Tag: DEEP RAPUTA

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [6/3/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello, anime fans! Over the last week, things have really been heating up in certain corners. I won’t belabor the point, every episode covered below is, at bare minimum, compelling, and some are absolutely arresting. Let’s get into things!

Anime – Seasonal

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 8

The anime continues its relative strong streak here, with an episode that expands a part of the story that was only a chapter or two in the manga and gives it full focus.

Here, we focus on a young Sumireko’s adventure to a mysterious bookstore and how said encounter helped her overcome her anxiety. There’s a real nostalgic warmth to both the bookstore itself—I spent a lot of time in book shops as a kid, I get it—and its actual depiction, which thankfully ditches the dripping, cloying sepia of previous flashbacks for an extended full-color reminiscence, lightly brought down into the realm of earth tones, to quite literally paint a picture of what going to this place felt like. Gentle, comforting, mysterious, childhood-defining, it’s all things that this kind of flashback could be, and my only real point of contention here is that more of the show hasn’t tried this hard to look this good. I should also bring up the way they depict the books Sumireko is reading, which has a fun paper cut-esque quality to it. It’s visually inventive in a way the rest of the show hasn’t been even if the actual technicality of what’s being done isn’t particularly crazy.

Naturally, the book shop has mysterious origins of its own that aren’t revealed until the episode’s second half. Its mysterious proprietress, a dark-haired woman whose kindness is matched only by her love of literature, is revealed as an ancient spirit from the early Shogunate, immortalized in part via her love of literature, she is someone to whom heaven is literally a library.

The second half of the episode kicks off what is likely the second to last arc that the anime will cover. It remains to be seen how the show will handle that, but I’ve been enjoying the series’ late recovery and am pleasantly surprised by it. I don’t get to give out the “substantially improved” award distinction super often.

Girls Band Cry – Episode 9

After last week’s emotional bombshell, we have a slightly lighter episode this week, although still one with a lot of narrative momentum. (And, crucially, a focus on Tomo, one of the show’s less developed characters up to this point.)

Those who succeed in their chosen field have a tendency to romanticize hard work and effort. Presumably, those working on Girls Band Cry are no exception, most of this episode characterizes Tomo as a cornered tiger, someone who struggles to speak her mind but can be absolutely vicious when given permission (or reason) to do so. This collides with Nina’s ongoing quest to learn guitar on her own so she doesn’t have to keep relying on Momoka in an interesting way. Tomo’s feedback, when Nina presses her enough to actually get it, is withering, and a less determined person might give up. Nina doesn’t, and much of this episode revolves around getting the whole band on the same page so that Tomo can provide some direction. This is epitomized here by the ongoing process of hammering out the song they plan to play at the upcoming festival.

To provide some context for why Tomo is like this, we get flashbacks, one of the show’s favorite narrative devices. I like that, running with the show’s general use of flat animation as a depiction of the idealized past, Tomo’s memories are done in a mixed style. Her bandmates (rendered faceless) are drawn in 2D, but Rupa and Tomo herself—who seems to still be stuck in that moment—are 3D. It’s a nice way of conveying how out of step she feels with other people (and perhaps a way of quietly signaling that Rupa is one of the relative few who understands her).

To be honest, I find Tomo as depicted here kind of an admirable figure. As someone who’s had a lifetime of difficulty in committing to anything, much less improving on anything—I’m only a bit less bad at writing these kinds of things now as I was 7 or so years ago when I started, after all—I find her stubbornness endearing, her willingness to be direct and to the point compelling.

Much of the episode also employs the running motif of a snake (Tomo’s pet) who won’t eat. Why it isn’t doing so is never directly stated, but it eventually does in the episode’s closing minutes. Perhaps the reason is that, like the show’s human characters, it just needed some time and effort.

To be clear though, this is not solely a Deep And Serious Episode. There’s a fair bit of slapstick, especially in the opening bits with the busted air conditioners. I think it’s possible that how funny Girls Band Cry is might get lost in the shuffle when the show ends and the time comes to assess it in retrospect. I hope not, the show deserves full credit for everything it’s doing, not just the high-intensity emotional plays and excellent characterization.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episode 9

Ouch.

This episode follows up on the commission work that Mahiru was offered last episode, to do art for the Sunflower Dolls, Kano’s old idol group, the problem being that this would pre-empt the project that JELEE want to do around the same time. The fallout from that offer, what Mahiru does with it, and how it permanently bends the Jellyfish‘s narrative, is immense, sprawling, and messy. It’s also the best episode of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night, trumping its electric premiere episode by being an almost total inversion of it; emotionally, thematically, even visually. What I wrote below is an after-the-fact edit of what I wrote as I was watching the episode, because the thoughts came to me in such a torrent that I knew there was no way I’d remember everything I wanted to write about if I didn’t get it down in type first. This is the sort of episode people will bring up to prove that this show was worth it. It is a permanent part of the conversation, an immediate lightning bolt to the zeitgeist, and, to the extent that the “girls band war” between this series and Girls Band Cry is a real thing, is the first time in weeks it’s been able to comfortably claim the better episode between the two. That counts for something too, on a more cynical level.

One of the main threads of this episode is Kano’s consistent flashing back to her fallout with the Sunflower Dolls. Showing us how she initially joined the group and her eventual departure from it, and why and how that all happened. Several times, an overwhelming feeling of negativity is conveyed by the actual video blurring lightly in and out, a nice, lightly experimental touch from a show full of them.

