talk about, but I had the mental bandwidth to do it. A lot’s happened over the past few months even in the specific realm of my relationship with anime (I got really into Uma Musume, for example), but the honest truth is just that I found the time and energy to get around to it. Thus, Weekly Orbit is back. At least for now. You can probably assume it will be a similarly on and off affair going forward.
That said, if you wanted to be dramatic—and who doesn’t love being dramatic?—you could point out that the last thing I wrote about in the last column before this series went on a months-long hiatus was BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! No prizes for guessing how that relates to this week’s column. Between this and the other column that will be going up later today, this is basically Ave Mujica Day on Magic Planet Anime. I cannot pretend I’m sorry about that.
Anime – Seasonal
BanG Dream! Ave Mujica
Where to even start?
What follows is a collation of two separate tumblr posts I’ve written over the past few days. A funny fact about anime—art in general, really—is that it’s always constrained by the circumstances around its production. Ave Mujica, as anyone who’s read my first impressions article or, honestly, just taken a gander at them knows, is cursed with very bad official subtitles right now. The practical effect of this is that I’ve had to wait for some brave souls (a group going by LoftMoon and a lone warrior calling themselves Nyamuchi after the in-show character, respectively) to pick up Crunchyroll’s slack before I could bring myself to actually catch up with the series.
All that is to say, I watched episodes two, three, four, and five of Ave Mujica over the past couple of days rather than the past couple of weeks. I would describe the overall effect as bulldozer-esque. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had with an anime in ages, but it’s also genuinely emotionally exhausting. At one point, I attempted to just write a literal list of the show’s ongoing events, but that in of itself got a bit out of control, so I pared it down to just these. Episodes two through four are defined by an arc in which Wakaba Mutsumi, the band’s rhythm guitarist and thus the core of their sound, does the following:
Flubs an interview by voicing what appears to be an intrusive thought, thus sparking rumors that the band is going to break up.
Freezes up on stage, sitting stone-still before the audience. Or, to invoke the metaphor we’re actually intended to see, sitting like a puppet with her strings cut.
Experiences a psychotic break, at which point a dissociative alter naming herself Mortis, after Mutsumi’s stage pseudonym, takes over as the primary personality, placing herself at front in what we are now aware is a system.
Mortis proceeds to hog the spotlight in interviews, leading to a bunch of tension with the other members, especially Nyamu. Mortis in general is flighty and theatrical. More importantly, she can’t actually play guitar. (At the very least, she claims to not be able to, and we’re not given a reason to disbelieve her on this subject.)
All of this, as well as Mortis’ generally confrontational nature towards Sakiko, who she claims to hate, culminates in the band breaking up. We are, at this point, four episodes in, and the band our show is named after is gone. “The dolls no longer exist.”
What is all this?
Usually, when you’re asking that question about an anime, it’s rhetorical. With Ave Mujica I’ve genuinely found myself with very little idea of where exactly it’s going to go. It’s fair to ask the question, and people have asked the question, is this even really a music anime anymore? We haven’t really gotten anything in the way of new songs, and Ave Mujica as a group, at least in the show’s narrative, are less defined by their music and more defined by what interrupts it and what grows around it.
An acquaintance has been watching the show ahead of me, and in doing so described it to me as going in more of a horror direction. My initial assumption was that they were exaggerating. Ave Mujica are a goth metal band, sure, but even considering the rich vein of drama mined by this show’s own immediate predecessor, MyGO, “horror” just seemed like a step beyond believability. And yet, here we are. To be sure, these horrors are largely in the mind, but that doesn’t really make them any less arresting. (See also Perfect Blue, clearly at least an indirect influence on this series.) Episode three, with its haunted, surreal visuals as we go directly inside Mutsumi’s mind, is the big turning point for the series. Yes, this is all “in Mutsumi’s head” and what is depicted in this scene is not literally happening. The lack of material reality does not change the fact that Mortis’ usurpation of the system is portrayed by her cute little doll form morphing into a shadow monster and eating Mutsumi. Yeah, sure, it doesn’t “actually happen,” but someone gets eaten alive in a fucking BanG Dream anime! What the hell!
This does raise the question, boring but admittedly necessary, as to whether or not Mortis’ depiction is problematic. When I wrote the tumblr version of this post I was on the fence, but having had the time to think it over I don’t really think so. Despite clearly being some kind of protector alter, Mortis is also naïve and rather kiddish. Most of the “horror” elements are framing of her own experiences or those of others reacting to her, especially Sakiko who is clearly just very unequipped to deal with this entire situation. It gives us some deliciously spooky shots, but Mortis is very clearly not actually a monster, all of this is part of the theater of the anime itself. (Still though! Episode 3! What the fuck!)
