Posted on December 25, 2023December 25, 2023 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

The Year in Magic: Looking Back on the Anime, and Beyond, of 2023

I am getting a little tired of talking about how tough my life is, so I’m going to skip most of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know things have been complicated around here lately. I bring it up at all only to explain why the format is so different from last year’s Year-End List. This year slipped through my fingers, so I have not had the time, energy, or frankly the desire to concoct a nice and neat worst-to-best list like I did last year and in 2020. To be honest, it’s just also felt like a particularly mediocre year for anime. Certainly it’s the weakest since I started this blog.

That said, a brief Top 5 like I did in 2021 also felt inadequate. So, instead of a carefully curated list where I weigh all of my options intelligently, I’ve decided to embrace the chaos. This is less of a curated list and more of a sideways data dump. Some of these things have been written for a while, and are only finding a home here. Others are new. Some are very long, and some are quite brief. Length has no correlation to quality here; there were a few things that I really liked but could only summon up brief takes on (or none at all, in a couple cases, but we’ll touch on that again at the bottom of the article).

Furthermore; the entries here are not in any particular order beyond a favorite being at the top (which is actually the bottom because that’s how listicles work). They’re still mostly anime that came out this year, but some of them, as the title implies, aren’t anime at all, and a few of these things are—gasp—not even from Japan. Instead of worrying so much about format and qualifiers I decided to just write about the things this year that gave me a strong emotional response, made me think, or brought me some comfort in these bizarre times. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the madness.

That said, I wouldn’t quite feel right—

MAGICAL DESTROYERS

—if I didn’t start off talking about one of the few true clunkers I watched end to end this year.

Ah, Magical Destroyers. There’s something tragic about the complete sputtering-out that happened to this series, a reasonably strong first couple of episodes lead into most of the rest of the show being absolutely dismal, and if you wanted the bite-sized review of the show, that’s about all you’d have to say.

Of course, we’re not interested in being bite-sized here. What’s interesting to me about Magical Destroyers, some months on, now that the dust has settled, is the sheer scale of the drop-off. There was a big fall here, and I’m not sure how obvious that was to people looking in from the outside.

In premise, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Magical Destroyers. As I’ve said many times, its core conceit of a world where general, sneering dislike for the nerdy and withdrawn among us turns into outright persecution is a bit indulgent, but it’s not completely crazy. Nor is the idea that they’d then fight back. Other anime (Rumble Garanndoll and Akiba’s Trip, mainly) have done interesting things with this material, so it’s not that the show’s premise is the problem. Instead, what sinks Magical Destroyers is a massive sense of inconsistency, both in tone and just general competence. We’ve been here before, where an anime having bright spots makes the whole thing worse given their proximity to the mediocrity that makes up the rest of the series. Those bright spots aren’t meaningless, but with time, more removed from Magical Destroyers than I was when I first reviewed it, I mostly just remember the whole thing as a letdown.

Worse, there’s a particularly bitter postscript here. Like many anime, Magical Destroyers was created in part to promote a mobile game and hopeful cash cow. All told, Magical Destroyers Kai—the game in question—was active from just April to August of this year, a service life of less than six months. A failure to clear even the incredibly low bar set by such projects of ill repute as Pride of Orange’s mobile game. This is a truly depressing flit and sputter from what started out as such a promising project. Worse, given that I imagine quite a few people are out of a lot of money given Jun Imagawa’s pet project completely tanking, it seems entirely possible that the man will never lead an anime project ever again. Magical Destroyers represents more, then, than just the failure of a single series. It is the failure of one man’s entire creative vision, and the decision making of those who supported him. Worse shows definitely aired this year—the usual slate of iffy sequels, bottom-of-the-barrel narou-kei adaptations, deep pools of mediocrity like Revenger (brilliantly reviewed here by my friend Julian), and whatever the hell was going on with The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses—but I can think of none that so thoroughly embody disappointment as a concept. The rest of this list is going to mostly be positive, but I felt the need to revisit Magical Destroyers. For better or worse, the letdown has stuck with me.

“SHINKIRO”

About half of you are cheering right now, and the other half of you have no idea what this is or why it’s on this list. What is “SHINKIRO”? Aren’t those two of those girls from Hololive? What’s going on?

Well, yes, they are two of those girls from Hololive; that’s Gawr Gura and Houshou Marine (operating here as a very creatively named idol unit; GuraMarine), two of the VTuber Agency Imperial’s most popular talents. This is a music video. Specifically, a really fucking good one that reimagines Marine and Gura’s friendship as a sort of bittersweet romance. It’s inspired, is what it is. The pirate and the mermaid, more or less. A summer that lasts the rest of your life. The key to that vibe—a mix of nostalgia for a time and place that never quite really existed and an implied sadness that it’s forever out of reach—is the music video’s art style, a dreamland pastiche of pre-Millennium anime, reinterpreted through a modern lens by Studio KAI of all groups. I’m guessing the general idea was either Marine or Gura’s (I’m not huge into VTubers these days, but I know Gura is a city pop fiend and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Marine was too), and was followed through by art director Yuusuke Takeda, who has been in the industry for long enough that he’d have been working when this style was current.

The song itself is worth at least touching on, too. I’m not a music critic, so my vocabulary here is even more limited than it’d be otherwise, but to my ear this is almost indistinguishable from “authentic” city pop from the 80s. Things like this can seem transient, and thus not worth discussing in the same breath as “real” anime or similarly longform art like games or manga. But here, when I’m writing this in the second week of a particularly dark December, it reminds me that summer, no matter how far away, is real somewhere.

Oh, and Marine and Gura totally fuck in this video. Like, they don’t literally show it but there are a limited number of ways to interpret “two people wake up naked in a bed together.” Wild.

MAKE THE EXORCIST FALL IN LOVE

Here’s an elevator pitch for you; psychosexual Catholic battle shonen. This is another rule-bendy entry, since Exorcist here technically started back in late 2021. But it’s still ongoing, and yours truly happened to only find out about it this year, so this is where it gets written about (for the first, but maybe not the last? time). Exorcist is a real oddity, a battle series that leans pretty heavily on Catholic myth and morality for its worldbuilding to weave the tale of a teenage exorcist forbidden from the usual affairs of his age because he’s destined to save the world from Satan, a rare appearance by the capital D-L Demon Lord in contemporary manga. The general premise of said exorcist having to protect a seemingly-innocent girl who is actually a demon might sound like the setup for a fairly goofy romcom, but that would belie the fact that Exorcist is actually one of the gnarliest things that runs in Shonen Jump, if only intermittently. There’s something very surreal about the more straightforward romance manga aspects rubbing shoulders with the battle shonen flash, body horror, and unflinching depictions of abuse that otherwise color the manga.

Full disclosure, I was raised Catholic but am contemporaneously a practicing neopagan. So, the manga’s strange mix of subject matter feels like it’s simultaneously meant to cater to and repel people like me, folks who have not set foot in a church in many years and might never do so again. I think this may also be why Exorcist has struggled to really find an audience over here, but at the same time, that singularity of theme and subject matter is what makes it so distinct. Every chapter is a parade of these disparate concepts, and there’s much to be found in seeing how they’ll manage to work together this time, even as the material itself is often grim (see, any number of the manga’s very upfront depictions of sexual assault) or puzzling (the character of Aria and her concatenation of every possible meaning of the word “idol”). Exorcist is a true oddball, I’m hoping against hope that it gets an anime someday, but even if it doesn’t, it’s definitely worth a read if you can stomach what it’s putting down.

CASSETTE BEASTS

The first of several “there is really no way to argue this is even remotely anime” entries on this list, Cassette Beasts is a creature collector game from smallish studio Raw Fury. If you just want the buy/not buy verdict on this charming little indie game, I’ll give it to you in two sentences. Cassette Beasts is Pokémon for depressed burnout Millennials. This is unequivocally a good thing, and if you’re struggling to imagine how, you are not the target demo for Cassette Beasts.

Creature collector games developed in “the west” tend to get slapped with the Poké-clone label regardless of how closely or distantly they adhere to Pokémon’s formula. But while Cassette Beasts is definitely a riff on that formula, it’s far from just rotely copying it; more than can be said of some games in this genre. Aside from a number of flavor differences—for one thing, you don’t command the monsters, you turn into them, here. Feel free to provide your own “henshin!” shouts at the start of each battle—there are some important mechanical ones, too. The vast majority of battles are two-on-two, and you go through the whole game with one of several partners, who you can swap out freely at a café. In addition to Pokémon’s usual types, or close matches thereto, there are also Plastic, Glass, and “Astral” monsters, who lack any real equivalent in that other series. (Astrals are often themed in a broadly similar way to Ghost-type Pokémon, but they work very differently.) Speaking of types; hitting a type-advantageous move doesn’t just do more damage than usual, every single interaction of that sort has some kind of effect. For example; if a Fire-type attack hits an Ice-type beast, it’ll melt, turning into a Water-type. If that same attack hits a Poison-type, the toxins within the monster will ignite, causing a burn status. Metal attacks will shatter Glass-type beast, spreading damage-dealing shards all over the battlefield, but that same monster could strike a Lightning-type beast and cause it to become “Insulated”, reducing its targeting range in the process. There are quite a few of these interactions, and learning the ins and outs of them is recommended for those seeking to truly master the combat system.

The monsters themselves are fun, too. Not every single design is a winner, but of the 120 on offer here, the vast majority are fun in a fresh way that gives them a distinct look in comparison to Cassette Beasts’ genrefellows. One minor point of contention might be the often-punny portmanteau names, which is a naming scheme directly cribbed from Pokémon and used in many other games in this genre besides. Still, it’s hard to get too mad about gems like “Salamagus” and “Crowpocalypse.”

Some might also take issue with that “120”, since that’s relatively small a number for this genre, but if the pool of monsters and moves seems limited, it’s broader than it seems at first glance. For one thing; techniques aren’t picked from a simple level-up list here, and you have far more than four slots per ‘mon, comprised of both active attacks, buffs and debuffs as well as passive skills that are always in play and require no further input from you the user. They’re also not stuck on the monster that learns them; instead, they’re items in the form of stickers (those are what you earn from levelling your monsters), and can be freely swapped out at any time. (Sadly, although understandably since otherwise there’d be no real gameplay reason to use different monsters, there is still only a limited selection of what stickers are compatible with what tapes.) This lets you build different instances of ostensibly similar monsters pretty differently, and if you’re creative with your stickers you can come up with some powerful stuff. My personal right-hand man during my playthrough was an Artillerex—a flak cannon / T. Rex hybrid—who I stuck a variety of “gun” attacks of different elements on, plus the very useful passive Roll Again, which gives monsters a chance to strike a second time at the end of their turn and use a random move they have enough Action Points for. The broad type coverage and multi-striking made it a machine gun of total elemental destruction, and I never got tired of using it. Other monsters have more narrow applications, of course, but the fact that you can fiddle around with your creatures like this provides a huge amount of appeal to even casual experimenters, and I’m sure those who love min-maxing will find even more to tinker with here.

For two; in addition to the basic 120 beasts, every single creature also comes in a variety of “bootleg” types, which tint its sprite a different color, give it a different typing, and change what attack stickers they get as they level up. If you’re not picky about art, you could only a little disingenuously argue that there’s really more like 1,500-odd creatures, and the vast majority of them just happen to be insanely rare, since bootlegs have a Shiny Pokémon-esque rarity to them. Still, they’re often worth seeking out, especially since bootlegs earn rare upgraded attack stickers with bonus effects more often than normal monsters do.

Now look at this, a half dozen paragraphs about the gameplay and almost none about the story or anything else. That shouldn’t be taken to mean Cassette Beasts‘ only strengths are on the gameplay side. The story itself is a little rough, but the general premise—CB’s world is a mysterious island that our protagonists, and everyone else who lives there, are isekai’d to from our own world without warning—is intriguing, and more than the actual narrative per se Cassette Beasts excels at vibes. The main town’s theme; the melancholic, gauzy “Wherever We Are Now“, is an absolute masterpiece of game music and sets the tone perfectly. My generation is all getting older, and it’s nice to play something that understands that on an empathic, thematic level.

IPPON! AGAIN

The first offering from new-to-the-game studio Bakken Record, Mou Ippon! rang in the new year with a smile.

Some folks probably argued—amongst themselves or with others—over whether Mou Ippon was a sports anime or a school club anime. The truth of course is that it’s both, combining the former’s invocation of intimacy by way of physical contact with the latter’s easygoing warmth. Lot of blushing in this one. Between that and the constant grappling between girls, it’s hard to argue that this show isn’t at least a LITTLE gay. (There’s a pretty great sequence at the show’s halfway point where a new girl, the self-proclaimed “Wonder Child” Ana Nagumo, joins the club and demands to be thrown. Said girl joined the club in order to get closer to her friend. I leave the conclusions there to you.) It’s not the best-looking show on this list by a long shot (the actual judo is always drawn and choreographed quite nicely, anything else is a crapshoot), but it has heart.