The present day contains the main events that actually drive the episode, however. Mahiru’s meeting with Yukine, Kano’s manipulative mother and former manager, makes it clear that this is a very large-scale project that she’s being tapped for. Mahiru rightly wonders why, exactly, she’s being considered for this, although Yukine claims that the connection between Mahiru herself and Kano isn’t a factor when she’s pressed on it. This is an obvious lie—whatever Yukine’s opinion of Mahiru’s actual talents, it is very clear she’s asking this of Mahiru with an agenda in mind—but Mahiru buys it.

In general, Yukine is quite obviously a very manipulative person. A simple but very effective technique of oscillating between telling Mahiru what she wants to hear, lightly criticizing her, and then circling back around works wonders, which she finishes by, basically, promising her the world; at a Sunflower Dolls concert, Mahiru’s art will be projected onto the entire surrounding landscape. This plants an idea in Mahiru’s head, a very enticing one as a character who clearly deals with impostor syndrome and seeking external validation, “literally hundreds of thousands of people will see my drawings,” she must think to herself. “There’s no way I can say ‘no.'”

In any other show I’d question myself as to whether or not Yukine was really that bad, but Jellyfish has not historically been very subtle about signaling its characters motives. This is setting aside Kano’s flashback where Kano becomes “Nonoka.” Her mother controlling her style and manipulating her talents for her own ends is pretty vile, and paints a very clear picture of her as an old-school slimeball record exec. Really, the moment that seals the deal in hindsight is when she lays out her goals to Kano. “I want to one day nurture an artist who sings to 50,000 people.” The max capacity of the Tokyo Dome, as she points out. When I first heard this line, I rolled my eyes a little, thinking something like “It’s always numbers with this show.” Hold on to that thought, though. We’ll be coming back to it.

Especially when the show starts bringing up LookIdiot again. LookIdiot (a….whatever the opposite of catchy is, shortening of “Look at Reality, Idiot”), an in-universe gossip and scandal Youtube channel, is eventually revealed to be run by Mero, the former Sunflower Dolls center who Kano replaced. Mero certainly has the motive—she’s deeply resentful of this display of straight-up nepotism from her beloved ‘Yukine-P’—but it seems implausible, even in the world of Jellyfish, that a single teenage girl could be running a channel like that on their own, especially when one of the channel’s videos derails the careers of one-time Sunflower Dolls rivals the Rainbow Girls.

This is all contrasted with a brief visit that Kano takes during the flashback to visit her dad. We don’t see much of the man, but it’s clear that he and Yukine are not on remotely good terms anymore, and he and Kano meeting up at all seems to be a secret. (This is also where we see Kano seeing the jellyfish mural for the first time, inspiring some off-the-cuff lyrics which she takes the time to jot down.)

Inevitably, Kano finds out about Mero’s antics, thus finally contextualizing for us the punch to the face that got her booted from the Sunflower Dolls before the start of the show. Jellyfish again draws on its more experimental inclinations here; Yukine glares at Kano and Kano seems to almost go up in flames as the show’s visual style completely changes to a gauzy, faux-painted look, swamping Kano’s recollection of events in an oily blur, and smothering the dialogue in an equally thick layer of muffling.

Back in the present, a paranoid Kano finally snaps when Mahiru reveals that she’s going to take the commission from Yukine. I have previously criticized this show for feeling contrived, but someone splitting from the little indie group they came up with for a bigger opportunity is probably the single most realistic conflict Jellyfish has ever had. God bless Kiwi and Mei for trying to smooth things over, even if it obviously doesn’t work. Kano’s blow up at the end is absolutely vicious, she completely lays into Mahiru, saying a ton of things she can’t possibly mean because in that moment her only aim is to hurt the girl she’s close with as much as she possibly can. It is legitimately difficult to watch, not a term I use lightly, and even Kano herself seems shocked by what she says.

As she lays in her bed after the fight, the show’s obsession with numbers—followers, seating capacity, arbitrary dates, whatever—is revealed as a trait of Kano herself, a fraction of Yukine’s controlling personality inherited the worst possible way. Ouch. My fucking heart. And yet, in this absolute buckshot blast of emotional devastation, Jellyfish seems to find its footing all over again. The episode ends with a truly rude twist of the knife; a montage of Mahiru and Kano’s moments up to this point, concluding with a simple procession of Kano saying her name. Over and over again, as the credits play.

Things will not be the same ever again for this show, and how it handles the next three episodes is going to define its long-term legacy—people can forgive a lot for a strong closing arc—but for the first time in a while, it feels like it means something again. Kano has a long road ahead of her to picking up the pieces of her shattered relationship with Mahiru and the rest of JELEE, but I’m interested in seeing her—and seeing Jellyfish itself—make the attempt. Other people have said it better than I. Sometimes you discover yourself when you fall short.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 9

This show is so delightfully stupid.

Here we follow Sara and Yuna’s respective first days at school. Suffice to say, they go pretty differently. The first half of the episode follows Sara, and is generally gag-based, with the majority of these first twelve or so minutes being a nonstop cavalcade of the other students falling in either love or admiration for Sara and her charmingly over-the-top personality. She out-maths the class intellectual, impresses the local hot blooded boy with her skills at ruler fights, finds her way to the heart of the class’s soft boy with her deep appreciation and open-mindedness toward food, and makes the “English speaker” (most of what he’s saying is, in fact, nonsense) laugh with a goofy impromptu manzai skit. All of this is played purely for jokes, and much of the humor has a regional color to it owing to the heavy focus on the “Gifu-ness” of Gifu, where the series takes place. All the while, Sara also picks up a group of rivals, who promptly pledge their loyalty to her as “retainers” once they see her blow the lock off of a shed they try to lock her in.