And then there’s episode five. The most recent, as of the time of this writing.
In the immediate aftermath of Ave Mujica’s dissolution, its members largely go their separate ways. Here, for the first time in a while, Sakiko gets to be the main character in her own show. Unfortunately, since that show is Ave Mujica, this does not necessarily mean she has a particularly good time.
Despite Uika’s—that’s Doloris, Ave Mujica’s vocalist, in case you’ve forgotten—pleas, Sakiko does not stay with her, where she’d been crashing for the past couple of episodes. Instead, she returns to her soul-crushing call center 9-to-5, and the abuse of her drunken father. Until, that is, her grandfather shows up, tells her he’s paid off the—I must imagine, significant—debts incurred from the cancellation of Ave Mujica’s arena tour. This is a pretty classic rich older asshole relative move, they take care of some financial problem for you so you’ll owe them. An episode one Sakiko would probably not have caved to this, but at this point in the series she’s been beaten down by the fallout from both her own bad decisions and the bad decisions of others, and so, she surrenders her agency to her grandfather. We don’t get to hear any explicit promises made, but it feels safe to say that the path forward for Sakiko, if things do not change, is a life as a physically comfortable but emotionally miserable pawn in the interminable power-play games of the wealthy.
Seeing Sakiko like this is, of course, a huge fucking bummer. At the core of it all, Sakiko is only human, but it must be remembered that she was introduced to us as an antagonistic, somewhat cryptic presence throughout the second half of MyGO. Seen through the eyes of others, Sakiko is massively charismatic—Char Aznable with a girl band, recall—but here she’s stripped of everything that makes her so. Seeing her cowed, beaten, rendered painfully clearly as just the teenage girl she actually is, is heartbreaking, a painting so sad the colors run off the canvas. She’s been reduced to a rich girl playing pretend. It hurts to watch.
All the more so because the second half of episode five reintroduces some of the MyGO cast. We get to see some of Sakiko’s past through Tomori’s memories. This person, a happy, fulfilled Sakiko in the early days of CRYCHiC’s activities, is someone that we the audience barely know. It’s difficult to even reconcile that this is the same girl who had a catastrophic falling out with the rest of that group and then spent the remainder of MyGO lurking around in the background. This is the girl who would be Oblivionis? And yet, it’s obviously so. What we are seeing—and have been seeing, this whole time—is someone who’s badly lost her way. The show’s oppressive atmosphere lets up for the first time in the parts of this episode dominated by the MyGO cast. They absolutely have their own shit going on, but compared to simply everything else the series has been so far, it’s small potatoes.
MyGO definitely paved the way for this to exist in both a sense of literal continuity and also in its particular approach to storytelling, but a lot is still up in the air, and episode five’s twin endings raise many, many more questions than they answer. Not to mention I have barely talked at all about what Uika and Nyamu have going on, those two are clearly powderkegs all their own. (One of the very few things I can say with confidence about the future direction of this show is that it will not end without them exploding.) Not that I’m complaining, mind you, the show’s intense, pulsating goth-drama is far and away its best quality. Things are almost placid when we’re within Tomori’s flashbacks, but the last parts of the episode bring us crashing back down to the depths pretty hard. I won’t say more, except that I think MyGO‘s central theme of music as a tool of honesty and communication is about to be very thoroughly tested.
Purely in terms of how much they can be mined for discourse in the old sense of the term, Sakamoto Days might be the least complex thing airing this season. There are zero hidden layers here, every episode is an excuse to get Sakamoto and a group of other assassins in a room, where they will fight, and Sakamoto will win. It is consistently entertaining and just as consistently absolutely nothing else. This episode’s got a fun one-off character in the form of Hard Boiled, whose whole thing is calling stuff “hard-boiled.” Also he has exploding ping pong balls. Pure popcorn TV, and I can’t fault it for that.
Anime – Non-Seasonal
Umamusume: Pretty Derby Season 2
The thing is this: everything anyone has ever told you about Uma Musume is true.
It is a ridiculous, meticulous setting where girls with horse ears compete in very serious, deadly serious races against each other for glory and the thrill of victory. Season 2 is not my favorite Uma Musume thing, that’s still the brain-scrambling New Era film, which I hope to write about someday in the not-too-distant future, but it’s very good, and it’s a really good take on the inspirational sports story formula, a vast improvement over the already pretty solid first season.
Tokai Teio [Machico]! I could kiss her. She’s the greatest prodigal runner ever. She’s our heroine. She suffers more than Jesus. The show repeats the basic plot beat of “Teio injures herself severely and might never run again” three times and somehow it actually hits harder each time. I don’t understand it, it flies in the face of conventional narrative logic, but here we are. It slaps end to end. By the end of the show I was cheering in my seat when she ran her final race.