At the end of the day, this is a series about the pure joy of athleticism. Anything else is secondary. Both our central cast and the series’ many supporting characters (mostly other judoka) face a fair number of trials during the show’s run—outside pressure to succeed, the difficulty of overcoming natural differences in ability, etc.—but inevitably, the spirit of the sport wins out.

MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY

I’m fudging my own numbers here, since technically Witch From Mercury started last year, but I didn’t cover it in the 2022 end-of-year writeup, and the second season aired this year. So it gets to stay here, keeping the company of 2023’s motley crew.

I’ll be honest, I mostly think of Witch From Mercury as a yuri series. That’s not strictly true; it’s a war drama and a couple other things besides, but given that mousey protagonist Suletta Mercury’s relationship with her rich-girl crush Miorine Rembran defines the entire thrust of the series, it makes sense, at least to me, to put it in that category. Throughout, they struggle together and apart as the political landscape of the Utena-inflected school they both attend whirls around them, eventually engulfing the whole solar system in a conflict orchestrated by the main villain, Suletta’s sinister—and very attractive—mom.

In an intellectual, detached sense, my main criticisms remain the somewhat spotty plotting; the conclusion is just a bit too neat and it avoids asking many really hard questions. In addition—and maybe this is a me problem—the show’s sheer complexity and the amount of overlapping power plays, etc., prevented me from getting emotionally invested in much of the story in a very immediate way. Suletta and Miorine’s relationship ups and downs were really the only exception there.

Yet, it’s hard for me to be mad at something that can muster up this much genuine optimism and empathy even in the face of an overwhelmingly bad situation. (And the things going on in the show’s universe are certainly not great.) Plus, it has a canon gay-married couple. That’s genuinely significant, given how huge Gundam is as a franchise, even if the show’s owners tried and failed to walk it back in one of the most comedically cowardly company moves I’ve ever seen. A move that was eventually undone by the show’s own director. You can’t keep a good power couple down.

HELL’S PARADISE

It just ain’t fair. Back in the day, Hell’s Paradise would’ve gone to a workman studio and aired for a good 2, 3 years straight. It would’ve picked up innumerable filler arcs along the way. There’d be shipping wars. It would’ve been great.

But we are not back in the day. It isn’t 2006, and Hell’s Paradise was brought into a significantly less forgiving anime industry and absolutely choked out by the sheer volume of competition. That in mind, I really don’t know if I could tell you why this show, of all the ones I started but didn’t finish this year, is one that I went back to and eventually completed in the dying days of December, here. Maybe it’s just that despite various deficiencies (janky visuals, rote character arcs, questionable gender politics) it’s still pretty good at delivering good old fashioned brawls, with fights that make up what they might lack in visual polish with a genuine cool factor and a powerful sense of rhythm that lets our protagonists always feel like the underdogs in their quest on the violently hostile island referred to by the show’s title. Maybe it’s because it had the year’s single best opening theme. Maybe it’s because Gabimaru managed to be the ultimate wife guy in a year where we also got another season of Spy x Family (and on that note, I was dead sure his wife and Yor Forger shared a voice actress, but nope! Different people). Maybe it’s the killer aesthetics, with gnarly monsters derived from a deliberately twisted interpretation of Taoism.

Whatever my reasons might’ve been; the themes don’t hurt; by its end, the first season of Hell’s Paradise stresses that we’re all in this together. Perhaps appropriately, this ended up being the last anime of 2023 I finished, and that spirit of solidarity is worth carrying into the New Year.

OSHI NO KO

Lady Gaga summed it up best when she called the rerelease of her first album The Fame Monster. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the Pop Machine eats its own young, and few in the industry are ever really spared. This is the thematic thrust of Oshi no Ko, and is a huge preoccupation that takes up most of the manga (and of course, this anime adaptation), irrespective of its actual plot points. But we’ve gone over that on this site before. What’s interesting to me about OnK is how as a piece of art, it itself is complicit in this cycle. This is both why it’s on the list at all and why it’s not higher up.

Oshi no Ko‘s main characters are Aquamarine and Ruby, children (/reincarnated fans of. It’s complicated) of the late idol Hoshino Ai. Yet, it’s Ai herself who ends up on posters and in key visuals, in the shockingly large amount of tie-in commercials related to the series, and so on. There’s haunting the narrative and then there’s haunting the broader sphere of Japanese pop culture at large, and that latter stage is where Ai is really at. There’s an apparent contradiction here between Ai as a symbol of promise and life snuffed out too soon and Ai as a commercial titan, but any disagreement between these aspects is illusory. Ai is viable as a commercial idea because she dies in the show’s debut episode; that’s the start of her legend, and is why people care about her at all. One leads to the other, and no matter how convenient it might be to try to separate the two, doing so is impossible.

On a more serious note, this same self-contradictory nature is why I haven’t really covered OnK here since abruptly dropping my Let’s Watch of it back in June. For some fans, the strength of the narrative overtook its real life influences when the mother of the real person who Akane’s early story arc is based on complained, and that woman was subsequently harassed by fans of the series.

Things like this make it difficult to go to bat for OnK, despite its strengths. The unfortunate truth for me is that, like a problematic pop star who ends up in headlines as much for bad behavior as great singles, I will probably keep following the anime, and it might even show up on this list next year, if I make one. Don’t expect to see it between now and then, though. Sometimes it’s best to keep your fandom to yourself.

THE 100 GIRLFRIENDS WHO REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LOVE YOU

In a sense, what is there to say here? It’s a comedy show and it’s funny. Mission accomplished. On the other hand, though, there’s a real accomplishment in how affable 100 Girlfriends is despite the fact that it’s an over-the-top horny harem comedy that by its premise requires The One Guy to date many, many girls simultaneously. That sounds like a recipe for disaster in the context of a romantic comedy, but our boy here, Rentaro, just genuinely is that good. If you can remember the general sell on Catarina from In My Next Life as a Villainess!, the general idea is the same. Rentaro manages to feel like he really is the right person for all of the show’s women just by dint of the fact that he’s insanely likeable, with eyebrows the size of banana leaves and an even bigger heart; a total genius of emotional intelligence who knows exactly what to say and when to say it, a supernaturally smooth operator just because he’s so good at connecting with people on an emotional level. No wonder a half dozen girls and counting are falling over themselves to smooch him.

Which would be meaningless if the girls weren’t also great, but they thankfully are. Each is a classic harem series archetype either dialed up to eleven or tweaked in some other way, all of whom work together to create an absolutely pitch-perfect ensemble cast. Tossed in a blender of absurd comedy, overflowing with puns (thanks in part to a delightfully loose official sub track) and slapstick while mostly remaining good natured, a handful of exceptions aside. (I could probably do without the entire character of the old schoolteacher. But she’s a bit character and doesn’t show up much, so we’ll forgive it for now.) It’s also shockingly good at the more tender and serious parts of romance. It really seems like this stuff should suffer given the sheer amount of characters, but somehow all of them feel like they really do work not just with Rentaro but also with each other.

100 GFs is a silly, sometimes outlandishly horny show, but I think its genuinely big heart makes a case for it as perhaps the year’s single best comedy and one of its best shows overall; a perfect polyamorous fairy tale for the modern age. What else could you ask for?

TENGOKU DAIMAKYO

It’s probably for the better that this list isn’t organized like last year’s. If it were; where the hell would I put Tengoku Daimakyo? (Heavenly Delusion unofficially and widely, despite the Disney+ English release using a straight transliteration of its Japanese title.) We’re in murky waters, here. Heavenly Delusion goes some very strange and very dark places over the course of its 12-episode run. A run that feels, frankly, too brief to possibly contain everything the show explores. The series maps out a grim coastline populated by all the horrors, real and imagined, of the human psyche. Abuse, violence, teenage pregnancy, mental illness, human experimentation, the damaged relationships between people in crisis, eugenics, murder, and rape. This is bleak, bleak, bleak territory. Maybe too bleak? It’s hard to say.

The big Discourse Point about Heavenly Delusion was its adjacency to queer issues. “Adjacency to” because the plot point in question—spoiler alert, here—that Kiruko, one of the leads, has the brain of their own younger brother Haruki, forcibly transplanted into their own skull via some horrible procedure. This was criticized for appropriating the transgender experience, a point of view which, as a trans person myself, I sympathize with but don’t really find compelling, if only because Kiruko/Haruki’s experiences are so different from actually “being a guy in a girl’s body” (or any permutation thereof) that any similarity seems coincidental. (I’m open to the idea that I might be wrong, and if it is intentionally supposed to parallel the trans experience then it says some very bad things about original author Masakazu Ishiguro‘s opinion of trans people, but that seems like a big if.)

I’ll admit, though, it took me a while to come to that conclusion, partly just because wow is that a fucking plotline to put into your show, but also because Heavenly Delusion legitimately does dip into some dicey territory. I find it hard to justify the show’s ogling of Kiruko’s body, for example, and I have no idea what to make of a lengthy subplot that, without getting into the details here for the general sake of saving space, I found weirdly ableist. But I’ve also seen the exact opposite interpretation. Was I just reading it uncharitably? It’s hard to say.

But then again, I don’t entirely know what to make of most of Heavenly Delusion in general, and all that in mind you might think I dislike it. That isn’t really the case, though! In addition to its more obvious visual merits, the show has a real warmth and empathy to it in its best moments that does feel, despite the vast differences in just about every other respect, of a piece with the original mangaka’s best-known prior work, And Yet The Town Moves. A core part of a certain strain of post-apocalyptic fiction is that regardless of circumstance, people are fundamentally the same. Heavenly Delusion seems to believe that too, and is undecided on whether or not it’s a good thing. This is without getting into the show’s more bizarre, out-there sci fi elements. Even in brief summary, there’s just so much to this thing that it’s hard to condense into tidy little phrases.

I feel much the same about the show overall. I wouldn’t sort my thoughts into neat categories like calling it good or bad or even saying I have “mixed feelings.” But I have a lot of feelings, and a lot of thoughts. I think to a certain degree, simply being so memorable will count for a lot in the long run. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe I’m just not ready for this one yet.

VOID STRANGER

Inside the box is just another box. Void Stranger, a Sokoban-inspired block puzzle game from Finnish development team System Erasure, is by an order of magnitude the most opaque thing on this list. It’s also, just a fair warning, one of those pieces of art that is impossible to discuss without spoiling the hell out of it. So if you’re just looking for an endorsement, I would recommend buying this game immediately and enjoying being lost in it with the rest of us.

For the rest of you; Void Stranger‘s simple-on-the-surface mechanics and deliberately retro presentation belie what I’ve come to loosely term an experiential game. That meaning; figuring out just what kind of game exactly you’re playing is part of the game itself. What sort of story is this? What exactly can you do with these puzzle elements? Are there things the game isn’t telling you? These are some of the broadest questions you’ll be asking yourself as you work through this thing. During which time you’ll learn about Grey, a woman from a fantasy kingdom, and how protecting her charge, a bratty princess, led her to the bizarre labyrinth that is the game’s primary setting.

For a while, it will seem fairly standard, until it becomes clear that it’s very much not. To me, it really clicked when I “finished” the game for the first time. On your first pass through, you’re locked into what’s essentially the “worst” ending. The dungeon dissolves into incoherent chaos around you, a song plays, the road ahead becomes less and less clear. You have succumbed to despair and the world is nothing but a whorl of confusion. But then you start again, and things start to make a little more sense. Rinse, repeat, spend many hours cracking the games ludicrously elaborate codes, and things become a little clearer again. The game is a tug-of-war in this way; between the constant hazy fog that comes from knowing you don’t really know what’s going on and the little gemstone moments of clarity that do shine through. It’s an interesting, rewarding experience, and one I recommend if you’ve got the stomach for the game’s truly staggering difficulty.

Even if you do, it will take you a very, very long time to properly finish Void Stranger. I got quite far myself and still haven’t actually finished the whole thing. I plan to, of course. What’s the other option? Stay trapped in a monochrome labyrinth forever? Don’t be silly; even when you leave the maze, the memory remains.

SOARING SKY PRECURE

Sky fly high. They didn’t have to go this hard, is what I kept thinking to myself. Pretty Cure’s 20th anniversary is essentially an ongoing holiday, in between two adult fan-oriented sequel seasons as we currently are, but it was the main line of the series, Soaring Sky Precure, that best held my interest in 2023.

It’s not fashionable to say this, but at its heart, Precure is a fairly change-averse franchise. The series more or less found its pay dirt formula with Yes 5! and has been riding that train to the bank every year since, but what this means is that even changes that would seem minor to an outsider can be absolutely seismic in context. See, for example; Cure Sky, this year’s lead, being blue. It’s hard to overstate how enthused people were about the simple fact that the lead Precure of this year’s season was identifiably a color other than pink. Similar hype followed for similar reasons; Cure Wing is the first boy to ever join the main cast (he’s not the first male Precure full stop, that’s a different character from a prior season), Cure Butterfly the first adult, and so on.