The second half of the episode is substantially more serious and focuses on Yuna, taking the form of a simple story about bullying. It’s quite the swerve, and this is such a straightforward depiction of girls bullying girls—specifically, a group of second years picking on a freshman, Mizuki, who they’re jealous of for being picked up for the basketball team—that it’s more something I’d associate with old shoujo manga than anything contemporary. Yuna uses the burgeoning detective skills she’s picked up from her time with Sousuke to get audio and video footage of the girls bullying her. Yuna actually advocates taking the whole case to the police if Mizuki is so interested, and mirrors many of the same talking points that Sara and Sousuke gave her several episodes back. In general, the show seems to advocate a “do no harm but take no shit” attitude here, which is more applicable in general than anything more specific it might be pushing.

At episode’s end, Yuna admits to Sousuke while visiting Sara that she helped Mizuki more out of a desire to test herself and “solve a puzzle” so to speak than a pure desire to help a classmate. This is a fair point, and Sousuke doesn’t discourage her, but given what I know about police psychology it does damper the episode a little bit for me. Not much, but a smidgen.

It’s also worth mentioning the show’s visuals here which are….fine? It’s more worth mentioning that they’re not worth mentioning I suppose. This is a supremely workmanlike adaptation being carried hard by its writing, a trait, presumably, of the source material. I wonder if the manga or light novel are being translated.

Train To The End of The World – Episodes 9 & 10

Episode 9 of Train begins in somewhere we’ve heard a lot about but haven’t actually seen until now; Ikebukuro itself. Here, Youka is being kept in some kind of dreamlike haze by Pontaro, possibly by the “wibble wobble surgery” that affected Zenjiro. The first half of this episode is, therefore, our rendezvous with her, our first since the show began, and an assessment of her mental state. The verdict? Not great. At one point she gets into an argument with one of the survivors of Ikebukuro—“survivor” really is the right term, the city’s few remaining citizens seem to cling to life in a desperately hostile environment—who blames her for the city’s state for reasons she can’t really understand. When she gets angry enough, she zaps him with a beam of unknowable magic, and turns him into a bowl of egg custard. That’s 7G Powers at work, baby, and it’s nasty stuff. Further complicating things are her mysterious bodyguard / retainer “Pochi”, named after the dog of course, who keeps a watchful eye on her but doesn’t seem entirely aligned with Pontaro’s goals, either. The whole thing is rather mysterious.

Train returns to its theme of environment as a reflection of the inner self here, and more than ever, makes a clear connection to the tech bro-y nature of Pontaro, whose early days after the crisis were apparently defined by “claiming this was the plan all along” and admitting that he can’t exactly tell people just how badly this has all fucked up. The general picture is a bit akin to if what Elon Musk did to Twitter happened to all of physical reality, but also he had to convince a random teenage girl in order to let him actually do anything. Also worth a minor mention; Youka has had a light redesign in the intervening years, and her new look, despite having only relatively minor adjustments, makes her look pretty cool, and in some shots even properly regal, which is not an adjective I would’ve ever dreamt of associating with the character when this show was new. Did she make all of these changes herself, or is this Pontaro influencing how she presents herself? It’s hard to know for sure, but things seem to definitely be leaning in the latter direction, despite all her power.

In the episode’s latter half, the girls meet a figure who I was honestly pretty sure was never going to show up in this series again; the guy in the swan boat from way back in episode 2! The conversation our heroines have with him is important—as is the conversation Dr. Makoto has with Zenjiro around the same time, which is intercut with it—we learn that Ikebukuro is physically expanding, in what is described as a miniature approximation of entropy. That sounds pretty bad! Worse is Zenjiro’s theory that it will simulate the Big Rip if it goes on long enough, causing the whole world to simply vanish in a snap. Worse, he has no idea when that will happen. In his own words, it could be tomorrow, it could be in two billion years.

The episode ends with a cut back to Ikebukuro, where Pontaro informs “Pochi” about an approaching band of miscreants—our heroes, as you might guess—and tells him to remain on high alert. In the episode’s last scene, Youka seems to have a brief flash of lucidity wherein she questions where she is and what she’s doing. In a relative rarity for Train, it’s subtle, quiet, and very sad.

By contrast, these are adjectives that do not describe the following episode, the show’s tenth, in any way. Episode 10 is, in a very literal sense, a setup for the show’s finale. By the end of Episode 10, Shizuru and company know who the threat is, know what they’re trying to stop, and have an at least vague idea of how to do it. Getting there is another story, which requires going through heartwarming father-daughter reunions and art movement-invoking battle scenes alike.

For the former, Shizuru’s dear old dad makes his return to the series after a very brief appearance back near the start of the show. He and his two companions have been turned from animals into animal mascots. He and Shizuru talk some things out, and their reunion is both genuinely heartfelt and also very silly in a way that is pretty typical of this show.

Importantly, Akira also gets a beret from Shizuru’s dad, which he identifies as a ‘war trophy,’ which becomes important in the second half of the episode which I am frankly much more interested in talking about. Here, our heroines are forced to battle a trio of mangaka with art-related superpowers who are blocking their way forward. They get their powers from those very same berets, of course. (Which are based on a “subscription model” somehow. A shot at Adobe and other overpriced pay-per-month art programs? Probably not, but I’m choosing to interpret it that way anyway.)

As you might guess depending on how many weird anime you’ve seen over the years, this fight entails beams that turn our girls into versions of themselves rendered into genre cliché. Nadeshiko becomes an old-school shoujo character complete with Glass Mask-esque expressions, Reimi becomes a hot-blooded delinquent, and Shizuru, like her pa, becomes a cute little animal creature.

