Brief Thoughts on: IKOKU NIKKI – Episode 10

Something I greatly appreciate about Ikoku Nikki is its intentionally screwy chronology. Asa walks home disappointed when one of her friends suggests they all try out for a lead vocalist position. We then get to see why she’s upset. All of those friends pledged at some point to write a song together, a promise treated as sacred in some genres here dissolves into nothing in the span of just a few months. As she walks, melancholy, a piano melody drifts her way, and it’s suddenly years and years ago, when she was much younger and singing in a choir competition, something her biological parents seem to have encouraged. Later, when she loses, her father stutteringly tells her that her singing “stood out.” In this way, there is a through-line. The immense weight of that reaction, likely not even intentional, is something that can utterly sledgehammer a child’s sense of self. This isn’t the thing that sets Asa a-wandering, but it is one such thing.

This methodology pairs well with the collage-like approach that Asa takes to her notebook itself, the central object of Ikoku Nikki on the whole. Her writing in it is, like her memories, patchwork, a scrawled quilt of quotations from the adults in her life, doodles of UFOs, short exclamations of feeling and so on. In this way, Ikoku Nikki is very good at marrying form to function; we are living inside of a notebook not unlike Asa’s as we watch it, because everyone’s life is like this.

And indeed, Asa’s not actually the only character to have this privilege. We follow Emiri for some time here, time spent waiting for her friends, fixed on a length of telescoping pencil lead, washes away into a daydream of the seaside.

When one of those friends arrives, she vents about feeling like she could never stop being friends with Asa even if she wanted to ever since the accident. That feeling, tense and heavy, melts away. The person Emiri is venting to is a gentle newcomer to the narrative, one Shouko [Hanazawa Kana], who wraps her pinky finger around hers, the implicitly romantic nature of the gesture made explicit when Emiri blushingly says that she likes this girl. Without this insight into Emiri’s own point of view, it would be easy for the viewer to condemn her at arm’s length. Walking alongside her, we can see that her feeling of burden isn’t borne of cruelty. It’s the shifting unease of someone who feels she is rapidly growing apart from her childhood friend, in ways she’s not sure how to confront. This sort of tempering is what drives Ikoku Nikki’s emotional logic, it’s what makes it feel “real.” The emotional verisimilitude holds up a mirror to every similar selfish decision we’ve ever made for ourselves. It doesn’t judge, but it does reflect.

These aren’t the only lives this show has explored, but all those it has are considered similarly. (Makio, most notably. Both here and elsewhere.) Notebooks, connected by only the whims of their writers, emotions and events blending together with no regard for time or space, are the perfect metaphor. We are, perpetually, searching for the unifying thread at the center of it all, the reason we write in the first place, no matter what form our stories take.

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Posted on February 19, 2026February 19, 2026 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Your Anime Orbit: OSHI NO KO – Season 3, Episode 6

There are a variety of ways to interpret any story. This is something that’s obviously true, but I think is more often deployed as a cliché than really understood. For example, I have spoken a few different ways about Oshi no Ko over the past few years, I’ve praised it for its strong cast and bold storytelling, and I’ve criticized it for its relatively shallow understanding of the systems it seeks to critique and its reliance on elbow-jabbing shock value. Those aren’t contradictory opinions, my frustrations with the story stem from thinking it’s otherwise very good.

Out of habit, I’ve kept a lot of my more negative opinions on the series off-site to my tumblr or the like (with a few exceptions), while posting the more positive ones here. This has served to perhaps obscure that I think so far that season three is a pretty noticeable downgrade from season two. Not in terms of visuals—Hiramaki Daisuke’s team at Doga Kobo know what the fuck they’re doing if nothing else—but in terms of its actual story. I like this show best when it succeeds, but just as often, it lapses into Akasaka Aka bothsidesing some issue he clearly doesn’t understand very well, or gets caught in the muck of his addiction to wallowing in drama. (Often both at once.) Not to say “called it”, but I essentially knew this would happen, purely from Oshi no Ko‘s reputation as a manga that has a strong beginning and middle but a weak ending. Nothing gets a reputation that specific and that widespread without there being some kernel of truth to it. “No higher to climb” is specifically how I put it.