This spirit of comparative experimentation did not stay throughout the show’s run, as what followed was a fairly typical (if notably episodic) Precure season. The ebb and flow of online discourse has of course led to some concluding that this makes the show bad. I say fuck that; this season ruled. Sure, you could describe Precure as artistically conservative if you wanted to, but the flip side of that coin is that it’s consistent. Every year you get 4-6 girls in colorful outfits punching the themed forces of evil to death, and it kicks ass every single time. This year had a particularly strong cast of villains, with the oafish Kabaton being succeeded by the leering, smug Battamonda, and then the honorable, upright Minoton, before looping back to Battamonda, giving him something of a redemption arc, and then finally revealing the main bad’n for the final few episodes. It was a ride!

Admittedly, I would not personally place Soaring Sky in my absolute upper echelon of Precure seasons; Fresh, Heartcatch, Tropical Rouge, and—sorry, haters—Healin’ Good, but it’s still a delightful and entertaining piece of work. I expect I’ll say much the same about Wonderful Precure next year, and I’m looking forward to doing so.

That said, there’s more than one way a kids’ anime can be great, and while some stuck to the tried-and-true methods, others were much more willing to experiment.

POKéMON HORIZONS

As I discussed when the original anime finally, incredibly, came to a close back in March, I have basically loved Pokémon my entire life, for better or worse. It’s baked into my DNA, and I’m never going to be rid of it. Pokémon Horizons, though, has made the series feel essential—like an actual part of the cultural current, relevant to non-lifelong fans—for the first time in what feels like a million years. There has, in actuality, been lead-up to this of course. Some of that was when Ash Ketchum finally became a Pokémon champion in November of ’22, some of it was in the making long before that, but with the new series it really feels like a page has been definitively turned, and a lot of that has to do with how different it is from the previous Pokémon anime.

Pokémon Horizons has nothing to do with being “a Pokémon master.” Competitive battling in the usual sense is barely a factor, our main protagonist is meek and initially doesn’t actually care about winning at all. And, oh yeah, she’s a girl. Liko, who had the unenviable task of stepping into Ash’s shoes this April, has done amazingly well for herself as the new face of Pokémon. She doesn’t have to do it alone, thankfully, as co-protagonist Roy balances her out and makes up the more fiery, battle-oriented half of their duo. Joining them are the Rising Volt Tacklers, the do-anything crew of the airship Brave Olivine who initially meet Liko when their captain, Friede, is asked to keep her and a mysterious pendant she carries safe. Suffice it to say; we don’t really know for sure where the whole pendant business is headed yet, but we know it involves a legendary hero of a bygone age, the machinations of a villainous group with the deceptively innocuous name of “The Explorers”, and a smorgasbord of cool-as-hell Pokémon battles. Did I mention there’s a Pikachu in a captain’s hat? His name is Captain Pikachu and he is cooler than any of us will ever be.

The main thing is that the series excels at a sense of adventure. The first Pokémon anime had been airing for so long that it tended to fall into tropes of its own making, and that continued to some extent right up until its very end (not to say that it was bad or anything, it could certainly be great, too), Horizons manages to feel as fresh as it does partly by simple virtue of not being its predecessor, but there really is a genuine sense of the new and unexpected with each and every episode. The airship gives the show license to set its adventures basically wherever, and it often takes advantage of that, helping even inconsequential-in-the-long-run “filler” episodes feel fun and purposeful. There’s also a lovely paralleling between the makeup of the Brave Olivine’s crew and the actual people who’re watching this show, with both adults and children represented, with Friede and company helping to mentor Liko, Roy, and tertiary protagonist Dot. In a real sense, the series feels like it’s bridging the gaps between generations, and that’s a lovely thing to see as a long-time fan of Pokémon. Here’s to 900 more episodes, god willing.

CHAINSAW MAN: PART 2

Wherefore The Chainsaw Man? Part 2 of the manga—which we’ll be discussing here, so the spoiler averse should skip down the next entry—began last summer to a fair amount of anticipation. Some of that has cooled in the intervening months, but for the most part, the manga remains very popular and widely-read.

This is a little surprising, all things considered. Chainsaw Man‘s second half is a very different beast from its first. Most of the original cast have either died or otherwise departed the narrative. Denji has a costar now; Asa, human host of the War Devil, and a sort of adoptive little sister in the form of Nayuta. In the process, Denji has lost one family and gained another.

But the biggest change has actually been in terms of pacing, of all things. Chainsaw Man Part 2 is a noticeably slower affair than Chainsaw Man Part 1. Indeed, the manga has adapted a deliberately tease-y tempo as Part 2 has gone on, even as the tension has mounted and literal prophecies of armageddon have begun to fill the air. But it has kept its core emotional roughness; a kind of pain that resonates very broadly and is the main reason that this thing is still so popular. Denji’s old life keeps haunting him, as disparate forces conspire him to pull the ripcord once more. He is still searching for answers to life’s big questions, he’s still not happy, and the world’s still going to hell. So of course, they’ve succeeded. As of its most recent chapter—its final, before a hiatus into the new year—Denji has once again cast aside any pretense of ordinary life to become Chainsaw Man, laughing like a maniac in the manga’s final image of 2023. The poor kid can’t catch a break.

ELPHELT VALENTINE

Look, this is basically a filler spot, but what are you going to do, stop me? This is my article, and if I say a DLC character from a fighting game I like (Guilty Gear -Strive-) gets on the list, she gets on the list, logic be damned. I barely knew who Elphelt was two months ago, and now she’s my absolute favorite pink and white marriage-obsessed heavy metal singer of a blorbo. It helps that she’s fun to play (and fairly simple, which as someone who is still very much a neophyte to fighting games as a genre, is welcome). I paid another human being $30 USD (plus tax and tip) to make a chibi drawing of her eating a large pretzel because I wanted my own unique Elphelt icon that badly. She’s great, and you will pry her from my cold, dead hands.

I don’t have the space to earnestly get into Guilty Gear’s genuinely weird-as-hell lore here, but her backstory is genuinely pretty compelling, as is the silliness of her arcade mode story in Strive‘s story. Bottom line; she brought a damn sight more joy to my life than most things this year. For that, she gets a place at the table.

SLAY THE PRINCESS

The other video game with an expanding, changing narrative on this list, Slay The Princess is a good deal more accessible than Void Stranger by virtue of being a visual novel and thus posing no difficulty beyond reading and clicking. But that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s somehow the lesser of the two (I wouldn’t say I cleanly prefer either to the other), or even that it’s harder to spoil (this is another section you’ll want to skip if you care about that kind of thing). The story is simple; you are on a path in the woods, at the end of the path is a cabin, and in the cabin is a princess. Your charge? Kill her. Failing to do so will, at least so you’re told, end the world and doom everyone in it.

Of course, things are more complicated than they first appear. The stern narrator who tells you all this seems untrustworthy at best, and there are voices in your head beside your own. The Princess herself is no ordinary human, either. But eventually, you’ll make your choice, to either free or kill her, which seems like it should be the end of this story.

Except, it is obviously not. You are on a path in the woods. You find her and save or kill her again. You’re on a path in the woods.

Time loops are one thing, but Slay The Princess’ entire narrative structure is based on iterative rings like this. What you do changes the woods, the cabin, yourself, and the Princess. No matter what you do, you’ll discover that the two of you are deeply connected. This is, after all, a love story. You kill, you die, you try again. Slay The Princess reveals itself as a love song from one myth to another. You are on a path in the woods. You are a path in the woods.

LEVEL 1 DEMON LORD AND ONE-ROOM HERO

Ecchi slapstick political satire fantasy!! It’s a genre jambalaya. And of the various fantasy anime that tried to tackle serious issues this year, One-Room Hero might honestly have done it the best. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth reiterating how utterly weird it is that this series, with its burned-out loser JRPG hero protagonist and his 404 gender-not-found shapeshifting demon lord frenemy, is probably the best satire of imperialism I’ve seen in a mainstream TV anime in years.

That’s not to say the show is an intellectual powerhouse or anything; there’s a difference between being witty and being smart, but it should probably say something that all of these cultural currents are so dumb that even a show with a character who dresses like this can poke fun at them. Other anime swung more for the fences this year, but I don’t think anyone hit higher above their weight class.

OTAKU ELF

In my head, Otaku Elf is this year’s version of My Master Has No Tail. Absolutely rock solid comedy / slice of life shows with a fantasy bent that seemingly rather few people actually watched. (I think Otaku Elf did a little better in that regard than My Master Has No Tail, but not much better.)

In premise, Otaku Elf is pretty simple. The title character, Elda, is a classic high fantasy-style elf who has inexplicably been enshrined as a kami in a Japanese shrine. Here, she uses her position to while away the centuries by indulging in her nerdy, nerdy interests, all while basically never leaving her house, often using her put-upon shrine maiden Koito as a go-between. Think Himouto! Umaru-chan if Umaru herself was taller, a bit less abrasive, and had magic powers, and you’re in the right ballpark.

Much of the comedy here is referential or (very) lightly satirical, but throughout, the show commands an impressive and easy charm that mixes well with its occasional moments of real pathos, like when Elda remarks that the way Koito eats her ramen reminds her of her late mother, the previous shrine maiden. Heart like that can’t be faked.

Undead Murder Farce

Another oddball that defies easy genre categorization. Undead Murder Farce seemed from a distance like it might belong to that millieu of Bakemonogatari-ish (and consequently, Boogiepop-ish) shows like In/Spectre and Rascal Doesn’t Dream of the Bunnygirl Sempai. In practice, it ends up watching like a strange cross between a detective novel, Bakemonogatari itself, and the Fate series if it were set in the Victorian era.

The detective part is the main hook, though, with the titular Undead girl being an immortal named Aya, a literal talking head who serves as a detective for supernatural cases that more traditional sleuths can’t really crack. Throughout the series, she, her assistant Shinuchi, and her maid Shizuku traipse across Europe solving supernatural mysteries and hunting for her missing body. Whether their cases are actually Fair Play ™ or not I can’t definitively say, but they at least seem solvable, giving the show an element of involving the viewer, as well as more traditional mystery series thrills. (And it does do those pretty well; it’s worth noting that this series is from Kaguya-sama director Shinichi Omata, and some of that style shines through.) Later, things get a bit more action-y as a plethora of period-appropriate public domain characters turn up—Sherlock Holmes, Carmilla, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Phantom of the Opera, you get it—which is where that dash of Fate spice comes from. These disparate parts work together pretty well, with elements like Carmilla’s queer-tinged rivalry with Shizuku adding additional intrigue.

Really, the only bad thing about this series is that it ends without resolving its main plot, being adapted as it is from a series of novels far too long to condense into a single anime cour. If there’s justice in the world, we’ll get more Undead Murder Farce. But if not, at least it made a strong showing while it was here.

SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF

“At its finest, Scott Pilgrim is much, much more than it appears to be. It’s an ambitious meditation on what growing up means to a generation for whom comics and video games are not just cultural touchstones, but the dominant iconography.” That was The Globe & Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, on the original Scott Pilgrim graphic novel and the then-upcoming live action film, way back in 2010.

I’m writing this, myself, on the last day of November, 2023 (and editing it nearly a month later). Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with this series whatsoever. I wasn’t really planning to watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Science SARU’s still-inexplicable anime take on the series. I had no reason to, having never seen the movie nor read the comics. But, circumstance is a funny thing, and what initially started as me wanting to spite a group of deeply annoying people (it’s a long story) has led to me flipping this thing over in my head several times. The nature of this list makes me deeply hesitant to crown an overall single “best anime” of 2023, even in the narrow category of ones I actually finished, but if this isn’t my single favorite, it’s at least one of several.

First, if you don’t know the story of Scott Pilgrim in general, of how an uncomfortably relatable loser-everyman manages to forge maybe the first real connection of his entire life with an uncomfortably relatable loser-everywoman after being forced to (among other things) fight her exes in combat, this whole entry might scan as a little incomprehensible to you. Sorry about that!

Scott Pilgrim is one of those things that started out fairly niche, and then became a touchstone, and then (probably unfairly) a shorthand for a Certain Type of Guy. So Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is then much less about Scott Pilgrim (the guy) and much more about Scott Pilgrim (the story). In general concept and execution, it’s not entirely dissimilar to something like Rebuild of Evangelion, in that it’s not a reboot exactly or a straight sequel exactly but more of a front-to-back rewiring that keeps the main players intact but does pretty different things to and with them. It is also a sequel, though. So to understand it we should at least touch on the original comic, which I read essentially in preparation for watching this anime.