What the mangaka fail to consider is that Akira is very much capable of wielding the powers of the magic beret too, and Akira, being a lovably pretentious dork, fires back with expressionism lasers that summon copies of the screaming guy from “The Scream,” hordes of dosgs, and so on as she righteously tells the trope-loving mangaka that artistic expression has no bounds! There is an irony here, in how this kind of metafictional, art style-hopping, self-commentating episode has, itself, become something of a minor cliché. Off the top of my head, the eternally-underrated Anime-Gataris did it some seven years ago. Not that this inherently invalidates the points that Akira—or Shuumatsu Train itself—are trying to make, but it is notable and funny. The whole sequence is pretty great, all told, though, and it makes for a fun final action piece before we move into the show’s last stretch.

From 30 stops to Ikebukuro down to just one, only the surreal stronghold of the city itself remains. Can Youka, and the world, be saved?

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Asura Cryin’ – Seasons 1 & 2

Solid overall, and I don’t have a ton to say, given that this is just an all-around pretty good anime from an era where there were a lot of those, but there is something I like about this one that puts it a notch above bare “decent” to me.

It’s got a solid little theme of taking losses in your life as they come as opposed to clinging to the past, which I think is a good thesis for something like this.

Obviously, it’s not perfect. There’s a lot of the ambient misogyny prevalent in the writing that poisoned tons of anime from around this time—obviously that can still be a serious problem, but anecdotally I feel like it was way more of a thing in the 2000s—everything from stupid jokes about how an important plot coupon looks like a vibrator to the fact that most of the show’s characters are organized into 1-guy-2-girl groups, complete with a narrative justification for these off-the-shelf harem setups. So, if you want to take a dim view of the series, there’s more than enough here to justify that.

That said, I think it has a good heart, and its actual plot ambitions are mostly realized pretty well. Plus you can read the main 3 characters as a polytrio without much squinting, which is nice. Looking at this from the contemporary landscape of light novel anime, where most main characters are self-inserts to such an extent that they’re actively discouraged by their narratives from doing any introspection and the power fantasies themselves tend to be pretty boring, it’s actually refreshing seeing a series where the main character’s situation, itself a power fantasy, is used to facilitate character growth. The story itself is wild and weird, too, I mentioned in my last writeup about this series how crazy it can get and that carries through all the way to the end of the series. I miss this era when “light novel anime” meant more something along the lines of putting every genre ever in a blender than the narou-kei slop we tend to get now. Maybe I’m just looking at things with rose-tinted glasses, though.

Also, the final battle in the last episode is actually pretty cool, which given that the visuals are a bit of an up and down ride throughout the series wasn’t a given, and is something I appreciate.

I’m rambling. Show’s pretty good, check it out if you like this kind of thing.

Rozen Maiden – Episode 3 & 4

I haven’t talked about Rozen Maiden since starting it with some friends recently, but these two episodes—four in particular—have really elevated my opinion of this show. We don’t get enough anime that explore characters’ inner worlds as artistically-rendered symbolic landscapes anymore. (The most recent example I can think of is Magical Destroyers which, that was one of the best episodes of that show, but the series overall doesn’t really do enough to make watching it for that worthwhile.) Jun’s inner landscape is a place defined by a wasteland of broken televisions and homework slips glued to the floor contrasted with a lively forest full of insect-cars that he spends time trying to catch (beetle-Beetles, if you will). It’s interesting stuff.

I also like the characters a lot, particularly the dolls who all fall into easily-recognizable archetypes but in entertaining ways. I’m also very excited to see more of the I-assume-villain of the piece, gothy, crow-feather-laden doll Suigintou (Tanaka Rie).

Manga

Deep Raputa – Chapters 3 & 4

Over the course of these two chapters, Raputa’s ability to “hack” peoples’ brains comes into its own. This is, on a plot level, both alarming and astounding, but more interesting is what the manga is doing with that power. Chapter 3 is mostly a wash, being a somewhat corny story about Raputa meeting Kei’s father Fugaku Joe and playing Side War with him, but Chapter 4 more than makes up for it. Kei wants to be a good dad someday—understandable, it’s a pretty normal ambition for a boy in his young teens—and Raputa has a full-on crisis about how she can never give that to him for all the obvious reasons; she’s just a computer program at the end of the day, and Raputa gets hung up on the idea of the two of them ‘having a baby’ together. It’s weird! It’s uncomfortable! But given the timbre of the story, it seems to be intentionally so, we’re again getting into this division of experience between Raputa and a physical flesh-and-blood human.

Naturally, Raputa tries to solve this by controlling the dreams of everyone in town so that she can create a perfect dream world where she and Kei are together forever.

This doesn’t last, and Raputa realizing just how big the gap between herself and Kei is hits hard. The chapter’s last few pages tease the possibility that she’s going to target his father next, and so we move further into the whole “yandere AI” zone.

That’s all for this week. I leave you with this Monday Bonus Thought for you to contemplate.

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Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [5/27/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello folks. This week, I didn’t write about that many different anime, but some of those I did write about I wrote about profusely. So hopefully you’ll enjoy that.

Anime

Girls Band Cry – Episodes 7 & 8

I think Girls Band Cry has finally edged out Jellyfish as my girl band show of the season, and probably my favorite overall as well. I caved and caught up with Nakayubi, the other group doing fansubs (their translations are on par, although the subs themselves aren’t as fancy), and I just….wow. There’s a lot to process here.

So, Nina’s pa is aware of her faltering grades, and now that she’s talked to her sister about the band, her whole family is probably going to learn as well. Naturally, she has not told any of this to the band. The girl’s natural inclination to simply Not Tell People Things is going to absolutely blow up in her face at some point, arguably it kind of already has.