Also of note: the story of Rice Shower [Iwami Manaka], the Assassin in Black, which is maybe the dark horse (haha) actual best story arc in this season, presented as a shy would-be contender and then revealed as a deadly spoiler who snatches a victory from, most crucially, co-protagonist Mejiro McQueen [Oonishi Saori]. All in all just really solid stuff throughout. The pacing problems inherent to having to write these stories loosely around real-life events are still here, but all told this is just an absolute blast and a huge improvement over season one. This is where I start to understand how we got to New Era.
As an aside, if you don’t follow me there you may not know that I actually livetweeted my experiences with much of Uma Musume on bluesky. I started with the Road To The Top OVA, and then the New Eramovie, (although that one stalls out about halfway through for reasons that will be obvious if you read it), before going back and watching season one and season two. I won’t be doing this for the third season for reasons that will be apparent if you just scroll a bit further, but I figure I should mention this here where it’s relevant.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby Season 3 – Episodes 1 & 2
Interesting stuff.
These are just loose thoughts as opposed to more organized ones, and given that I’m only two episodes into this series I’m disinclined to re-edit them to the extent I did with some of the other stuff in this column. But the main thing that’s sticking out to me is this: a recurring fixture of this series is that you can’t compete against an idea, only the actual people on the field. Previously we see this with Teio’s fear that she’ll never be able to catch up to McQueen when she’s recovering in that show’s last arc, later on we’ll see it with Jungle Pocket and Agnes Tachyon in New Era. Here it takes something of a different form, in that our new protagonist Kitasan Black [Yano Hinaki]’s admiration of Teio is clearly constraining her in some way (probably most directly obvious during her flashback wherein she imagines Duramente, the horse who actually beat her, as Teio in full racing silks). Once Duramente is injured in the second part of the episode, this fixation almost immediately leaps to her instead.
All told this seems to be building up a somewhat more pronounced underdog story than is usual for this franchise. Also, one scene here has what I think is probably the most emotionally raw use of the vent stump (a recurring fixture of the series) that we’ve ever seen, in that Kitasan, fresh off a loss, doesn’t really say anything, she just fuckin’ hollers into it.
What all of this says about Kitasan is pretty interesting. A lot of what she does in these opening episodes is genuinely kind of offputting, which, ironically, kind of makes her more likable than she might’ve been as a more traditional protagonist for this series. I’m interested to see where the rest of this goes!
Manga
False Marigold
Interesting Taisho-period yuri with a nuanced, fraught central relationship, in which our protagonist is a young girl pretending to be her own dead brother in order to make his girlfriend, a blind girl, happy. This does not go smoothly, as you might expect, and I really like the story’s exploration of both Hana’s (the boymoder) and Lily’s (the girlfriend) internality. Both of them feel like very fully-realized people which makes it hurt all the more when they’re suffering and makes it all the nicer when things are going well for them.
Also there is a ton of hand and eye symbolism on the volume covers. Hana covering Lily’s eyes because yeah she’s literally blind but also she’s symbolically blind to the deception. (Or is she? As the series goes on it becomes apparent that Lily is sharper than Hana initially assumes. Still, it’s a nice bit of symbolism.)
I don’t have as much to say about this as I’d like to, so I might reread it at some point and take notes this time. All told though I do highly recommend it especially if you’re looking for a “toxic yuri” pickup. (True misery connoisseurs might be disappointed by a few aspects? I’m not sure.) Also if I ever see someone say that this “doesn’t count as yuri” I’m gonna slap them.
And that’s all for the big comeback piece. Hopefully you found something enlightening or just interesting somewhere in there. I’m going to make a rare direct request that, if you like my work in general and this article in particular, you drop a donation if you can spare it. It’s my only source of income, so every bit helps.
Now then, I leave you with this rare Anon W as your Bonus Thought of the week.
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. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.
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.
“Will you give me the rest of your life?”
God help us all, a short girl with blue hair is here to make her trauma everyone’s problem.
At the end of the final episode of BanG Dream! It’sMyGO!!!!!, the show was essentially hijacked. That series’ finale doesn’t really have anything to do with MyGO directly. Instead, it follows Togawa Sakiko [Takao Kanon], a cryptic, antagonistic presence for of much of that season and a former member of pre-MyGO band CRYCHIC, whose extremely messy dissolution still haunts that show’s cast. MyGO‘s finale made the argument that Sakiko, actually, was more haunted than any of them. Recruiting a supergroup of musicians from across BanG Dream‘s talent-overstuffed universe, she made them wear black lace face masks and gave them goth metal code names; Doloris for lead singer, guitarist, and childhood friend Misumi Uika [Sasaki Rico], Mortis for rhythm guitarist and also childhood friend Wakaba Mutsumi [Watase Yuzuki], Timoris for bassist Yahata Umiri [Okada Mei]—she of the famous “I’m in roughly 30 bands” screenshot—Amoris for capricious drummer Yuutenji Nyamu [Yonezawa Akane], and, finally, Oblivionis for herself, Sakiko, composing and on keyboard. It is their story, we’ve been promised, that BanG Dream! Ave Mujica will tell us.