To be honest, I would’ve loved nothing more than to completely bounce off Scott Pilgrim. The entire franchise—from the original comic, to the live action film by Edgar Wright to, I assume it’s only a matter of time, this anime—has been simplified into a punchline these days. You’ve all seen the tweet; “you are not Scott Pilgrim and that girl on the bus is not Ramona Flowers.” This is wrong on several counts of course; the girl Scott meets on the bus in the original comic isn’t Ramona, it’s Knives Chau, a high schooler who becomes his ill-advised mostly pretend-girlfriend. Also, I absolutely am Scott Pilgrim. So are you. So is probably everyone who’s ever lived, or at least everyone who’s ever grown up in this strange, strange era of history we live in. Millennials, who are ostensibly “the generation” meant to identify with Mr. Pilgrim, are defined by anxiety. We don’t hurt people because we mean to—who does?—but because the alternative to hurting people is doing something scary, and lots of us don’t know how to handle scary things. We’re all Ramona Flowers, too—I’m aware I’m contributing to a stereotype by being transgender and identifying with the character in any respect—in that for many of us, at least sure as hell for me, the default way to disengage with people is to just silently drift away without a word. Reader, I would so love to tell you that this is all me being dramatic, but if there’s any projection here, it’s solely on my part; Scott Pilgrim vs. The World read me to fucking pieces. I was embarrassed. It was bad, but I can only respect a piece of art that prompts me to do some genuine reflecting.

Of course, this entry is, actually, technically, about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The brand-new anime from Science Goddamn SARU, that has, actually, not a ton in common, at least plot-wise, with its forbearer. But it’s important to understand what vs. The World actually was. Because, just to hammer this home one more time, while Scott Pilgrim (the comic) was largely about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), Scott Pilgrim (the cartoon) is largely about Scott Pilgrim (the story). It is also kind of about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), to be fair, but only in the sense that everyone is “Scott Pilgrim” (the archetype).

Because Takes Off is also a sequel, thematically if not entirely textually, it can get away with snipping out character arcs in some places. Knives, for example, is reduced to a bit player here, and, as others have pointed out, the actual damage of Scott’s insensitivity—in the original, he hastily breaks up with her in a rush after meeting Ramona that leaves her heartbroken and defines her character for the rest of the comic—is by consequence pretty much entirely erased. Is this harmful to the character? Is it harmful to the show? I don’t know! On the one hand; Knives gets to be happy for most of the anime because she had her character development back in the comic and came out the other side a much more mature person. The fact that the show doesn’t literally chronologically follow on from the comic, so this is not technically “the same Knives”, is true, but pointing it out feels like nitpicking. The emotional logic of this sort of thing is a lot more important than the actual logic. On the other hand; Knives being reduced to basically a series of fanservice (in the old sense of the term) cameos guts her character and thus most of the reason people liked her in the first place. Changes like this one are divisive, and they are so for a reason.

The people who do get arcs are the exes—they’re the real stars of the show here, and in particular Roxie is elevated from basically a living joke about “girls having a gay phase in college” to a character with some actual pathos—and Ramona herself. It’s interesting that Ramona gets so much spotlight actually, because while the original comic was definitely mostly Scott’s story, she still got a fair amount of play. Perhaps it’s because the comic was definitely also guilty of sometimes treating Ramona as the unattainable, mysterious maiden she attempts to present herself as. Attempts that are, as the comic points out, covers for her own emotional flaws. Again; the main reason that Ramona and Scott get on so well is that they’re very similar people. The actual plot is a whole haphazard patchwork of goofy shit involving time travel and a whole very meta thing where the events of the series are made into a movie in-universe while they’re actively happening. Explaining all this in more detail would I think get in the way of an important fact; Scott’s biggest enemy is himself. No, literally, as in, him from the future, where he’s broken up with Ramona and is torn up about it and tries to sabotage his own past because of it.

Since, of course, a huge part of Scott Pilgrim is that trying to fix your mistakes is way more important than just feeling bad about them, they eventually reconcile to try again. They will probably try again forever. The amusingly huge Divorced Guy Energy of Future-Scott aside, it’s hard to imagine the two of them ever having a smooth relationship. But a smooth relationship and a fulfilling one are different things, and no matter what form it takes, Scott Pilgrim does understand that much.

On a more lighthearted note the whole thing just looks great. And it left a lot of questions in my mind, too. Questions like “if Scott Pilgrim met Shinji Ikari would they be friends or enemies?” and “how does Ramona dye her hair so often without it getting all dried out?” Anime that make you think are good, I’d say.

All of this then said, the question of whether or not this reimagining is actually “good” seems kind of quaint. I’m still not terribly keen on a future ruled by reboots, reimaginings, and redos, and I still think that this whole phenomenon of western companies hoisting sacks full of money on anime studios and telling them to make a Whatever Anime kind of sucks—although I should take a second here to concede that Brian O’Malley at least seems to have been much more involved in this than is the norm for these things—but if we’re going to keep getting more of these, more of them should probably be like this.

And that’s the list. More or less.

Is Scott Pilgrim Takes Off actually my anime of the year? I don’t know. I didn’t do the whole cutesy “guess my top anime this year, everybody!” contest on social media this time around. Partly because I don’t have a Twitter account that I use in any major capacity anymore, partly because it just seemed like a trick question. I’ve quite liked a few anime this year. Oshi no Ko was much farther back on the list, but despite what I said I probably like it more than this. Or do I? I go back and forth. The same is true with Pokémon Horizons, 100 Girlfriends, and Trigun: Stampede, which I couldn’t manage to finish a writeup on. Some of the older anime that I watched this year, like Earth Maiden Arjuna and The Devil Lady will definitely stick with me more than the vast majority of 2023’s own anime will. And even some anime from this year I genuinely thought were really good, obvious standouts like Skip & Loafer and BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!, I didn’t actually finish. Because! You know! Life is weird and difficult and sometimes even something as simple as making yourself watch a cartoon can be tough! This is without factoring in shows that actively disappointed me, like, again, Magical Destroyers. Or hell, Frieren, a letdown that I don’t really want to talk about in detail. With no better place to put it, here is a short list of honorable mentions that I liked—really liked in a few cases!—but couldn’t come up with even brief writeups for, didn’t finish, or otherwise did not get a full writeup despite every one of them having definitely deserved it.

Anime
- High Card
- Buddy Daddies
- Dead Mount Death Play
- Trigun: Stampede
- The Ice Guy & His “Cool” Female Colleague
- Skip & Loafer
- Helck
- BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!
- SHY
- YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-
Manga
- Touge Oni: Ancient Gods in Primeval Times
- Sakamoto Days
- Witch Watch
- Magical Girl Tsubame: I Will (Not) Save The World!
- Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
- Kindergarten Wars
- Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell!
- Touhou Suichouka: The Lotus Eaters, Drunk & Sober
- Cipher Academy
- Otherside Picnic
Games
- Ultrakill
- Yume Nikki Online Project
- Pokémon Violet’s Teal Mask and Indigo Disk expansions.

Art really has helped me get through an immensely difficult year, and more than just being a source of comfort, it’s given me things to discuss with others, things to look forward to, and moments of genuine sublimity that make the time I put into this medium feel worth it. I’ve rambled a lot in this article, but at the end of the day, I really just want to help people appreciate art, in my own, very specific way. Hopefully, this article helped you do that in some fashion or another. That’s really all I can ask for.

So where does all that leave me, other than with another year down? I honestly don’t know! I have no idea what the future looks like. I was going to type “for this blog” after that, but honestly, it’s just true in general. The future is an open void of unknowability. These days, I’m just thankful for every day I make it through.

And on that note; who knows what 2024 holds? I’m reluctant to make any specific predictions.

But hey, Metallic Rouge looks pretty promising, right?

See you next year.

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on February 16, 2023February 16, 2023 in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Forget Everything Else About CHAINSAW MAN PART 2, Let’s Talk About How Cute Nayuta Is

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

This article contains spoilers for all of Part 1 of Chainsaw Man—which extends very far past what the anime covered—as well as Part 2 up to the current chapter, Chapter 120. If you are not caught up with the manga, stop reading unless you want to be spoiled.

If you wanted to, there is a lot you could discuss with regard to the second part of Tatsuki Fujimoto‘s breakout hit Chainsaw Man. You could talk about its fairly drastic scaling-back of scope compared to Part 1. You could talk about the fun but tense dynamic between Asa and Yoru, Part 2’s main protagonists, and its possible implications going forward. You could talk about the manga’s many unresolved mysteries and how they might be wrapped up before Chainsaw Man one day ends, not the least of which is that of what role, precisely, the mysterious devil hunter Yoshida plays.

You could talk about all of that. But I don’t really want to.

I want to talk about how Nayuta, the new Devil of Control, the Horseman of Conquest herself, is absolutely freaking adorable.

To be fair, we did sort of already know this. When she was introduced in the final pages of Part 1, there was a decidedly creepy undertone to her presence. She was, after all, the Devil of Control. Denji, having just defeated Makima, was understandably not eager to be involved with her reincarnation. Nonetheless, her imitation of Denji’s mannerisms (which continues here) and demand for bread painted a picture of a far less menacing character. Things have changed since then, but it’s still clear that Nayuta is no Makima.

She was, however, absent from the manga for a pretty significant length of time (not as long as still-AWOL Part 1’ers like Kobeni or Kishibe, but still quite a while), and it became clear simply from the length of that absence that her eventual return would be a big event. It has been! She’s reintroduced to the manga by Denji calling her a “problem child with an extreme personality”, and then this happening, in her first on-panel appearance since Part 1.

There’s a lot we could talk about here, even! Yoru did basically force the kiss in the immediate prior panel on Denji, so you can make a pretty decent case that Nayuta is just being protective. And hey, listen, maybe she is! That’s basically what I think. Who wouldn’t react in a pretty extreme way upon seeing some random girl frenching their older brother apparently against his will? Nayuta’s strong reactions are just more noticeable than other peoples’ because she is, of course, still the Devil of Control.

But something that’s much more important than all this is that Nayuta is extremely adorable.

I realize this is unbelievable given that it’s me saying it, but I’m not really putting forward any grand thesis here. The most recent chapter—120, which went up two days ago, on February 14th—has made it very clear that she’s an absolute chucklegremlin. Look at this.

Are you really going to try to argue with that? She looks like she just convinced her parents to buy her an expensive scooter and is dead set on immediately running over the foot of every adult in a 5 mile radius with it. She looks like she was the baby that someone stole candy from and is gloating because she stole it back and kicked the thief in the nuts while doing so. She makes the sound “Gya ha ha ha ha!” when she laughs, apparently. She’s moe, alright? You need to accept this.

^{Point of clarification: in this panel, “this dog” refers not to any of the literal dogs, even the one that’s actually in-frame, but to Yoru. Confusing, I know.}

(And because I know some people perpetually have their minds in the gutter, I do not mean she’s cute in a leery way. She’s like twelve; be normal.)

She also thinks of “wet dog” as a pleasant odor, which is super weird, but she and Denji do keep like 40,000 dogs in their apartment, so maybe it makes a kind of sense.

Again, no grand thesis or theory here. I could spin yarns about how even Nayuta’s worst behavior in these past two chapters is way less terrible than anything Makima ever did, the already-mentioned fact that trying to pry Denji and Asa apart—especially if Nayuta knows about Denji’s ‘love life’—is entirely reasonable, that there are several points in just the few pages here where she could use her powers but doesn’t, and so on and so forth. But really, I know better than to try to pin down where a Fujimoto story is going in advance by now. And really, who cares? Funny gremlin child – look at her.

You may be asking some further questions at this point, such as “is that really it?” and “are you only writing this to paper over the fact that you didn’t get to work on commissions this week” or “are you being mind-controlled by Nayuta herself into writing this flattering but ultimately pointless puff piece?” to which the answers are, in order “yes”, “maybe”, and “well, how would I know?” respectively.

See you next Tuesday on MangaPlus, folks.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on January 1, 2023January 25, 2023 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

Ranking Every 2022 Anime I Actually Finished from Worst to Best – Part 4: The Top 5 Anime of 2022

Here it is, the top 5.

I have to be honest, for whatever reason, much more than the past two years, I feel actively nervous about posting this. I’m not sure why? It’s not like my picks for last year were uncontroversial. Regardless, after a very extensive regime of writing, re-writing, editing, and re-re-writing(!), I have settled on a form for this list that I am mostly happy with. Hopefully you enjoy it, as well.

#5. SHINEPOST

Yeah, I like SHINEPOST more than BOCCHI THE ROCK. I almost feel the need to apologize for that opinion, but I can’t lie to y’all. Between the two, I liked this one just the slightest bit more, despite it being arguably the more conventional of the two. It is what it is, I could’ve gone either way. (And as mentioned yesterday, I did. SHINEPOST and BOCCHI switched places on this list several times.)

But enough handwringing, why’s it actually good? Well, SHINEPOST is rather unlike its genre-fellows on this list. It’s not utopian and relentlessly pleasant like Love Live, and it’s not a candy-surreal kids’ anime dream sequence like Waccha Primagi. Instead, SHINEPOST‘s best and most defining moments chronicle the stomach-flipping knots of anxiety that come from being a performing artist, the demons that can eat a performer’s psyche alive if left unchecked, and the very real camaraderie to be found in those fields anyway, in spite of all that. (In that sense, it’s actually slightly more of a piece with BOCCHI, although they, too, are fairly different.) SHINEPOST, in its brisk single cour, manages to touch on the pressure to succeed, how even modest fame can both weld new friendships together and cleave old ones apart, the fear of never being good enough and the burden of being too good, plus the ticking clockwork of the industry itself. The goal is simple and straightforward from episode 1; TINGS, the protagonists, must fill Nakano Sunplaza to its pleasantly symmetrical 2,222-person capacity for their first anniversary concert. If they can’t, their time with their agency, and as an idol group, is over.