But, if I’m honest with myself, there are two things that make me want to be wrong about that assessment. One is simple contrarianism—you did remember that I’m the Wonder Egg Priority Defender, right? I love liking things that other people don’t. I never assume the role without a reason, but it’s one I like playing. Two is that when Oshi no Ko is good, it’s still very good. I think this episode is probably Oshi no Ko at its very best. It’s mostly about its best character, and it allows the show to actually explore its central ideas in an interesting way.

Last week’s episode saw Kana trying to schmooze with a director, Masanori Shima [Seiichiro Yamashita], to potentially be cast in one of his films. Shima, a young upstart who’s apparently responsible for some really good flicks, seemed nice enough at first, but once arriving at Shima’s home office, Kana found all of his staff gone for the evening. What followed was an awkward and uncomfortable scene of her being pretty ruthlessly hit on. Nothing Shima did crossed a clear line into violating consent, but this was one of those sickly situations where it’s clear that the power dynamics at play were influencing things in a way they really shouldn’t be. In finding a way out of this, Kana thought of Aqua, and tearfully explained that she has someone she already has feelings for.

This whole scene was, in of itself, a display of one of the obvious downsides of being an actress. The whole “casting couch” thing is a supremely gross mindset. Seeing someone in a position of power over an actress actually act on it is even more so. To his very limited credit, Shima backs off after Kana explicitly rejects his advances. But it’s still just all-around slimy, and despite the two parting on relatively okay terms, given everything, one can’t help but feel that Kana dodged a bullet. And however Kana herself may feel about it doesn’t end up mattering, because she happens to be spotted by a tabloid photographer while leaving Shima’s house. He snaps a few burst-shots of the two of them together and knows he has a scandal story in the making.

To be a little critical here, it feels like the show goes out of its way to exonerate Shima himself from any direct blame. A worse show would do this explicitly. Instead, he simply largely goes unmentioned while the episode places the blame on Mako Azami [Haruka Shiraishi], the girl who introduced Kana and Shima in the first place.

Now, it is true to life that scandals are often leaked from within a celebrity’s inner circle—this is even explicitly mentioned in this episode itself, albeit in a different context, because Oshi no Ko cares not for your subtlety—but a better show would just cut this entirely. It feels like a symptom of Akasaka Aka’s general tendency to try to complicate things for the sake of it, even when doing so doesn’t actually serve the narrative. It hardens into an overly-eager “no, you guys aren’t getting it, it’s not just the systems that are the problem! It’s the people in them!” that feels at times downright defensive. This trait is probably Oshi no Ko‘s biggest flaw in general, the kink in the armor that keeps holding it back. In its first season, Oshi no Ko really seemed like it wanted to turn the entertainment industry over and examine it rather than simply condemning it. That this tendency is present here—albeit only just so—in the show’s best episode in a season is thus a bit worrying. (And of course, if we circle back around to examining Shima’s role in all this at a later date, I’ll happily eat my words here, but I don’t think I’ll have to.)

Nonetheless, while this is all worth talking about, what I loved about this episode, and what makes it so great in spite of this flaw, was its study of Kana herself. Kana’s reaction to the specter of a probable scandal is one of profound panic. Confronted by the tabloid reporter, she freezes up in the face of his questions and eventually dashes off into the night in a fearful blur. Because episode director Uchinomiya Koki is a fucking pro, the show’s entire color palette changes moods along with her, trading in its usual bright and bold colors for a frozen world of grays, dark reds, and coffee-stain sepia browns.

When Kana’s panic is at its worst, she imagines the people she passes in the city crowd saying terrible things about her, the imagined slander clawing its way into her field of vision, like a blown-up, massive version of the tweet that ruined one of Ai’s days back in the very first episode of this series. It’s one of the best visual moments in a season that has hardly been short on those, and for that alone, this would be a great episode.