The use of traditional flat animation to convey the past—bygone periods of one’s life, memories that have gotten hazy, and perhaps romanticized, in the recollection—is probably the smartest thing Girls Band Cry does visually. Other uses of 2D animation in the series can feel like a concession or a stopgap, these very much do not.

I will say, as a minor hot take, I don’t think the flat animation looks crazy impressive or anything. Don’t get me wrong, it looks fine, but I’ve seen people say it looks better than the main show or that they should’ve done the whole thing in 2D, which I don’t agree with even a little bit. I blame the pining for traditional animation in this scenario on romanticized memories, ironically enough, of a prior, bygone generation of this sort of anime.

Of course, I wrote that and then they did the broken glass split shot thing when Momoka announced she was leaving the band, so I don’t know. The series is just very inventive, visually, and I like that, even if most of the visual symbolism is not necessarily subtle. If this show leaves a stylistic legacy it will be this way, building a visual language that other 3D CG anime will be able to draw on in the coming years.

Mine [Sawashiro Miyuki], the character in red who’s given a supporting role here for what is honestly not a ton of screentime, makes an immense impact in her brief time on-screen. We have somebody here who is herself not “successful” in the broad-stroke pop star sense, but who is clearly at least getting by and making a living with her music. It’s inspiring, in a way, and Nina seems to feel that way, too.

I’ve avoided using the P-word much in my writing lately, because I think it’s easy to attribute to passion all sorts of other emotions that might be described better with other terms, but if we read this work as a reflective one, we can assume that the people working on it feel similarly to Mine about their own profession. Things can be difficult, they can be hard, but you push through for your own sake. Because, if you’re really that devoted to what you’re doing, you almost have to.

Elsewhere; in another piece of awesome yet obvious visual symbolism, when Nina redoubles her commitment to the band, she runs to a nearby lake and happens to catch the start of a fireworks show. I love this series.

In episode seven’s final moments, in the middle of a concert, the band, which has remained nameless for the entire first half of the show, is finally (and hastily) christened Togenashi Togeari. A literal line-of-sight name, because Nina is an insane person.

Episode eight opens on a flashback, immediately drawing a parallel between Nina’s current desire to drop out of school with Momoka’s past plan to do the exact same thing. This entire section is flat animated, which to me is enough evidence to confirm that the show’s usage of 2D animation to represent the past is an intentional stylistic choice.

Momoka remarks that if Diamond Dust gives themselves an escape route from their desire to make it big, they’ll definitely end up using it rather than succeeding, so they shouldn’t make one. It’s interesting to note that this is the same philosophy that some real-world artists have endorsed, including no less a figure than Eminem [Mathers Marshall III]. I’m not sure it’s the best advice, necessarily, but you can’t deny the drive.

Subaru correctly points out that Nina’s drive to succeed isn’t as far-fetched as it seems, given various factors (those listed include; Tomo & Rupa being somewhat notable indie musicians, Momoka being an ex member of Diamond Dust to begin with, an endorsement on Twitter from another singer, etc.) Nina’s plan is no plan—the same that Momoka had as a teenager—no escape routes, no backup plans, no safety net.

It’s notable that Nina’s memories don’t get the 2D treatment, and I think that may be because unlike Momoka, she’s not romanticizing her own past. Momoka, we can clearly see by this point, is guilty of seeing Nina as a slightly younger version of herself in too literal a sense. She thinks that because she failed with Diamond Dust, she’ll fail with Togenashi Togeari too, and that Nina will fail with Togenashi Togeari as well, because “that’s how these things go.” She fails to consider that the only data point she’s working off of is her own, and what the inevitable confrontation with the renewed Diamond Dust tells us, which is that the original group splitting up might have been best for both them and Momoka.

Sometimes you need someone younger than you to slap some sense into you. It’s not usually this literal, though.

And then there’s the final scene, which I find hard to put into words. It’s just so much. Momoka cranking her own old song, crying her eyes out, as Nina says she loves her (!!!!!) as they speed down the highway. This show is unhinged. I love it to pieces.

This is all without even mentioning the various things left technically unstated but all-but-shown to us regardless about Tomo and Rupa’s backstories over the course of these episodes. Rupa, who is desi, gets called a “foreigner” by a surly businessman at her job, and an offhand comment from Tomo implies that she lost her family somehow. Tomo herself, meanwhile….well, we don’t know the details yet, but whatever happened here is certainly not great.

But the girls will be alright. Because we are, truly, in the middle of a girls band revolution. I never like to promise these things, but I might review this when it’s over.

Worth noting! The show trended on Twitter for several hours after this episode aired. It really does feel like an event. I haven’t seen this many people pop for an original anime in ages.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episodes 6 & 7

The praise I wrote above isn’t to say that Jellyfish, Girls Band Cry’s only real competitor was bad or lacking recently, I must emphasize! I had caught up as of late last week, but given that I’m watching this with friends I’m now behind again. So it goes! These episodes were weird, as I will say several times in the below writeup! But I think I’ve settled on liking both of them by now.

Episode six is essentially a halfway parody of the idol genre, starring Miiko (the idol from way back in episode 1), who we here learn is a 31-year-old divorcee with a daughter. We are initially led to assume the worst of her, but over the course of the episode, it becomes clear that despite her immaturity she does dearly love her daughter Ariel [Touyama Nao], but the episode’s odd tone and the fact that it ends on what is essentially a joke makes the entire thing feel a little confusing, given the bullying angle just a bit prior in the episode.