I’m loathe to even float the word “deconstruction” in my writing, especially in its latter-day TVTropes-y usage. But it’s worth pulling up here, not because it describes SHINEPOST but because it neatly defines what it isn’t. All of this, frankly, pretty heavy shit, comes not from some desire to criticize or pull away from the girl group idol anime genre, but from a real love of it. Something that was trying to put distance between itself and its genre’s foundational texts would not be mythologizing something as mundane as a venue in the way SHINEPOST does.

More than that, though, the series’ real strength is that by laying its characters bare; showing their insecurities, their weaknesses, the complexes that gnaw away at their very psyches, it can really make you root for them in a way that something comparatively fluffy (such as again, Love Live) can’t manage to the same degree. If anything, SHINEPOST reminds me a lot more of that series’ perennial rival, Idolmaster, whose 2011 TV series remains the definitive golden standard for this genre. SHINEPOST is a true underdog; a scrappy series about a scrappy idol group from a still relatively-young studio (Studio KAI. Their second entry on this list after Fuuto PI), and all of those hardships, no matter how serious or melodramatic, are buildup to the absolutely electric immediacy of its finale. Even the absolute corniest plot details, like the etymology of the show’s very title (it’s a portmanteau of “shining guidepost”), hit like pure bolts of lightning.

And that kind of momentary transcendence, where you forget that you’re watching a silly cartoon and feel the energy? That is why it’s the best idol anime of 2022. TINGS kill it; accept no substitutes.

#4. CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS

Few anime come with this mixed a pedigree. Sure, Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a TRIGGER series directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, a fact that comes with a hell of a lot of goodwill, but pretty much everything else about this thing would give anyone good reason to be skeptical; start with the fact that it’s a tie-in to the rightly-polarizing open world game Cyberpunk 2077, skip over to the fact that it’s got a Franz Ferdinand song as its OP theme, and roll on from there. I won’t lie, there’s a part of me—and it’s not a small part!—that wanted to boot Edgerunners from the list entirely. I considered deliberately putting off watching it until next year so I wouldn’t have to rank it, and even now that I have seen it, there remains a temptation to dock points less for what it is and more for where it came from. I’m not sure I want many anime to be globally-released tie-in promos for broken-on-release AAA video games. Certainly, the fact that you still, months after the anime’s been out on streaming platforms worldwide, can’t reasonably watch the Japanese audio track with English subtitles (well, you can try, but the sloppy dubtitle track doesn’t really work with the JP audio at all. Thankfully the dub is excellent; this is the only release on the list I watched dubbed, in fact!) is case enough that this probably isn’t how anime should be made.

All this in mind, it’s almost painful how fucking good this thing is. Edgerunners burns so bright that it leaves scorch marks: black as melted plastic and twice as toxic, pure neon, grime and dirt.

David, our protagonist, is a person stripped of his humanity both systemically, and, eventually, with violence. He loses his mother, his home, his status as a citizen, his sanity, his humanity, and, eventually, his life. In one sense, Edgerunners is a gradual sanding-down of his personhood until nothing is left.

Lucy, his co-lead, is an unscrupulous hacker who runs with a mercenary crew. Secretly, she harbors a dream of visiting the moon. It’s a poetic hyperbole; the stars we hang in the sky to keep ourselves going made very literal.

To home in on one specific example, no single moment in anime this year conveys the sheer amount of blasted-out trauma as episode six, which sees the character Maine completely lose his mind as a side-effect of his cybernetic implants. The result is harrowing; all gunfire and blood on the floor. That point is where I realized that putting this anywhere outside the top five would’ve required me to do some major mental gymnastics.

On the whole, the series is deeply discomforting and utterly visceral to watch in action. If this isn’t how anime should be made from a production pipeline point of view, it definitely is how they should be made in terms of having a strong creative vision and following it through to the end as thoroughly as you possibly can. RIP David Martinez; reduced to a tale for the next dreamer.

#3: Chainsaw Man

Forget, for a moment, everything else. Forget the rest of this list, forget that there ever was a Chainsaw Man manga, forget the very notion of ranking and reviewing and processing, debating, analyzing. Focus on one image; a chainsaw, covered in rust, and in blood – which itself will be rust soon enough. Now focus on the boy holding it, the boy who became it. And think, for a moment, about what it takes to travel the vast canyon between those two images.

I have called Chainsaw Man many things on this site, but if you strip everything away; the need to intellectualize the art we love, the fanbase, even the original material itself, you are left with those two images and the gap between them. A boy and his dog; a boy and his instrument of bloody fucking murder. Love twisted up and turned violent in the name of protection, in the name of needing to escape, in the name of trading bad for worse because you don’t know what better looks like. A frizzy-haired punk kid with a drawn knife; that, essentially, is Chainsaw Man.

A lot of other things are Chainsaw Man too, of course. Everyone Denji meets during his journey is or becomes part of him. In some cases, in ways the anime itself has yet to reveal. Death is ever-present, and any insinuation otherwise is a facade.

So, what form does this take? Well, young Denji is a devil-hunter, a professional mower-down of wicked monsters that spawn from humanity’s own fears, from the trivial to the deep-seated. He’s raised by a coldhearted yakuza, only to end up in the care of Public Safety, Japan’s own government-controlled devil-killer force. Along the way he strives for any kind of human connection, gleefully oblivious to his own desires. A recurring refrain from the character is that all he really needs or wants is a roof over his head, three meals a day, and maybe, ambitiously, to touch a girl’s chest before he dies.

Consciously, he probably does think that’s true, but it’s obvious from very early on that he’s looking for something deeper, and that un-articulated desire for true human connection lands him squarely in the palm of Public Safety’s obviously sinister head, Makima. This plot goes unresolved in the first season, but it is already obvious that she doesn’t have his best interests in mind. In this way, Denji is all of us, a hardworking guy being ruthlessly exploited by the system that provides him the few things that he can truly call his own. He makes and then loses his very first friend over the course of just these twelve episodes; how much more is in store for our boy, and how much more can he take?

That’s without even getting into the tangible specifics of the CSM anime as an adaptation. It is a markedly different experience from the manga; slick and polished but never sterile, engaged wholeheartedly in a deep emulation of the live action film that informs so much of original mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto‘s work. It also probably has the best soundtrack of anything on this list, with a truly ridiculous twelve separate ending themes—one for each episode!—all of which go ridiculously hard in their own way. On the whole, we can easily say that, yes, this is the best-case scenario for adapting this material. Season 2 cannot come soon enough.

So yeah, all that poetic nonsense and it’s still only at #3. Look! I hate feeling like I have to justify every placement on this list, but this one does warrant at least a little explanation, I think. Part of it is that the show does have a tiny amount of minor flaws—a handful of very minor production gripes in a few specific scenes in a few specific episodes. On a narrative level you could also maybe make the case that Himeno dies a little too soon—but mostly, it’s just that incredibly, the Chainsaw Man anime has not actually gotten to the truly unhinged parts of its source material quite yet, and I’d feel a little bad for putting the cart before the horse. What point is there in giving out a gold medal to a rookie athlete? Even the very best have room for improvement. If I’m going to rank Chainsaw Man as the best anime in a given year, I want it to be a season where it is at the absolute fucking apex of its powers, something I can’t deny. Until then, it can settle for the bronze.

So, on that admittedly shaky logic. Yeah, still just third place. I could have put it at #1, and I would’ve felt just fine about doing so. To be honest, I like this, my #2 and my #1 pick about equally (I could maybe even argue for Edgerunners back in the last entry). But the following two anime are a little more undersung, and they’re also more self-contained, two things that do matter to me. I have to confess a certain irrational fondness for the underdog, too. So just wait, Chainsaw Man. Your day has yet to truly come.

#2. Vampire in The Garden

To be honest, I so badly want to just tell you to read my review of this, where I was reduced to clumsy poetry in an attempt to convey, if not necessarily describe, what this series means to me. But for one thing that’s lazy, for another thing, would it really help? I am still not done processing Vampire in The Garden, an achingly beautiful piece of fiction, and perhaps an important one as well.

The real truth of the matter is that queer stories that treat queer characters as people are still far rarer than you might assume. There are plenty that are cute, or that use us as tear-jerking props in a cynical way, but there aren’t really that many that feel lived-in, studied, like they were made to resonate with an audience of proper fucking queers first and foremost, with anyone else as a secondary concern. Vampire in the Garden really does feel that way. Is it intentional or just a staggering coincidence? If it is intentional, as far as I’m aware, no one’s ever said as much, so ultimately, I can’t really say so. What I can say is that Vampire feels important, if not to “queer people” as a group, then at least to me, personally. Somewhat frustratingly, though, it is such a shining, glistening thing that it falls apart like gossamer if you try to grasp it too tightly. You can describe its plot, but describing why it’s great is much harder.

In basic terms, Vampire is a story about two people who fill a void in each other’s lives. Both protagonists, the human factory worker Momo and the vampire queen-on-the-run Fine, have lost someone close to them. Through the struggle of eventually connecting with each other and healing through this shared loss, they are beaten down again by the world around them; both the vampires that seek to return Fine to her throne and the humans who hunt Momo down as a traitor, to be returned to her dreary existence in the city-tower-prison that much of humankind now resides in. Along the way, they seek an ineffable “paradise”, somewhere they can coexist in peace. Will it surprise you to learn they never find it? Not really, anyway. They pass through Fine’s own dilapidated manor, a segregated town where vampires and humans live side by side in only the most literal of senses, a village run on blood sacrifice, and so on. Fine ends up dead long before they find this mystical paradise, and there is more than a little suggestion that it doesn’t really exist.

But does that render Fine and Momo’s time together moot? Absolutely not. And that is what makes Vampire feel so vital (and so vitally queer) to me; the world sucks, and it often conspires to rip us apart whenever it can. It is absolutely crucial that we appreciate our time together, while it lasts.

So! That’s most of the list. There’s only one entry left. As with last year, I put up a tweet about a month before this went up, where I asked people to guess what they thought my number 1 pick would be.

This year, two people got it right.

What can I say? Congratulations to Blue Dash. And hell, I’ll throw in a shout out to my good friend Josh, too, since he mentioned it out loud while were talking at one point.

#1. Healer Girl

I am keenly aware of just how transient what I do here at Magic Planet Anime truly is. Anime criticism as a medium is still essentially in its infancy—most of us aren’t much more than consumer advocates, telling you to either spend or not spend your precious leisure time watching some particular series or another—and it would be very, very naive to assume that anything I write here will ever persist throughout the ages. If anyone writing in this field now makes anything that endures, it’s unlikely to be me.

I write anyway because when something really does touch me on a deep, personal level, I end up feeling like I have to scream it from the mountaintops. This doesn’t happen often—I like most anime, but the amount that I truly love, in the way where I know I will come back to them five, ten years from now, is much smaller, and rarely does a given year produce more than one or two such pieces—but when it does, I really feel like little else in the world matters to me, in those moments. 2022, astoundingly, produced four, and we’ve just met three of them. This is the fourth. Healer Girl, my favorite anime of 2022.

It is a font of genuine, deep light and warmth. It’s really all in the name; Healing. The iyashikei genre rarely gets the credit it’s due over here in the anglosphere, but in Healer Girl, the genre has found its best representative in many years.

I have to confess; I spent much of 2022 so, so, so tired, and so, so, so sick. I have gone through more than one total emotional breakdown, caused at least in part by a ten-car pileup of illnesses I have been battling and continue to battle. I won’t go into details because to be honest it’s not anyone’s business but my own, but know that it has sucked. Many days, I have gotten up and wondered if I’d really be able to continue writing like I have been, even though this site, for better or worse, is the project I’ve started in my life that means the most to me, by an order of magnitude. Without embellishment, 2022 was a profoundly shitty year for me. Probably the worst I’ve had since moving to Chicago in 2018.

Through it all, Healer Girl, perhaps improbably, has remained a source of genuine comfort. In a year where I had been having less of a bad time overall, maybe I would’ve been more comfortable putting something darker at #1. But I didn’t, and I can’t truly see into those possible parallel presents. So Healer Girl it is, because I need it—because we need it.

Part of it is the music; the opening notes of “Feel You, Heal You”, tap into some deep, rarely-touched part of my psyche, perhaps it’s the part that used to fall asleep listening to Wilson-Philipps and Faith Hill on a grainy radio when I was very young, perhaps it’s the same part that, when I was a younger anime watcher, cemented Kamichu!, which I saw on a bootleg streaming site that no longer exists, as one of my very first favorite anime. Whatever it is, and no matter how corny I’m sure it may seem to anyone who isn’t me, that connection is real, and extends not just to the music, but to the series built around it.