What’s really interesting, though, is how she eventually breaks herself out of this panic. Huddling by herself in the dark, Kana thinks that she should just quit. She thinks she wasn’t built to handle all this pressure. She cries about the mask she’s had to put on for the public her entire life, and somewhere in here she says something pretty heartbreaking: “Nobody wants the real Arima Kana.” Alone and frustrated, she cries for Aqua, who just so happens to be searching for her nearby. As a soft insert song kicks in, it briefly looks like Aqua might go to comfort her, which, just to lay it on the table, would’ve been super lame. The tension between Kana’s ambitions as an artist and her feelings for Aqua has been a central part of the character since the beginning, but it only works as a tension because Kana is so strong-willed. Having Aqua swoop in like an angel here would’ve robbed her of some of her agency and made her look weak.

Thankfully, this does not happen.

Crying out for Aqua causes her to pause, she’s shocked at her own neediness for someone who, at least from her point of view, isn’t actually interested in her like that. (Remember, Kana is not privy to Aqua’s inner thoughts like we are.) She chastises herself for playing the damsel in distress, and abruptly screams to the fucking sky that she’s not going to back down. She’s going to take the scandal, no matter how it breaks, on the chin, and she’s going to survive in the industry as she is. She—rightly!—reassures herself that she’s put up with this kind of thing since she was a preschooler. Something like this is not enough to stop her.

It’s absolutely fascinating that Kana seems to realize in real time that these things she’s always thought of as flaws about herself, her bitchy personality, her competitive streak, her lack of tolerance for the facades and handshaking of showbiz, her distance from the classical “pure and sweet-hearted” idol archetype, are actually why people like her. That’s definitely true out of universe, and in spite of her being a total professional, it’s hard to imagine that all this isn’t at least a little visible to her in-universe fans as well. You can’t really completely hide who you are, not wholly and not forever. It’s that old self-explaining magic trick maneuver Oshi no Ko really perfected last season, telling you exactly why you like this character right as it’s using that fondness to tug at your heartstrings. It’s brilliant stuff.

So, for the first time in a long time, Kana chooses herself. She’s will not bend or break, not for this. If I can be real here, I think this was also something I needed to hear as someone who’s long connected with the character. It’s really easy at times to dissociate from your own role in your life, to turn yourself into a damsel in distress or a completely helpless victim of circumstance. Sometimes people are victims, of course, but just as often, you really do have to rely on your own grit to get back out there, no matter what stands in your way. This is the kind of situation where Akasaka’s penchant for old school “just build up your confidence and do the damn thing”-type writing really shines. It helps that she handles things with a sense of humor, dryly realizing that this is going to lead to throngs of angry Twitter comments accusing her of being a slut who sleeps her way to the top and maybe worse. That’d be a hard thing for anyone to deal with, but Kana? Well, she puts it best.

The Doja Cat approach.

Taking the broader view, it’s interesting to contrast this development, how Kana frames it as something she’s doing to be true to herself, with the fate of Suzuhiro Mana. We briefly met her for the first and only time way, way back when Oshi no Ko was still a relatively new phenomenon, before it even had an anime. Back then, it seemed like Oshi no Ko would treat leaving the business, one way or another, as the only real possible “happy ending” for a life in the entertainment industry. That’s what Mana did, and that is what that little aside, buried next to the debut of the new B*Komachi, seemed to imply. This episode raises the possibility that just maybe, that isn’t the case. Maybe for a lucky and strong-willed few, the white hot light of fame doesn’t have to actually burn you to cinders. Of course, fire still hurts whether it kills you or not, but that’s just the cost of playing with it.

Then again, maybe even that much is just wishful thinking. Oshi no Ko is hardly the sort of story that would shy away from setting all this up only to pull it out from under the audience. It is totally possible that despite her confidence here, this scandal will destroy Kana’s career. I certainly hope it doesn’t, but it’s not off the table! If that happens, we’ll talk about it when the time comes. No matter how her story ends, I will be watching—and probably writing about—the saga of Arima Kana until it reaches its conclusion. She’s simply the best.

Posted on November 30, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 20 – “The Answer”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

A recurring tension in the Umamusume series is the fact that all racing careers eventually end. This only makes sense, most athletes retire eventually. You can’t push your body like that forever, and even the best will have to pack it in someday, as the alternative is usually much worse.