Thus so established, Sakiko joined a long lineage of real and fictional masked musicians. From Slipknot to Daft Punk, from MF DOOM to KISS. Her reason for adopting a mask is, at its heart, the same as many real musicians who do so: a rejection of her “real” face allows her to become lost in persona, the old self subsumed into a dramatic, shadow-casting new self. A puppetmaster in a near-literal sense, given how her stage shows involve so much doll imagery. Welcome to her beautiful dark twisted fantasy, right?
Wrong. A driving theme here is that Sakiko is not nearly as in control of any of this—not her band, not her life—as she’d like to be. Most of this first episode, aside from Ave Mujica’s killer performance of opening theme “KILLxKISS” at the start, an interview immediately after where there is some tension between Sakiko and Nyamu, and a sequence at the end, is flashback.
Here, we learn a little about Sakiko’s life. The usage of traditional animation for some of these flashbacks is interesting. Readers may recall that Girls Band Cry used a similar technique to similar ends; to emphasize an idealization of these moments, to underscore that we’re not necessarily seeing them as they really were but rather how they felt. Ave Mujica, befitting its goth theater kid vibe, hammers the point home further by also drowning the earliest, still mostly happy memories in an amber sepia filter. More memories follow, and these get no filter and no flat animation; we learn how Sakiko’s mother died suddenly, tragically young. We see her inspired to found a band for the first time after seeing BanG Dream! veterans Morfonica in a small concert. We briefly retrace the rise and fall of CRYCHIC, Sakiko’s father losing his high-paying job at his own father-in-law’s company, and his collapsing into a broken drunk. Sakiko’s struggles to find some kind of job—any kind of job—to make ends meet for herself and her father. We relitigate CRYCHIC’s breakup, this time from Sakiko’s perspective and with a whole lot more crying in the rain, making it clear that leaving the band was just as painful for Sakiko as it was for anyone else. At one point, later in the episode and back in the present day, her father chucks a beer can at her face, giving her a noticeable bruise, and tells her to leave the house. Sakiko can’t take any of this. Thus, the mask.
All of this theater, mind you, lasts for less than a single full episode. On the stage before Ave Mujica are set to give a performance to their largest audience yet, Amoris promptly torches the entire thing, tossing her mask off and unmasking the rest of the band’s members in short order, underscoring both her status as the cast’s wildcard and her general lack of patience for Sakiko’s theatrics. There is something genuinely bold about undoing your characters’ central gimmick right at the end of the first episode, but it only matters so much. It’s true that the audience now knows of Ave Mujica’s civilian identities, but the real masks are something much less material than the flimsy lace that Amoris chucks on the ground.
The command of drama throughout this first episode is superb, but it’s fair to say that where any of this will go is still very much up in the air. Ave Mujica is a theater kid at heart, it lives and breathes drama, and drama, as we’ve seen in anime like MyGO, or, to name an even darker example something like Oshi no Ko, can keep the fire burning for a long, long time. But not forever! This upturning of a core component of the band’s—and thus the show’s—mythos is a promising start, but I do hope we get some actual character growth here, in one way or another. Sakiko’s awful home life is another factor that I do hope the show explores. It’d definitely be a lot more interesting than another rehash of the usual commercialism vs. authenticity stuff, which some of Nyamu’s antics can’t help but bring to mind, given that she’s an influencer off-stage. (Any commentary along those lines is doomed to fail anyway. Ave Mujica are a lot of things, and they make great music, but they’re not any kind of “authentic,” in-universe or out.)
That’s all hypotheticals though. The real nitpick as of now is in the subtitling. What would a girl band anime release be without bitching about the subtitles? I’m only going to touch on this, since other people have already pointed out the obvious, but Crunchyroll’s subtitles for this first episode are notably subpar, stilted in places and lacking song translations. Hopefully this will be fixed at some point, to say the least. Regardless of this glaring issue, which isn’t really even the show’s own fault, I’ve left the first episode confident that we’re in for a hell of a ride, episode 2’s title, Exitus acta probat, “the outcome justifies the deed”, is hugely promising. 11 more weeks of this! Strap in.
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. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.
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.
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