Healer Girl’s premise promises a cross between a “magical girl“ series of a variety unknown ’til now, a medical drama, and a slice of life anime. In practice, it’s all of these and none of them. It has all of the magical girl genre’s storms of massive feeling and emotion, a medical drama’s focus on literal lifesaving, and the school life genre’s easygoing warmth, but even as it feels born of these genres, it stands apart from them. Its great visual trick is the “image song;” literal conjurings of the magic music that the series’ world runs on. This is not something that would exist in a lesser series, and I’ve seen similar things only a handful of times. Almost on its own, this is what elevates Healer Girl into a truly rare artistic achievement. (The show is so good that while it has probably the year’s single best episode, its fifth, the Night on the Galactic Railroad-referencing “Blue Skies, Green Mountains, River Battles and the Galactic Station“, this is almost an afterthought compared to its more general brilliancies.)

Healer Girl’s magnetism is difficult to explain in this way, because the series was not—is not—an event. There is no “Healer Girl fandom”, or at least, not a particularly large one. The show inspired no complicated thinkpieces or vigorous debates on its nature and true meaning. The impression I get is that the show was mostly liked, but just liked, by those who saw it, and I am something of an outlier for loving it as much as I do. Fundamentally, it’s a very simple anime, and whether or not it resonates with a given person is, I imagine, largely down to the old intangibles of feeling and mood. In this sense, I can imagine picking it as my #1, putting it in The Top Spot, might be contentious. (I doubt nearly as much as my #1 pick for 2021, admitttedly, but that’s another conversation.)

To me, Healer Girl doesn’t even really feel like a contemporary anime. It feels at once like a relic from a lost past and a transmission from some far-off, idyllic, solar future. A broadcast from a different universe; a softer world, one where the soothing tones of gentle music really can heal the sick. It is the endless everyday implicitly promised by all slice of life anime warmed with a gentle heat and decorated with floral blooms; an outstretched hand, whenever you need it. That, to me, is 2022’s best anime. If you feel it, it’ll heal you, a panacea in the darkness and the sickness.

Thus, the list—and the year here at Magic Planet Anime, although by the time you read this it’ll already be the first day of 2023—comes to a close.

I am very curious to hear your thoughts. Did you love it? Did you hate it? Were your picks similar or wildly different? I’m interested to know, so don’t be afraid to drop a comment or hit me up on any of my many social media locations below, I recently re-did my article footer with links to basically every site I maintain a presence for this blog on. Feel free to look around!

Let me take a moment here to also thank everyone who’s read this list—or any of my articles here over the past year—it really, truly means the world to me. While I’m at it, let me thank my good friends on the following Discord servers with funny names; The Magic Planet Anime server, the original The Magic Planet server, the Satellite Night Anime Block server, the Secret Scrunkly Server, Mugcord, and the Lesbian Radiohead Fans server. All of you have made ’22 so much better than it would’ve been alone, and I appreciate y’all a lot. I need to also give a shout out to my repeat commenters: you guys are the best, and make this blog feel so much more alive than it would if it were just me writing with no responses.

And lastly, just before I go, and as mentioned back in Part 1 of the list. If you can do so, and found the list worthwhile, please do contribute (either on Ko-Fi or Patreon), it was extremely effort-intensive. For your reference, I am writing this at about 8PM on the 30th. Crunch in writing is real, friends! Be careful out there! I’ve certainly learned some lessons about how I’m going to handle this for next year, now that I know there’s a real audience for the end-to-end breakdown rather than just a simple top 5. And for those who have already recently contributed, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Again, it’s hard to articulate how much that means to me.

As for the site itself, I don’t plan to do regular seasonal coverage for the upcoming season, but I may drop occasional articles here and there on the more interesting stuff and will probably do at least a small few first impressions. (I’m very interested to see what’s up with the Nier: Automata anime, for example.) More than that, I have a lot of commissions to get cracking on! Hopefully you’ll enjoy those reviews when they go live.

Until next year (which is already this year for you) Magic Planet 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 Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on December 27, 2022December 27, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CHAINSAW MAN Episode 12 – “Katana vs. Chainsaw” (SEASON FINALE)

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

Twelve weeks of blood on chainsaws, and here we are.

A lot has been said—and a lot more will be said, both here and elsewhere—about Chainsaw Man, inarguably the year’s finest action anime, and among its best character pieces as well. But for one last time, at least until season two, let’s dial in and focus on this week’s episode specifically.

For the most part, this is our climactic fight. If we place Chainsaw Man in the grand anime tradition, it’s the end of this arc. Here, Denji and Katana Man—aka Samurai Sword—square off. It will not shock you to learn that Denji is of course the one who triumphs, his first major rival defeated soundly. With bells on, even.

But, this is Chainsaw Man. There is a lot more going on here than just a huge, flashy fight. Even if the huge flashy fight is a big part of the appeal and is a core component of what makes this episode so good.

For one thing, we open back with Aki, strangled into unconsciousness by the apparently turncoat Ghost Devil. He has, yet again, more flashbacks of Himeno, soundtracked to a quiet, lo-fi piano and drum piece as Himeno offers the then-a-minor Aki a cigarette, manages to talk him into taking it despite his initial reluctance, and then backtracks when he reminds her that he’s underage. (Say what you will about Himeno, she certainly had….some kind of moral fiber.) But when he comes to, things are different. The Ghost Devil looms over him, unmoving, and before Sawatari can really even process what’s happening, the Ghost Devil hands Aki a cigarette. On it is written perhaps the most iconic thing to be penciled on a cig in an anime since “Never Knows Best.”

Aki releases the Ghost Devil from its pseudo-contract with Sawatari, and the woman herself doesn’t last much longer.

This entire opening scene—and really, the whole episode—also drives home a point I’ve been trying to articulate about the Chainsaw Man anime in general. Visuals like these put the lie to there being any merit to all of those “anime vs. the manga” comparisons. An anime is designed to look best in motion, it will always lose that particular contest, because it’s not trying to look good in stills. One of the things that consistently makes the Chainsaw Man anime so great is that it is in no way redundant with the manga. You can read that, and watch this, and get two experiences that are, visually, very distinct!

Which brings me to the next major sequence, and, really, the climax of the entire first season. Chainsaw Man vs. Katana Man. Following a dryly amusing bit where Katana Man tries to get Denji to just kill himself over the immense guilt he’s sure that Denji feels for killing a bunch of yakuza who’d turned into zombies, the battle proper begins, and it is a sight. Normally, I try to be at least broadly poetic when describing this kind of all-feel fight scene, but to be honest, what do you want me to say here? The idea that someone could watch this and not think it’s the coolest shit ever is completely foreign to me. And hey, Denji and Katana’s banter is pretty good throughout, too.

And of course there’s the highest note of all. When the battle moves from office to mid-sky to train, Katana Man briefly seems to have the upper hand when he’s literally disarmed Denji by cutting his arms off. That doesn’t actually matter, of course. Denji is smart enough to use his head to finish the job.

And that, friends, is how Katana Man goes from giving Denji a fair fight to being bisected from scalp to backside. The man is turned into a one-color impressionist painting, it’s really quite impressive.

But of course, he’s not actually dead. We get explicit confirmation that Katana Man is, indeed, the same sort of Devil-Human hybrid as Denji, and the Katana Devil’s replaced his heart. This leads us to a scene that would absolutely not work in most other fiction; Denji deciding to torture the tied-up Katana Man by repeatedly kicking him in the nuts. Moreover, doing so with Aki’s help, as the two compete to see who can make him scream the loudest. Somehow, this works as a genuine moment of bonding; Denji’s goofy personality rubbing off just the tiniest bit on Aki, who is serious enough that even right up until he joins in, he tries to convince himself (and Denji) that Himeno wouldn’t want them to do this. (To which my only response is, come on, man.)

So yes. That is how the first season of Chainsaw Man ends, with an act of joint petty revenge, with a metallic ding every time they kick him, and with a slow motion effect that turns the entire scene from mild amusement into genuine hilarity.

Except, of course, it doesn’t really end there. There is more going on. A lot more! There’s Makima reporting to her shadowy superiors, where we get the bombshell that Public Safety has gotten enough Gun Devil flesh from the raid on the building that it’s started to move toward the main body. There’s the credits scene, wholly original to the anime, that consists mostly of Denji, Power, and Aki having a fairly quiet evening at home. There’s Aki finally smoking the “Easy revenge!” cigarette, and, in the closing minutes of the episode, there is a brief, fleeting cameo from a character we haven’t met yet.

But we’ll get to all of that, because I really, really doubt that Chainsaw Man as an anime ends here. It’s just getting started.

Bonus Power Screencap: Here’s a picture of Power drinking out of a water fountain, because I know some of you are thirsty like that.

A brief programming note: This is my last weekly recap of the season, of course. But it might also be my last for a while in general. I don’t currently plan to do a Let’s Watch column for the upcoming anime season, I simply have too much else to work on, both in terms of material for this site and in terms of real-life stuff that needs doing.

If things change, I will let you all know. Until then, 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 Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on December 20, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CHAINSAW MAN Episode 11 – “Mission Start”

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

To some, it will seem a little surprising that we’re already near the end of the first season of Chainsaw Man. But quite a lot has happened over the past eleven weeks, and the foot is not taken off the gas pedal for a single second of episode 11.

We lead by catching up with Aki. As mentioned, he’s pushed to contract with a new Devil, one who is apparently known for taking quite hefty prices—the examples we’re given are “both eyes” and “half of the contractor’s lifespan”—and we meet that devil here. Don’t let the reputation fool you, though. He’s a surprisingly jovial sort. Meet the Devil of The Future.

He offers to contract with Aki for nothing more than the small price of living unobtrusively in his right eyeball. Why does he want that? Well, he says it best himself.

Aki says that he doesn’t care how he dies as long as he can get his revenge on the Gun Devil. But, notably, at no point does he think to ask the Future Devil (who would presumably know) if he eventually succeeds in doing so. Intentional foreshadowing? Just Aki drawing a mental blank that has no deeper significance? Neither? Both? I leave that question up to you.

A solid amount of the episode focuses on Makima having meetings; first with Kishibe and then with a Yakuza boss. If that sounds dry, rest assured that it very much is not. These are possibly the most substantiative character moments that Makima’s gotten so far. Plus, she is wonderfully stone cold throughout both. The character has a real ice-and-iron magnetism, and even if these scenes were about nothing much, she’d be a joy to watch.

Kishibe calls her out to try to discern her true intentions. Evidently, it’s clear even to him that she’s up to something. (Direct quote: He doesn’t care “what fucked shit [she] has cooking” as long as she’s serving mankind’s general interests. Kind of a wild thing to say!) He also accuses her of knowing about the train attack beforehand and doing nothing to stop it. When she reminds him that she was attacked too, and uses this fact to imply that there’s no way she could’ve known anything. Plus, a decidedly creepy grin, and the reassurance that her main goal is to “save as many people as possible from devils.” Oddly exact wording, maybe. Perhaps picking up on this, Kishibe flat-out calls her a liar, and the scene cuts away.

After another Aki scene (pretty good in its own right, but minor compared to everything else that happens here), we again join in on Makima meeting up with someone. This time, it’s the aforementioned Yakuza boss. Her goal here is simple enough; she wants his cooperation, a list of names of everyone both in his own family and in all the others who’ve contracted with the Gun Devil. (These “contracts” apparently consist of little more than giving the Gun Devil money and getting guns and ammo in return. The thing being a glorified firearm dealer is certainly something to chew on.) He refuses, arguing that this’d spark a gang war. Then, he doubles down, and tries to intimidate her while simultaneously justifying his own actions. If the Yakuza didn’t do what it did, he claims, then foreign mafias would elbow their way in to Japan. It’s a necessary evil, really.

This kind of self-justification evidently does not sit particularly well with Makima, whose own counterargument (it’s only a “necessary evil” if the state controls it) is pretty dubious on its own, but its effectiveness as a rhetorical point is rendered pretty irrelevant by what she does next; plops down a brown paper bag filled with eyes. Those of the various yakuza members’ girlfriends, parents, grandparents, etc.

With the frightening reassurance that, yes, Public Safety does have somebody who can put them back in, somehow or another, she gets her list. What exactly she does with it is not textually spelled out, but when the Yakuza goons start getting spontaneous nosebleeds and passing out cold later in the episode, it’s not difficult to draw a connection.

Which brings us to the episode’s final act; Special Division 4’s assault on the building where Katana Man and Sawatari are holed up (said building is infested not just with the Yakuza but also with a zombie army, a remnant of the Zombie Devil’s power). Kishibe leads the operation, and as he explains to the decidedly less-badass rabble that Div. 4 is operating alongside, they should be more worried about the mostly-non-human operatives of Division 4 itself than they should the terrorists. In practice, this is an excuse to give us a stylish introduction to several new characters. Enter Division 4’s ringers. In no particular order, we have:

Beam, the Shark Fiend (Natsuki Hanae), who can swim through any surface and briefly turn back into his proper Devil form to chomp basically anything in half.