In the context of Umamusume, retirement is a peculiar thing. It’s almost never addressed directly. When it is, it’s sometimes accompanied by mention of the Dream Trophy League, a wholly fictional second racing league that we know little about, which existed as a background detail in some of the earlier, no-subtitle Umamusume anime seasons. Whether the Dream Trophy League even exists at this point in Umamusume‘s vague, shifting, and sometimes self-contradictory timeline isn’t clear—if it’s ever mentioned in Cinderella Gray at all, I must’ve missed it, and honestly even asserting that Cinderella Gray and those other seasons take place in the same continuity at all requires some squinting—but I bring this odd relic of the earlier Umamusume anime seasons up here to point out one thing in particular. It doesn’t actually come up in this episode even once, which feels notable.

Why? Because this is the episode where we finally learn what, exactly, has been hanging over Tamamo Cross’s head for the last while. You may recall that she seemed oddly hesitant to commit to racing in the Japan Cup again next year back when Obey Your Master asked. Here, we learn why. The Arima Kinen is going to be her last race.

This episode actually opens on a bit of backstory for Tamtam, showing us how she met her trainer Komiyama Masami. That “old man” whose sake she’s run some of her races was in fact her landlord, implicitly a former umamusume trainer himself, and introducing Tama to Komi was an act of kindness where it’s easy to understand why she’d hold him in such high regard. We aren’t directly told precisely why Tama is retiring, but with the juxtaposition here, we can infer any number of reasons.

Regardless of the “why,” when the two of them meet at a press conference, Tamamo breaks the news privately to Oguri Cap, who does not take it well. Whatever reason Tamamo might have, this means that she and Oguri will only have one more race together, the Arima Kinen itself. Oguri is actually in a fairly good mood up until this point in the episode, and her sharp downturn in demeanor here is quite startling. Moreso when she realizes, as she tries to argue with Tama, that she is now essentially in the same position Fujimasa March was way back in episode six. Tamamo Cross’s ultimatum to Oguri is the same as Oguri’s was to March; if she really wants to settle things, she has to beat her here. There will be no do-overs.

When the actual press conference starts and Tamamo Cross breaks the news to the press that the Arima Kinen will be her final race. We actually get a rare bit of narration from Oguri here, where she admits to not even remembering what she tells the press when they turn their mics to her. We don’t hear it, either, all of her thoughts have been blotted out by the specter of Tamamo Cross’s retirement.

Between the prospect of her greatest rival retiring and her own failure to reach the Zone, Oguri’s in a pretty tough position here, mentally. Some time after the conference, we see Oguri training at night to blow off some steam, and it feels like an open question as to whether the self-doubt, anger, and disappointment might actually snuff out her competitive fire forever. This is a real danger to someone like Oguri Cap, and she’d hardly be the first Umamusume protagonist to let her own hangups psyche her out of a victory.

Enter Dicta Striker, the Chestnut Bullet.

Dicta, based on one of the real Oguri Cap’s contemporaries, the horse Soccer Boy, has been a background presence in the anime since Oguri relocated to Tracen, but this episode is the first time we really get a good handle on her as a character. We get some of her backstory, including how her early career as a young prodigy gave way to a streak of losses that broke her confidence. She rebounded, though, at one point partly inspired by Oguri herself. By the time she calls out to Oguri for a late-night practice race, she’s long since reached the elusive Zone herself.

The training race, then, is as much a direct conversation between these two as it is actual practice. Dicta lightly needles Oguri as they run, saying that as she is now, she’ll never reach it. Privately though, Dicta thinks that Oguri is actually on the verge of breaking through this mental barrier. Dicta pushes her further; what compels her to race? Who does she want to beat? What, at the end of the day, is driving her?

This seesawing tension, between the joy and the fire Oguri Cap feels from running itself, from surpassing her rivals—once Fujimasa March, now Tamamo Cross, perhaps someone else in the not-too-distant future—from surpassing her own limits, and the persistent fear that she won’t be able to, will remain an underlying current for the remainder of the series. Cinderella Gray really leans into the Beast part of Oguri’s nickname in scenes like these, illustrating an underlying, boiling primality at the heart of her character, something fiercer and deeper than just competitiveness.

In a way, it’s unsurprising to see the anime render her in these terms—at the end of the day, this is a sports anime, after all—but the elemental distillation of it here is still a pretty rare thing, and it’s one Umamusume has made an art of over the years. Perhaps because of this, the nighttime practice race between Oguri and Dicta is the episode’s best scene, with most of its best shots being moody, windy cuts of Oguri’s running figure against the night sky.