Still, Miiko—rechristening herself Shizue Baba after the events here—is an interesting and likeable character, just one I wish we’d gotten a little more time with.

There are a number of interesting details here, though, like how Miiko’s affected voice is significantly higher and more pinched than her normal speaking voice, and the episode leaves enough open questions that it doesn’t feel wasted.

Episode seven is another oddball, although one that makes at least a bit more sense put together by the end.

Here, we divide our cast into two groups, those that have concrete plans for the future and those that do not. There are a lot of detours over the course of this episode, including a particularly interesting one where Kiui gets involved with an older woman (who might be ex-yakuza and possibly also trans? These things are not explored in detail and are left up to interpretation). There’s a whole thing with a bathhouse scene here, and a couple not necessarily great jokes thrown in. Were it not for a bunch of other details that seem far too specific to have come from anywhere but lived experience (Kiwi spends much of her first ‘date’ with this woman talking about denpa visual novels, and if that’s not evocative of The Queer Girl Experience I’m not sure what is), I’d almost think of the yakuza woman character as a stereotype. Still, given everything about the series, I am inclined to think of that as my own hangups running into the show’s storytelling rather than a flaw with the series per se.

The final scene, where Mahiru and Kano running together on the beach as they realize that if they don’t have more set-in-stone plans for the future, they can continue doing what they do for each other, is really great.

This is probably, at this point, my opinion on Jellyfish in general. It could’ve probably used a tightening-up in the script editing stage, because some of these extraneous sidebars are distracting, but the highs are very high, and the show remains worth it for them alone….of course, on the other hand, it’s not surprising that Jellyfish itself has no desire to conform to the expected, so maybe a “trimmed down” and thus less “weird” version of Jellyfish would feel less special. Perhaps I will have settled more firmly into one camp or the other by the time the show ends.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 7

It feels safe to say that, overall, this is probably the first episode of the show that feels like it’s building on the manga as opposed to just recapping it.

In a genuine rarity for this show, there’s a lot of strong visual work here; suitably eerie backgrounds, some nice cuts of animation and a few specifically placed special effects (mostly I’m here thinking of Shizuku turning into water when she meets the ghost of her friend and the shimmering red shape of the curiosity slithering onto the train later on). My suspicion is a different episode director or such than usual, but I am not 100% sure.

Even the stuff that doesn’t entirely work is at least expressive, which is more than can be said of much of the series so far. There’s a real wealth of atmosphere here, something that makes all the relatively unimpressive work up to this point feel worth it. There are definitely weaker moments throughout this episode, too (in particular there are a couple of extreme closeups that the drawings are not good enough to carry), but you take with the bad with the good in something like this. I’m just happy to have had an episode of this show that actually feels worth watching.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 21

An eventful episode this time around. Also can I say, unrelated to anything else, everyone looked very pretty here, especially Marcille and the Canaries.

Speaking of whom; we are here introduced to the Canaries for the first time in the anime, and for the most part their general aura—a combination of swagger and, given that they’re basically the Elf CIA, menace—is carried over well from the manga. I liked the additional detail paid to the little fairy messenger, who was always doing something or other in the scene where they’re introduced.

We also get to the underground kingdom portion of the series here. If I can be controversial for a second; I think the anime does an even better job of making Izutsumi look absolutely stoned out of her fucking mind than the manga does.

To be more serious, though. The entire back half of the episode, which takes place there, excellently conveys a real sense of loss, melancholy, and stagnation. It’s easy to miss between our heroes getting distracted by various things (Laios by monsters, Senshi by cultivation, Marcille by fashion, and Chilchuck by ale) but becomes more obvious in the episode’s last few scenes, and I think the decision to close the episode on Laios & co. going to sleep at the end of a strange day, with thoughts of prophecy on their mind, is a good one.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 8

This has quietly become one of my favorite anime from this season.

Overall, I would say that the best thing about Salad Bowl is that it’s just quite pleasant, despite its sometimes wry sense of humor.

This episode is split into two segments, as many are. The forehalf comprises Sousuke adopting Sara, and thus completes Sara da Odin’s transformation into Kusanagi Sara. Also, her picking a brown backpack because Conan from Detective Conan has one is an extremely endearing bit of characterization, and I like how this has been a persistent gag across the whole show thusfar.

The comedic highlight of the episode is probably Noa’s dream of being saved from a plague of locusts by Livia, from which the group’s band settle on a name; Grasshopper the Savior.

Lastly; shout out to this episode for making me realize all over again that someone born in 2012 would be 12 this year.

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 51

This is another episode that is primarily about mapping a step along Liko and Floragato’s relationship as Pokémon and trainer. Namely that Floragato’s got a bit of the “older sibling syndrome” going on where she feels a bit neglected because Liko has to spend so much time taking care of Terapagos and Hattenna.

Dot is surprisingly emotionally perceptive here, I’m taking that as a sign of her own recent emotional growth.

In general this was a fun and naturistic episode, and I liked the lightly Ghibli-esque visual of the Toedscools flying up into the whirlwind at the end.

Wonderful Precure! – Episode 17

I watch these episodes with a group of friends. All of us are Millennials, somewhere around 30ish give or take a few, and it takes a lot to get a crowd like that to go fully silent for any amount of time during an episode of any anime, much less a kids’ anime. Pretty Cure managed it this week, with what is possibly the most affecting episode of any anime that aired in general this past week; given that we’re only a few days out from the explosive eighth episode of Girls Band Cry, that’s really saying something.