The Violence Fiend (Yuuya Uchida), on the extreme rational end for a fiend, and strong enough that Public Safety straps him with a poison gas-emitting mask even in situations like, well, what happens during this episode.

The Spider Devil (Saori Gotou); who has a human woman’s torso with a zipper running up the center and, appropriately, eight legs that she can use to kick the ever-loving fuck out of things.

And finally, the Angel Devil (Maaya Uchida), who despite his waifish appearance can drain the life force from anything with a touch.

The entire final ten or so minutes of the episode look absolutely fantastic, and should once again quell any doubt about the Chainsaw Man anime’s worthiness as an adaptation from a style point of view. The real interesting fight, though, doesn’t involve any of these new characters. Instead, it involves Aki, who gets the chance to confront Sawatari head-on, and—this is unspoken, but fairly obvious—avenge Himeno’s death.

There is only one problem; Sawatari’s Snake Devil can somehow “spit back up” the other devils it’s eaten. Which means that as the episode ends, Aki is face to face with this; the Ghost Devil, returning to strangle the life out of him under Sawatari’s orders.

Will he survive? This hardly seems like the death that “fucking rules” that the Future Devil promised Aki, but maybe he just has a sick sense of humor. Who can say?

Bonus Power Screencap: Despite everything else it’s packed with, this episode doesn’t actually feature a ton of Power. Thankfully, she puts in a stylish monochrome appearance in the ED. Here’s that.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on December 13, 2022December 16, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CHAINSAW MAN Episode 10 – “Bruised & Battered”

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

Chainsaw Man does not really do “slow” or “transitional” episodes. Even so, episode 10 is a comparative breather. The series takes its foot off the gas here for the first time in a while, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean that this episode is in any way lacking. Pathos, humor, and a surprising amount of action are all here. Chainsaw Man doesn’t do “minor” episodes, either.

We open with Aki awaking in the hospital, some days after the attack by Katana Man and his co-conspirators. One must imagine he’s a bit disoriented. Himeno, his partner of a number of years, is dead, as is much of the rest of his division. He himself was taken down during the fight and seems to only have survived through sheer coincidence. What does he awake to find? Just Power and Denji eating most of his get-well soon basket. Just another day in the life.

After they leave, he finds himself frustratedly thumb-flicking a lighter that won’t start, breaking down into a crying fit as the repeated click-click-click of the flint dissolves into memories of Himeno.

Denji has an interesting moment here, as well, on just the other side of Aki’s hospital door. As he recalls that Himeno, one of the first people who’s ever shown him any genuine kindness, is now dead, he realizes that he feels basically nothing. Musing on it further, he realizes he wouldn’t be terribly sad if Power died either. Even Makima, for how big of a spot she occupies in Denji’s mind, would only incur about “three days” of mourning, he guesses. He wonders if he’s lost his heart in more than one sense, before deciding to shove the thought away for the time being because it’s depressing. (I bet he and Finn from Adventure Time could have a very long conversation about that particular technique.) All this before the OP even drops.

After the cut, we follow up on that whole “training” suggestion from last week, and the episode forks in two. Denji and Power get a new teacher, in the form of the chronically drunk, middle-aged devil hunter Kishibe (Kenjiro Tsuda, doing his thing). Kishibe is an enigmatic figure, but slots neatly into the archetype of the drunken mentor. His method for training Denji and Power? Killing them! Over and over and over again, and then healing them back up with blood so they can recover.

Slorp.

He reasons that, since he is (apparently) the strongest-ever devil hunter, if they end up being able to kill him, they’ll be able to kill even the strongest devil without any problems. This is Chainsaw Man’s idea of a training episode; our heroes having their necks snapped and their throats slashed out by the guy who’s trying to build them into better badasses.

When, after the first night of this hellish training is over, Denji complains, you understand where he’s coming from. This is unfair and completely sucks, he says. He’s been working hard because he wants to live his version of the “easy life”, a warm bed, hot showers, three meals a day, etc. But now that Kishibe’s hellish training routine is in the picture, he feels demoralized, and worst of all, this new stepping-up of responsibilities isn’t because of anything he actually did. The Gun Devil wants his heart for some unknown reason. As far as he knows, he has no part in that.

All of this will seem eminently reasonable to anyone who is, or has ever been, part of the mundane workforce. (And probably to more than a few other Devil Hunters as well, although I don’t think any of those read my articles. If you do, please tell me how you got Internet access in the Fujimotoverse in the comments below.)

There’s a particularly lovely bit here where Power and Denji recoup their energy while walking home along a highway at night. They plot to take Kishibe out and hopefully escape their current training regimen as soon as possible, but more than anything, the scene demonstrates a real camaraderie between the two, in spite of what Denji may worry about his own self.

Aki has a decidedly less pleasant experience during the course of this episode. Himeno’s younger sister—who we see here for the first and only time—delivers him Himeno’s letters. In a scene that’s almost completely identical to the manga, Aki reads them, and realizes that Himeno was trying to get the both of them to quit, or at least to go private, for years. Yet another sucker punch to the gut for Aki, who, I’m realizing upon re-experiencing this story for now the third time, seems to have worse luck than even Kobeni.

The episode ends with Aki being escorted to an underground facility where Public Safety keeps the devils they’ve managed to capture alive. Here, in this rusting cage somewhere beneath the Earth, Aki meets his new devil partner, who, we’re helpfully informed, has previously asked his contractors for such pleasant things as “half of their lifespan” and “both eyes.” What will it ask of Aki? We don’t know, the end credits drop in here, leaving that a question for the future.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on December 6, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CHAINSAW MAN Episode 9 – “From Kyoto”

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

The highest praise that I, personally, can bestow on an anime has nothing to do with my writing at all. It’s a feeling, a kind of half-anxious, half-excited wriggling in my gut. Butterflies; basically, not out of serious anxiety that a show might “get bad” or any malformed pessimistic instinct of the sort, but from the sheer, imminent thrill of where something might go next. It is a very basic lizard brain sort of thing, and it’s not something I really have any control over. It’s one thing to feel like this when I’m not familiar with the source material—or if there is no source material—but today, as I sit here at 9 AM waiting patiently for the newest episode of Chainsaw Man to release, is the first time I’ve ever gotten it from an anime where I already totally know how this story ends. I am that excited purely from the sugar rush of this series being put to silver screen, yet again.

Maybe that means nothing to you, but to me, it’s another badge on CSM’s already well-decorated vest. One it’s really only just put on, in the grand scheme of things, given that we’re heading into the finale of the first of what is sure to be many seasons. Last week, when I was regrettably sick, we saw Chainsaw Man take its combat direction to another level as lives were lost, cursed phantoms appeared from the ether, and seemingly the series’ very foundations were torn to shreds in mere minutes.

This week? Vengeance with the V from Violence.

The last act of the Ghost Devil, Himeno’s now-former contracted devil, is to pull Denji’s ripcord before she finally vanishes. He and Katana Man go for round two in a fight scene that would be the highlight of an episode of nearly any other shonen anime. They slug it out something fierce, and Sawatari, Katana Man’s handler, even calls in some backup. But Chainsaw Man tends to swing for the fences, and this scene, while nice, is fairly conventional compared to what follows. I say this despite the fact that it ends with Denji being cut in half at the waist and left for dead. (You’ll forgive me for not pretending that there’s any real chance he’s going to stay dead in the anime named after him.)

A cue Chainsaw Man wisely takes from its most accomplished ancestors in the shonen anime field is that, while it is ultimately an ensemble piece, it knows to let each individual player showcase their strengths. By analogy; these are solos, stretches of the story where a single character becomes the focus on all levels; aesthetically and thematically bending the series itself to their personal rhythms. Chainsaw Man‘s ninth episode features, basically, two of these showcases, and they are wonderful, things of true frightful glory with fairly few peers in this—or any—anime season.

Makima, to the surprise of, I imagine, no one, is not dead. The episode pivots over to her part of the story through shots of the dead; eerie, still, and silent. Indeed, one of the bodies the camera lingers on is hers. That silence is final for most of the passengers aboard the train that the terrorists hit in last week’s episode. But, evidently, it isn’t so for Makima herself.

^{Makima jumpscare.}

When that train finally rolls in to its original destination, Makima is the one who steps off; covered in blood that is mostly not her own but evidently not actually any worse for wear. The two here-unnamed Devil Hunters she links up with are quickly drafted into a support plot. Simply put, no one involved has the time to speed back to Tokyo to help Denji and friends. Instead, Makima will “do what [she] can” from afar.

So what does “what she can” entail?

Well, I will start by saying, I think almost anyone with even a tiny smidgen of media literacy will pick up on the fact, very early in Chainsaw Man, that there is something decidedly off about Makima. But this episode is the first time we see just how “off” she really is. Let’s put it this way; her plan requires her to be taken to the highest nearby temple that her assistants can find, as well as “thirty convicts serving life sentences or worse.”

You can, here, start to make some guesses about where this is going. But if you don’t feel inclined to, the show spells it out about as soon as Makima has those 30 prisoners kneeling in front of her, with both they and her assistants wearing blindfolds. She then starts making peculiar hand motions; massaging her hands together, as though kneading a lump of clay. Here, for even the most unobservant, I must imagine the fact of the situation suddenly clicks into place; you are watching a ritual sacrifice.

As Makima works, the show undergoes a temporary transformation into a straight-up horror anime. One that is still, mind you, lit by the midday Sun, but is no less oppressive because of it. Makima’s contracted devils—whoever they are—must be fearsome indeed, because we don’t actually see them work at all. One by one, Makima has each convict recite the name of one of the terrorists. One by one, three prefectures away, crows spot them, they feel a sudden, inexplicable, and overwhelming sense of impending doom, and then, spontaneously, they explode, into a water balloon pop of high-pressure gore; ridiculous, and deeply unsettling expressionism by way of supernatural violence. The soundtrack, appropriately, darkens to an intense, drumming industrial track while this occurs. When it’s over, even Makima’s own immediate subordinates are more than a little freaked out. This, clearly, is some nightmarishly deep magic. Questions of how are of course unanswered at this time. You want a takeaway? Try “don’t mess with women in suits.”

Makima isn’t the only one to make an excellent showing here. Kobeni, who I suspect many anime-firsts might’ve written off as a bit character, puts in an absolutely stellar turn here, too. Shaking and trembling, she confronts the fleeing Sawatari and Katana Man. Hirokazu having physically shoved her out of the way of an assassin’s bullet and taken the shot himself, she is one of the few human members of her division left alive. Even so, she charges at Katana Man with nothing but a knife and a truly inhuman set of reflexes.

We actually get even fewer details about what Kobeni’s got going on as far as powers than we do for Makima, but sometimes exposition isn’t necessary. Kobeni manages to somehow flip what must be a truly back-breaking weight of PTSD into enough adrenaline and finesse to absolutely kick Katana Man’s ass; she very nearly kills him. Only after he and Sawatari have fled the scene does she finally break down crying, tearily apologizing to Denji for trying to kill him, and then laughing at herself for the absurdity of her words. The last we see of her here is that; half-cackling, half-weeping, and talking to a bisected corpse.

So, what of Makima and her two new “friends”? Well, somehow or another, she seems to know that her little Satanic ritual / artillery strike worked just fine. Madoka, a character we formally meet for the first time here, gives Makima the rundown; Special Divions 1 through 4 have been decimated—almost literally—by the terrorist attack, and the remnants of the four are being merged into a single unit under Makima’s own direct command. He also, without missing a beat, hands Makima his retirement slip. She accepts it, but when he tries to learn a bit more about what’s transpired here, this is the response he gets.

Bonus ~~Power~~ Screencap: Power isn’t in this episode! She doesn’t even show up in the ED! So do you know what you get instead?

Go on, guess.

Yeah, it’s another Makima stare. I’m not sorry.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on December 2, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CHAINSAW MAN Episode 8 – “Gunfire”

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

Content Warning: This article contains an embedded image which depicts a realistic instance of gun violence.

You know, I wasn’t actually going to cover this week’s episode. I’m sick, and I tend to write much worse when I’m sick. So, if this column—again a few days late—comes to you in a more rambly and disjointed form than usual, I do apologize.

That said; holy fuck that was good.

Most of the attention that Chainsaw Man episode 8 has gotten and will continue to get is going to come from its fight scene in the second half, a lovingly-rendered hallucination of locking blades, smoke, and phantoms.

We should talk about the first half of the episode, though. Pour one out for Himeno, who spends the first half of this episode continuing her drunken attempts to seduce Denji and ends it with her body literally vanishing into thin air. A sacrifice for nothing, as the episode’s final sucker punch makes clear.