Oguri comes close to making the breakthrough she needs to—very close, we get that visual effect of gray smoke leaking out of her eyes again, and a shot of a wall of glass cracking but not yet breaking—before Dicta abruptly calls the race off just as Oguri is about to pull ahead of her. Whether her explanation that she doesn’t want to push either herself or Oguri so much before the real race that they hurt themselves is what she really believes or a small bit of saving face is hard to say for sure. Either way, it’s clear that this run helps Oguri a lot.

Directly helping her rival out, even in such an oblique way, may seem contradictory with the goal of actually winning the Arima Kinen for Dicta. But, afterward, when her trainer, a hulking oak tree of a man, lightly chastises her for it, Dicta just wryly replies that she doesn’t want anyone to say that Oguri wasn’t at her best when she beats her.

Dicta isn’t the only one helping her, either. As all of this is going on, Belno Light, who by this point is essentially Oguri’s co-trainer, has been handling the more technical and strategic aspects of planning the race. An early scene at the press conference sees her inspired by how well Komi takes care of Tamamo Cross, and she gets a particularly great showcase here where, as an umamusume herself, she’s actually able to imitate Oguri’s running gait and analyze the specific ways in which the Arima Kinen’s track will affect her.

As with the Tenno Sho, the Arima Kinen features an inclined section, something that can’t be overcome with brute force alone and requires actual strategy to handle. Belno’s scenes in the episode, devoted to tackling this problem, are less dramatic than those with Tamamo Cross or Dicta Striker, but they’re no less important, and I think the story does a great job of making her seem just as important to Oguri’s growth as Oguri’s rivals are. By the time she’s finally come up with a good solution, she’s effectively run a version of the race herself. She may not be a preternatural talent like some of her contemporaries, but Belno’s tenacity here can stand up against that of any other umamusume in the series.

Of course, whether that growth equals success is another question. The episode ends on Christmas Day, at the Arima Kinen, a bright and sunny winter day as the runners take the field….

Posted on November 2, 2025November 2, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – EPISODE 17 – “THE JAPAN CUP”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

We open with Oguri on the practice track, remembering the sting of defeat at the Tenno Sho. Today, she swears to herself, is the day she closes that distance. Is it really? Can our ash-haired champion make a comeback?

One of the lovely things about the relatively curt episode titles that Cinderella Gray has used so far is that they point out certain reflections and repetitions within the story. Each of the episodes we’ve had which are directly named after a race—of which this is the third—have marked major inflection points in the series. “The Japanese Derby” showed us Oguri at her most dominant, a competitor so good that her absence overshadowed the race that was actually run. “The Fall Tenno Sho” focused on Tamamo Cross, Oguri’s strongest rival thus far and the first since her transfer to actually defeat her. This episode, then, seems to promise at least the possibility of a comeback story for Oguri.

In typical Oguri fashion, she’s not content to simply run. She wants to try something new and a bit daring. Specifically, she asks Musaka if she can run in the pace chaser style as opposed to staying farther back as she usually does. Her idea here being that Tamamo Cross mainly won due to being able to spurt farther ahead on the last leg of the Tenno Sho. If she’s in a better position, Oguri reasons, she’ll have a better shot at actually outpacing her. It’s a pretty sizable switchup, but Roppei agrees. Again, the elements for a comeback are all here.

Except, of course, the fact that Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap are not the only two people running in this race. A walkout sequence quickly brings in all the competitors we met or met again last week, saving two in particular for last: Tamamo Cross herself, and Obey Your Master, who meet for the first time on their way out to the field.

Obey, apparently not above taking the low road, makes a psychological play. We know from earlier in the series that Tamtam is normally pretty nervous before a race, but, as with the Tenno Sho, she seems calm here. (We don’t know who exactly, but Tamamo Cross was on the phone with someone, evidently someone important to her, earlier in the episode. Perhaps these two things are related.) So it certainly seems like she’s in great shape both physically and mentally, until Obey tries getting under her skin. It’s not hard to conclude, following on from last week, that Obey is deliberately attempting to psyche her biggest competitor out. She’s surprisingly good at it, too, initially leading with a bit of fake buddy-buddy talk that Tama immediately catches on to, only to hit her with this.