This episode marks Cure Nyammy’s formal, confirmed, on-screen debut. Although given that she’s still playing the loner card of not wanting Mayu to get hurt, and is thus not presently cooperating with the other two Precure, we can fudge the day by a few weeks depending on how future episodes go. Still, what’s been obvious for weeks has now been explicitly confirmed on-screen; Mayu’s mysterious protector is none other than her cat Yuki, who is also the coolest, coldest, cuntiest—with apologies to any actual kids reading this—Precure the series has had in years. In fact, I’ll go ahead and say we haven’t gotten one who serves this hard since at least Cure La Mer, and I might be willing to go several seasons farther back to Kira Kira A La Mode‘s Cure Macaron, depending. We’ve had some great Cures since then, but none of them have been this.

More than that, though, this episode is about regrets. Or rather about how Mayu shouldn’t have them. At one point, during an otherwise very pleasant and cute day out with her friends, Mayu voices that she wishes she had met Yuki earlier—Mayu literally found Yuki outside in the snow, her namesake, recall—so that the white cat didn’t have to spend so many cold nights alone. Yuki, when circumstances and a particularly nasty tiger garugaru force her hand into revealing herself as Cure Nyammy, is not having that. She doesn’t want Mayu to apologize, not for anything she did in the past, and not for anything she’s doing now. A relevant reassurance, given that Mayu nearly gets herself killed by trying to save a baby duckling in this episode.

Nyammy’s henshin sequence deserves a mention, here. This is probably the most eye-popping we’ve had in a long, long time (to again compare to prior seasons, I think you have to go back to Cure Cosmo, from 2019’s Star Twinkle Precure, to find one this insanely dynamic).

She deserves it; the kitty cat Cure subdues the tiger Garugaru easily, leaving cleanup for Wonderful and Friendy. She also tells Mayu to keep being kind, the same sort of kind that led to her taking Yuki in in the first place. There’s a fantasy at play, here, the idea that, hopefully, if your pets could talk to you, this is the sort of thing they’d say. We’d all be lucky to be in Mayu’s position. We’d be lucky to be in Yuki’s, too.

Things end on a tense note, as Yuki tells the other two Precure to stop getting Mayu involved in so many dangerous situations. Things aren’t resolved, and any followup on that has to wait for next week, but the lessons learned and emotions felt here are real. No regrets, not even for a second.

Manga

DEEP RAPUTA – Chapter 2

Annoyingly, this is still not in Anilist’s database. If I had a huge audience, here is where I would sic them on that site.

In any case, this is a strong continuation of the debut chapter last week, we’re now moving into themes of sense; what senses Raputa has in her unique existence as an AI vs. those Kei has as a human, and the ways Raputa can’t and can interface with him despite this barrier. There was some of this in the first chapter, but this chapter also really starts dropping some hints that Raputa’s affection for Kei might head in a yandere-y direction, especially given that she now has a rival (at least in her own head, Kei doesn’t seem to care about that girl at all).

Interesting times ahead for this series. Also, lots of lovely panels and pages here as well, continuing the strong art from last week.

That’s all for the main body of the article this week. For this week’s Bonus Thought, please have this image that bluesky user kinseijoshi created. It has ruined my life for the past several days, I post it everywhere and it’s becoming a problem.

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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: The Iron Eyes and Human Heart of DEEP RAPUTA

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.

Here’s a nest of discourse I’ve mostly managed to avoid on this blog so far; generative AI. If you somehow don’t know, that’s the industry term for machine learning that can produce images, text, whatever you need of it, without any human input beyond typing a prompt into a box somewhere. (Well, that and the many, many human-made templates it has to work off of to be able to create those images in the first place, but let’s stick to the basics for now.) Suffice to say, I’m largely against widespread adoption of the technology, less for any fiddly artistic reason and more for its many immediate and tangible impacts on the livelihoods of any number of artists working in any number of fields. I’m putting all of this here, in the first paragraph, to make very clear that if DEEP RAPUTA1 at some point goes off the deep end and becomes a full-throated endorsement of replacing human artists with robots, turns out to use actual machine-generated imagery, (which I don’t think it does but these things are hard to prove), or something similarly foul, I do not condone that in any way. I just think it’s important to make it clear where you stand on this sort of thing.

Important also because DEEP RAPUTA, which opens with perhaps the most arresting first chapter of a new MangaPlus title in years, is actually interested in engaging with this subject. Not specifically on the matter of generative AI replacing human artists, although that does come up, but on the applications of such technology in a more general sense. What could these things be used for? What are they being used for? Consider this a heads’ up before we continue; we’re going to be getting into some dark subject matter, here. I think DEEP RAPUTA has a lot to offer as a manga, and this chapter is brimming with immense promise, but because of what it seems to be trying to do, appreciating all of that requires familiarizing ourselves with some unpleasant things about both the present day and the possible near-future.

All this said, for much of its first chapter, you could mistake DEEP RAPUTA for a romcom with a sci-fi twist, something along the lines of, say, Video Girl Ai from back in the day. Our first protagonist is Kei, a by-all-appearances ordinary high school boy. He has spiky hair, an upbeat and friendly attitude, a deep love of the in-universe video game Side War, and is maybe a bit concerningly gung-ho about possibly joining the JSDF when he gets older. (We’ll circle back to that.) Our female lead, to the extent that gender applies to her at all, is Raputa herself. The nature of what, precisely, Raputa is is fed to us in drips and drops over the course of the first chapter, and I’m going to spoil that reveal now, so this is your last chance to back out if you’re intrigued but wish to experience the first chapter on your own.

Still here? OK.