Throughout another of the anime’s deeply-studied emulations (but not mere imitations) of live action film, she comes across as a lovable drunk, even as the opening scene itself sits somewhere between “intimate” and “horror movie.” She and Denji do not actually do anything, something she’s grateful for come morning since “they throw you in jail for doing that stuff with minors.” Even this in mind; she almost immediately offers to help Denji get together with Makima, whose affections are still what he’s actually gunning after. It either does not occur or does not matter to Himeno that Makima is also a fair bit older than Denji. Maybe she’s willing to skirt the law if it means her new bestie will be happy.

In either case; she doesn’t get the chance. Let’s circle back around to that in a few paragraphs’ time.

There is a scene, deliberately left un-expounded-on here, where Makima and several of her escorts from Public Safety are in the middle of a business trip train ride only to be abruptly shot in the head by a mysterious terrorist group. The unease hangs like a heavy fog, and it does not let up from here.

We’re introduced to two new characters in this episode, also. The first is informally known as Katana Man (Daiki Hamano) to most of the fanbase; the son of the yakuza boss that Denji killed back in episode one, and who rendered his early life so miserable. (Officially, his nomme de gurre is actually Samurai Sword, but few people call him that in my experience.) Katana Man is here to avenge his late father, and after a curious rant about how the ramen in the restaurant the scene takes place in tastes terrible, and how if you’re raised on “crap” as a kid you never develop “good taste”, the episode promptly explodes into shattered glass.

Katana Man himself is more than a match for Denji and, indeed, the entire group with Denji—Aki, Himeno, and Power—to say nothing of his mysterious handler, Akane, (You Taichi), the second character we meet here.

The entire “fight scene” (frankly, the term feels inadequate) is vicious and surreal. In particular, the bizarre sequence of Katana Man being “crucified” by new arrival the Curse Devil is sublimely terrifying and is the sort of thing I want to see the anime do more of as we continue moving forward.

As for Himeno, with the last gasp of her life, she tries to buy even just a few minutes to keep the others, especially Aki, who it’s become clear that she deeply cares for, alive. It doesn’t work; Katana Man’s handler summons her own contracted devil, the Snake Devil, and it eats the Ghost Devil in a single bite before vanishing with a light switch-flick snap cut, like it was never there at all.

That’s the fate of Himeno, too, reduced bodypart by bodypart until she’s nothing but a pile of clothes on the ground.

It always feels a little shitty to have to “justify” an early character death (a story trope of no inherent value, like any other), but really, as much as anything else, it serves as the final off-ramp for people who might not be able to handle—or simply not want to handle—what Chainsaw Man is putting down. There is a reason this episode’s ED is a song called “the first death.”

Bonus Power Screencap: Before the fight begins in earnest, Power gets a good, solid sock to the jaw in, on Katana Man. Here’s that.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on November 25, 2022November 25, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CHAINSAW MAN Episode 7 – “Taste of a Kiss”

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

You don’t need me to tell you that Denji, as his antiheroic alter ego of the titular Chainsaw Man, fucks up the Eternity Devil something wicked. If you’re watching this show, the fact that Denji can out-crazy the craziest of Devils is not news. It’s something that’s been established since basically episode one.

That is indeed how episode 7 opens. Denji, yet again a whirlwind of iron and gore, ripping the Eternity Devil to pieces, over and over and over again, until it finally stops fighting and begs to be put out of its misery. We’re told this little ballet of violence took place over three entire days; Genesis-ian timescale reduced to a footnote. Somehow, this fight scene, in all its headbanging heavy metal AMV glory, is not nearly the most notable thing about the seventh episode of Chainsaw Man. Even so, it is worth highlighting the flashback conversation between Himeno and her own mentor, who puts forward the idea that the devil hunter that the devils themselves fear most is not one who’s brave, but one who’s “got a few screws loose.” Most of this part of the episode is meant to re-emphasize that yes, Denji’s incredibly rough upbringing really has left him “crazy.” Remember, as we go forward, that Public Safety recruited him not in spite of that, but because of it.

Anyway, shall we cut to the vomit kiss? We might as well, right?

I have no photos of the aforementioned vomit kiss. Because I love you, dear readers, and also I think that putting images of a woman puking on my website would probably not be great for SEO. But! It is here! It is important! Somehow, it is actually quite important!

It also tends to serve as one of Chainsaw Man‘s great filters. I think the importance of these things—and of “weeding out the normies” in general—is vastly overstated, but it is impossible to deny that it’s going to put some people off. That’s a little unfortunate, but Chainsaw Man, while it never goes back to this particular well (I guess that’s technically a spoiler. If you’re angry about me spoiling the fact that no one else pukes in anyone’s mouth in Chainsaw Man you’re free to yell at me about it in the comments), is only going to get grislier from here. It’s probably better that people know what they’re working with.

The context of that particular incident is very important, and it doesn’t happen until toward the end of the episode. In fact, leading up to it, Denji is actually being rewarded for once in his life; he’s killed the Eternity Devil, gotten the entire unit out of a pretty harrowing situation, and has even procured a piece of the Gun Devil’s flesh. All worth genuine praise. So, it’s not a surprise that Himeno (and Aki!) take their squad to a drinking party a few days later. Everybody is there, including several new characters, most of them relatively unimportant. And, of course, Makima, who returns to the show after an absence last week in a truly wonderful fashion by subtly creeping up behind Denji as he’s talking about that kiss Himeno promised him.

^{Makima Jumpscare}

There’s also a pretty great moment where Aki asks her why she’s pursuing the Gun Devil in the first place, and this happens.

Denji, meanwhile, spends much of the restaurant scene acting, as my friend and occasional podcast co-commentator Julian put it, “weirdly moe.” I think that’s an accurate assessment.

On the other hand, Himeno mostly embarrasses herself. There’s a certain kind of person who finds someone being piss-drunk hilarious and/or charming. I will admit that Himeno makes it look better than most, but for most of the episode she’s absolutely sloshed out of her mind. I’m not going to say that this is necessarily because she’s a “normal” Devil Hunter and is partly drinking to forget the surreal and traumatic experience that the past few episodes have been, but I think the idea is at least worth considering.

At one point during the party, Himeno makes an advance on Denji and plants a kiss on him. Then, because of just how drunk she is, she promptly….well, here’s a photo of my note card from this part of the episode. I think you get the idea.

^{Pardon my handwriting.}

The scene is well and truly disgusting. The addition of sound and color makes what was already pretty gross in the manga absolutely nauseating. The actual emission is pixelated, but that might actually make things worse. All told, the amount of artistic heft put in to rendering the scene as off-putting as possible is bizarrely commendable.

Of course, it’s the aftermath of this infamous, iconic scene that is where the actual development lies. We end again on a cliffhanger, but not before Denji, rendered drunk somehow or another, finds himself lying in a mysterious bed.

Only for Himeno to enter, and, in a gorgeously-rendered POV scene that feels far more sensous and grounded than the vast majority of anime cheesecake, climb on top of him. She proceeds to very blatantly seduce someone who—hey, just as a reminder!—is only sixteen years old. We can make a lot of assumptions here, but it’s probably better to save such observations for next time. This scene, in another example of Chainsaw Man’s unorthodox adaptive approach, is cut off mid-thought by the end credits. That’s all for this week, folks.

Bonus Power Screencap: I’m fond of this bit during the bar scene, where Power tries to claim having a high IQ by constantly one-upping the most recent number anyone else has brought up. (She also gets hit on by the short-haired butch woman. I’ve never been envious of Power before, but there’s a first time for everything.) Here’s a cap from the start of that little bit.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on November 15, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CHAINSAW MAN Episode 6 – “Kill Denji”

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

Chainsaw Man is a story about bad things happening to people. I have said this before, I will say it again many, many more times before it eventually ends. To really get where CSM is coming from, one should attempt to understand this. Chainsaw Man isn’t a drag; we know this already, as the series is full of humor and of more delicate character moments. But it’s not happy, either. The jokes in Chainsaw Man are those of a depressed friend. But at the risk of sounding like the most arch and stereotypical critic imaginable; that gives it a real emotional honesty. The kind that makes everything hit with appropriate weight even when it might seem egregious in an anime that wasn’t this specific kind of tuned-in.

All of this is worth restating, not for the last time, because today’s episode is another fairly slow one, despite an impressively bizarre climax. Gently pressing down the brakes on the actual plot-as-such, it spends a lot of time engaging in character building. As always, if Chainsaw Man is crass, or hedonistic, or occasionally out-and-out psychotic, it is so for a reason. Case in point; episode 6, “Kill Denji”, is a wild seesaw of tone and emotion. This remains a best-case-scenario for adapting the manga; truly unhinged, quietly poignant, and crudely funny, by turns, and as it needs to be.

Where to even start? Sure, we open by learning that, as they suspected, our heroes are trapped on the eighth floor of their hotel, but a simple “how do we break the loop?” mystery would not be nearly compelling enough for CSM. (Even so, what of that is done here is done very compellingly, complete with a small visual motif in the form of a squarish alarm clock that keeps ticking back and forth to always land on 8:18.) We can break what occurs up into roughly three categories, although they’re not entirely in discrete sequential chunks as such.

First of all; we get properly introduced to Kobeni in this episode. Kobeni, as previously mentioned, is a walking bundle of neuroses and anxiety in the vague shape of a 20something young woman. She should really not be in this line of work, and in the manga she was essentially Chainsaw Man‘s main comic relief character. Kobeni’s backstory is so dead simple that it’s lodged somewhere between hilarious and ridiculously depressing. Her parents made her sign up so she could put her talented older brother through college. It was devil hunting or sex work. Ouch.

As has been its wont, the anime sands away a bit of the dark humor here. In the manga, the format itself means that we don’t actually linger on Kobeni’s depressed rambling for particularly long. Here, it’s a full scene, which really screws in just how utterly bleak her life situation is. In a more conventional series, she and Denji might find some fast camaraderie in their poverty-stricken upbringings. In Chainsaw Man, it is she who eventually gives this episode its title, but we’ll come back to that. The main thing to take away is that, while Kobeni’s initial breakdown remains a source of black comedy, much of that is shifted over to Power’s comedically insensitive reaction, rather than Kobeni herself. Remember; to her, this is deadly serious.

We also get a fair bit more insight into Aki and Himeno’s partnership up until this point in this episode. Much of the episode’s middle third is taken up by a flashback of Himeno repeatedly trying to get Aki to try cigarettes; “life is better with a little dependence”, she says, a bit of hard-luck pithy wisdom that suits the spirit of this series perfectly.

This entire sequence is dominated by warm guitar in the soundtrack and a purple-pink sunset over the city. But, even in reminiscence, no one in Chainsaw Man is safe from reality; Himeno is jolted from one memory to another with a slap, a surgically-precise cut that bleeds out the nostalgia of the preceding few minutes in a subtly heart-rending way.

Said backhanding comes from the girlfriend of one of Himeno’s late partners. Aki, who understandably doesn’t think she deserves that kind of treatment, gets petty revenge by sticking some gum on the woman’s clothes, probably the first time in the entire series so far that we’ve seen him do something genuinely funny on purpose. The two bond over a cigarette in the scene afterward, and Aki’s chainsmoking habit is established. The entire thing is sweet, in an off-kilter way.

Back in the present, our heroes happen upon the entity keeping them trapped on the 8th floor. The creature isn’t named as the Eternity Devil here, but its identity is fairly obvious, given its powers and some of the imagery. The Devil has a very simple condition. A contract, even. If the other devil hunters kill Denji, he’ll let them go.

Kobeni and Arai (who’s also been having a hard time of it), immediately turn on Denji, with the former charging him with a big shiny knife while squealing like some kind of small, dying mammal. This doesn’t work—mostly because Himeno and Aki(!) aren’t okay with just turning over a comrade to this thing, even as Himeno points out that it can’t possibly be lying. (Short version of the exposition; if a devil calls something a “contract” it has to fulfill its end of the promise or it’ll die instantly.) The Eternity Devil itself is a cascading wave of rubbery flesh, a specific kind of body horror that you really don’t see very often in mainstream TV anime. (The only other example from this year that I can think of is the finale villain in The Executioner & Her Way of Life.)

There are other options; that mysterious sword Aki’s been carrying is apparently Cursed Or Something, and is quite powerful at the cost of literally taking years off of Aki’s life. He could use it to get them out of this situation, but Himeno objects hard enough to use her Ghost Devil to stop him. Which, itself, leads to Kobeni accidentally stabbing Aki in the side.

All this going on, is it any real wonder that Denji ends the episode by feeding himself to the Eternity Devil? He has no real plan, beyond “make it suffer enough that it’d rather die than keep them trapped in the hotel.” But long-term plans were never our boy’s strong suit.

In the rush to praise what the CSM anime will eventually get to, I do worry slightly that we’re all a bit missing the forest for the trees. This episode ably proves that Chainsaw Man is already great, early on or not.

Bonus Power Screencap: Given all the ruminating over the anime’s themes and general tone this week, I didn’t actually have time to discuss the incredible comedy break of Power deciding to win a Nobel Prize and become Prime Minister so she can make everyone miserable by instituting a “100% income tax.” Here’s her coming up with that little idea.

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