^{Mood down?}

This doesn’t seem to properly rattle Tamamo Cross, but it definitely at least ticks her off. A more stabilizing presence though is, unsurprisingly, Oguri Cap herself, and it’s cute to see the two of them do the whole “I won’t lose to you!” rival bit.

Once the race starts, Oguri actually seems to be doing rather well right up until she finds herself next to Michelle My Baby. Michelle, being American, does not have the sense of decorum most of the Japanese racers—Oguri included—are necessarily used to. What I mean by this is that when Oguri finds herself in a spot Michelle wants, Michelle has no problem attempting to take it by literally elbowing her out of the way. (Similar things play out up and down the pack, including between Ellerslie Pride and Gold City towards its back half. Noteworthy, as the two got a bit of banter in before the start of the race.)

Aside from being pretty borderline in terms of whether or not it’s actually allowed, this is also terrible news for Oguri in general. Already lower on stamina than she’d like to be given that she’s pace chasing (and thus having to run harder to stay near the top of the pack), Michelle’s rough tactics sap her of most of her strength entirely, and she falls back to the second half of the pack in the last few minutes of the episode.

It’s a pretty disheartening showing for our protagonist, and it’s hard to imagine her coming back from it. Though, as Musaka points out, the race isn’t over ’til it’s over.

At around this point, Toni Bianca, the favorite of the overseas racers and, as we established last week, really the smart money to win this thing in general, stops playing around. Bianca has up to this point been biding her time in the dead middle of the pack, so this is her going for the win. As she does so, she remarks that Tamamo Cross—coming in from the outside to avoid the physical contact stuff from the foreign racers—must be very arrogant to think that that kind of recklessness is going to help her against someone like Toni.

Here’s the thing though, it absolutely does help her against Toni. For the second time, we see lightning strike the racecourse.

About “the Zone” (almost always written in quotation marks, from what I’ve seen): it’s a natural question to ask whether what we’re seeing is “real” within the context of the fiction—regardless of whether anyone who’s not an elite racer can actually see it—or if this is visual metaphor presented for the sake of us, the audience. I think, though, it’s an imperfect and incorrect question. Umamusume likes to play coy with whether or not “magic” (or at least something sufficiently close to it) exists in its universe beyond the obvious conceit of the horsegirls themselves. I think the honest answer is that leaving it open to interpretation actually makes these scenes more compelling. Is this merely Tamamo Cross breathing rarified air, giving it 110% with whatever powerful but still mundane techniques she’s learned, or is there actually some kind of Horsegirl Domain Expansion thing that she has access to? I personally lean more toward the former, since I think it’s largely more interesting. But I also admit that there’s part of me that practically vibrates in my seat at the thought of umamusume with superpowers, so it’s not a clear-cut case of one being better than the other. Hitting both sides of that internal divide is one more stylistic thing that makes Cinderella Gray so great.

Everything, then, seems primed for Tamamo Cross to take another G1, which would put her at a ridiculous seven such wins in a row. Here’s a question though, about the “Zone” and about Cinderella Gray in general; is there any reason at all to believe Tamamo Cross is the only umamusume who can do that?

And that’s the note we end the episode on! Tamamo Cross a streak of lightning across the track, suddenly staked to the ground by a sinister, all-seeing eye. What the finale of the race holds, we can only guess. See you next week, umadacchi.

Posted on October 12, 2025October 12, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 15 – “Our Story”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience.

Let’s talk about Super Creek [Yuuki Kana].

Actually, before we talk about Super Creek, let’s talk about characters, and how Umamusume handles them. Full disclosure, I’m going to be pulling extensively here—both in this column specifically and, honestly, probably whenever I talk about Umamusume going forward—from IronicLark’s excellent Umadacchi Densetsu blog, a fantastic resource for all things Umamusume and, so far as I am aware, easily the most thorough exploration of the series and its various components available in English. I highly recommend diving into it yourself sometime if what I am doing in these columns interests you even a little bit. Frankly, Lark is significantly more knowledgeable on the subject than I am.