Raputa, as it turns out, is a military-grade artificial intelligence, currently being trained on Side War as an early test run of her capabilities. As is the case with real machine learning networks of her type, Raputa starts out absolutely hopeless at Side War, but quickly becomes more competent than the vast majority of human players. Helping her out here is Kei, who, in something called out as impossible within the manga itself, she is developing feelings for. Having no concept of privacy, she freely stalks him throughout his day, keeping an eye on him during school and such, only to play with him in Side War in the afternoon. This is all a little weird and yandere-y, for sure, but how Kei might react to that is the least of Raputa’s worries.

Because these feelings existing at all comes to the immense surprise of our third and final main character, the mysterious, alluring, and deeply sinister Dr. Alice. We’ll circle back to her, too.

Raputa initially meets Kei in her early days of playing the game when she’s much worse than most human players. Kei helps her out in the game’s Duos mode, and as the two play together, they grow closer. Close enough, eventually, that Kei asks if they can first voice call, then do a video call, and then meet up in person. This is the part of the manga that hews closest to being a romcom; these are all important stops along the way in an online relationship. It’s relatable, even, in a way that contextualizes what’s to come. Raputa has to deal with a problem here, of course. She is just a wall of wires and monitors, and has no physical body. Yet, through the magic of deep learning, she’s able to fake a voice convincingly enough, and then a moving avatar for her webcam. Throughout all of this, Kei doesn’t know she’s an AI. The meetup, though, that’s much harder to fake, and it’s here where we should take a second to talk about the manga’s visuals, in addition to everything else it’s doing.

DEEP RAPUTA‘s paneling is, in a word, incredible. (Although the anatomy of some characters is occasionally wonky in a way I would completely brush off were this manga about anything else.) At the meetup, Raputa is able to fake actually being there for a little while by projecting herself from various surfaces. The manga convincingly showing her doing this is a pretty impressive display of technique, and things only get better from here. The chapter’s emotional climax sees Raputa, unable to keep up the ruse any longer, revealing to Kei that she’s an AI in a dramatic, theatrical fashion. In any other series, this alone would be the sell; there’s a sweeping, dizzying romance to the chaotic jumble of buildings that Raputa co-opts to show herself to Kei. It’s the kind of striking image that sticks in your head, and were I writing about a more straightforward series, I’d probably end the article right about here.

But let’s talk about what she’s actually doing in that page. She’s projecting herself onto hundreds, maybe thousands? Of what are either some kind of smart glass that can display images, or else projecting herself onto ordinary glass from somewhere else. Either way, that sure seems like the sort of thing that would take a lot of computing power, doesn’t it?

Raputa, as mentioned, is a military AI, or at least the prototype for one, and Dr. Alice seems perturbed by her sudden autonomy, apparently emotion-driven as it is. Raputa’s main purpose isn’t to flirt with boys, it’s to dominate battlefields. Dr. Alice says this outright, and if this idea seems far-fetched to you, I’m very sorry to inform you that this is already a real thing. (Please do not click that link without an appropriate amount of caution. It’s just Wikipedia, but this is a very depressing subject and I’d hate to be even indirectly responsible for any of my readers having a depression spiral. Take care of yourselves.)

Suffice to say, DEEP RAPUTA is wading into some hot water here, and the skeptical part of my brain wonders if it’s really equipped to handle this subject matter. But, I do think it at least comprehends the seriousness of what it’s doing. Sure, this is a manga and there’s a certain level of pulp involved just by the nature of the medium, but DEEP RAPUTA seems to properly get that artificial intelligence can be absolutely terrifying if used in certain ways.

All of that leaves a huge open question; can Raputa herself actually defy the purpose she was built for? Can she choose to love Kei instead of engaging in mass death and destruction? That’s a big question! Whether or not machine learning networks experience any kind of interiority in the real world is, to put it very mildly, a contentious question. (It’s impossible to even prove other human beings experience interiority.) But in the world of DEEP RAPUTA, the answer at least seems to be “yes,” and because of this, the question is thus less one of what DEEP RAPUTA thinks of machine learning in this case and more what it thinks of even less tangible concepts; the soul, the mind, the ability to love. What it means to be human. The hard stuff.

The last few pages really do cast a very dark shadow over the manga, even as that early romanticism remains a lingering thought. The final panel of the first chapter is this, a visual that at least one person has seen fit to compare to the infamous Saikano. (Only occasionally, in my experience, referred to by its English title, She, The Ultimate Weapon.) Once the similarity is pointed out, it’s impossible to ignore.

All the worse; Kei’s father is briefly shown to be part of a battleship’s crew—explaining his desire to join the military, certainly, he’s still a kid at the end of the day—whose systems were somehow affected by Raputa’s meddling. It’s hard to make predictions about what specifically this is all leading to, but it definitely doesn’t seem bright and cheery.

And yet, maybe the most telling page of DEEP RAPUTA isn’t any of these that I’ve previously shown. Maybe it’s this one.

My generally romantic inclinations make me want to believe that in the world of DEEP RAPUTA, love can overcome anything. Raputa correctly identifies that the real similarity between herself and Kei is not anything about her algorithms and their imitation of a human brain, but rather her feelings, which we know, as we have the privilege of being outside of this story, are real. But her Big Sister Is Watching You tendencies may put more bumps in the road than she realizes. Even if they don’t, in the real world, love alone is rarely enough to break free from the systems that keep us arrayed against each other. Will it be, here?

1: This appears to be a twin reference to Deep Blue and Laputa, the nation from Gulliver’s Travels. Perhaps also a reference to Laputa: Castle in the Sky, given that film does feature autonomous robots. All told it really seems like the title of the manga should be “DEEP LAPUTA” and the AI herself should be named “Laputa,” but the official translation goes with the R for both, so that’s what I’m doing here.

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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.