So, characters. Most things I cover on this blog are either standalone anime projects, or they’re anime adapted from some single specific source, a manga, a light novel, etc. Umamusume belongs to the other category of things I cover here, and has more in common structurally with, say, Love Live, than most other anime I write about. What I mean by this is that it’s a media mix¹ franchise. Without getting too into it (because that distinction alone is worth having a long conversation about) what this essentially means is that rather than one component of the franchise being the “primary” unit that all other adaptations pull from, there are many distinct components given roughly equal weight. Now, this isn’t strictly the case with all or even most media mix properties, as in the case of Umamusume and many others, there is a “central” project—the game—but the distribution of influence is much more horizontal than it is in something like, say, the Yano-kun anime airing this season, which is a straight one-to-one adaptation of a single specific story.

This approach changes how a series handles many things, but most relevant here is how it handles characterization. Because, if you primarily know Super Creek from the Umamusume game—and I’m betting that describes at least some of you—you might wonder how that character and her doting, motherly personality fit in to the generally fairly serious ‘sports anime’ tone that Cinderella Gray has going on. The answer is that Umamusume, as with many media mix properties, tends to emphasize or scale back different character traits depending on the needs of the story. As such, different iterations of the same character can feel pretty distinct, even if the “core” remains the same. (As a complete tangent, the most extreme example of this approach I can think of is actually Transformers, a series in which this guy, this guy, and this guy all have the same name, at least some of the time, despite being nothing alike.) Nothing so extreme as that example is present in Umamusume, but I bring all this up just to say: when we see Creek here, she is somewhat different from the Super Creek you’ve seen people make all those googoo babies jokes about on the internet. (Although, elements of that doting characterization do remain, I don’t want to overstate the differences.)

Creek is formally introduced here after having kicked around in the background of Part 1, and—not to spoil anything—we are going to be following her, at least intermittently, for quite a while. Her introduction is actually relatively low-key at first, though. We see her training. We see her trainer, Fumino Nase [Yū Shimamura²] apparently a prodigy who’s brought her trainees pretty significant success even early on in her career, beset by reporters. Nase seems to find all the media attention annoying at best (and particularly bristles at an offhand mention of her father, evidently also a trainer), but she’s willing to throw them a bone by telling them that she intends to have Super Creek compete in the Kikuka Sho, one third of Japan’s Triple Crown and, importantly, the longest race of the three. This comes as a surprise to the reporter interviewing her as, to hear that reporter tell it, Creek’s race results haven’t been that impressive, and she’s actually not even a sure thing to so much as run in the race, as someone would have to drop out first. Nase is of course aware of all this, though, and explains that as a trainer, she considers it part of her job to believe in miracles, no matter how unlikely they might be.

Naturally, just then, word comes down the line that one of the other competitors has had to drop out. Super Creek has an in.

The actual Kikuka Sho race follows both Creek and one of her main competitors. Yaeno Muteki, whose name you probably remember. It’s hard not to feel a bit bad for Muteki, who keeps getting put in these situations where she’s trained so hard and has good prospects only to end up facing a rare, generational talent.

And make no mistake, Super Creek is one of those. For a race as long as the Kikuka Sho both physical stamina and clarity of mind are important, so while Muteki holds the most promising position for a majority of the race, Creek is eventually able to angle her way from the middle of the pack straight to the front, and she ends up not only winning but winning by a pretty large margin. (A quick reference check on the real race that this episode is based on shows that the real Super Creek overtook the second-place horse, Gakuten to Beat, by five lengths. I am choosing to assume a similar margin here, in the absence of any other evidence. I suppose he really did beat Gakuten.)

Creek’s strength, as emphasized here, lies in her incredible endurance. Something she and Nase have evidently been working on for some time. A brief flashback between the two invokes the Cinderella metaphor once again.

^{Apropos of nothing, it is worth pointing out that Creek and her trainer seem}^very^close.

It’s worth going over again, the term “Cinderella story” refers to, in sports, a longshot victory by an underdog. Usually several such victories over the course of a tournament or the like. In the context of Cinderella Gray, well, the second part of the title spoils that this mostly refers to Oguri Cap. But it can, just as easily, be taken to refer to many of Oguri’s contemporaries, including Tamamo Cross and, yes, Super Creek as well. (Given her chestnut brown hair, she’s an almost-literal dark horse.) Her victory here is clearly hard-fought, and the fire in her eyes on the final spurt is really something to behold. I’m probably not going to surprise anyone by saying I absolutely love Creek, especially this incarnation of the character. I am hoping this episode might turn at least a few more people in the world into Super Creek fans. Fingers crossed.

(On the note of “beholding”, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room at least briefly. There has been some amount of discourse about the show’s somewhat reduced animation prowess from the first part of the first season, the Kasamatsu arc. There’s some truth to this, probably related to staff being shuffled around, but the highlights of this race stack up to anything else in the series so far. We’ll see how the rest of the season plays out in this regard. I feel the need to give a good amount of credit to the show continually paying attention to how the racers run, though. Even in the weakest moments of the race, Creek is consistently drawn as taking long, comparatively slow strides. Right up until that final spurt, where she starts really putting the pedal to the metal.)

In any case, while Yaeno Muteki takes her loss hard, she and her master keep up their training. Muteki has an endurance of her own, in this regard, and as I’ve gone through this story she’s become one of my favorite supporting pieces of Cinderella Gray‘s cast, which is not exactly lacking for strong characters.

And as for the Ashen Beast? Well, this arc does mark the point at which Cinderella Gray goes from being largely about Oguri Cap to being something of an ensemble piece, and I suspect we’ll get a lot more of these focus episodes in the weeks (and hopefully, years) ahead. But, she is here. The entire time Super Creek is making history on the racetrack, a pair of distant eyes are on her, and they are those of none other than our very own Gray Monster. She, Belno, and Musaka make a number of comments during the race, in fact, but what sticks out to me most are the ice-blue bullets Oguri stares into the screen when she senses she has gained yet another rival. Truly, our girl is a monster.

Super Creek will not be the last girl to give Oguri a hard time this arc, by a long shot. A brief post credits scene introduces us to Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko], the Italian umamusume who stands as one of many international racers Oguri and all other Japanese racers competing in the Japan Cup will have to face. Toni is wildly dismissive of them, time will tell if she can back up that talk.

Oh, and there’s another umamusume from abroad who arrives as well. Some blonde girl with tacky stars-and-stripes leggings. Probably no one important, in any case.

^{Famously a thing us Americans say a lot.}

But! We’ll get to find out together. See you next week, Umamusume fans.

^{1: While the Japanese term “media mix” is quite similar to the English phrase “mixed media”, I’m rendering it as-is here, because “mixed media” has a different connotation in English, whereas a “media mix” is something a fair bit more specific.}

^{2: As with the Sirius Symboli case in Part 1 of the anime, my usual sources are not helping me here, but I found a few stray references indicating that she’s voiced by Yu Shimamura, and am taking those at their word.}

Posted on October 10, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The All-Consuming Love of THIS MONSTER WANTS TO EAT ME

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

“Until the day that beautiful monster grants my wish with her own two hands….”

The first thing is the pacing, and the second is the sound design. I’m late to this one, I know, but upon watching the first two episodes of This Monster Wants To Eat Me, the latest in a growing number of decent-to-great yuri adaptations from up and down this year, those were the two elements that stuck out to me the most. Normally, when one brings up an anime’s pacing, it’s to complain. It is all too easy to fuck up the sequencing of events when adapting a manga to animation; by rearranging them illogically, by sticking so close to the source material that you sap the life out of the thing (the more common of those two scenarios these days), or simply by pacing them wrong. Events that are snappy on paper aren’t necessarily so in motion, timing is a key consideration when it comes to picking an approach for adapting this material.

Keep all this in mind as I say, usually, when an anime feels slow, that’s said as a bad thing. Especially if it was based on a manga. Watatabe—as This Monster is more commonly known—proves that it’s not necessarily so. This is an anime that creeps, lurches, and crawls. What it lacks in traditional production polish it more than compensates with in deploying its sense of timing and its audio to create atmosphere. Despite being set in the dead of summer, this is an anime that most makes sense as a Fall series. Mermaids should get to trick or treat, too.

As for what this is all actually about? Well, our main character, Hinako [Ueda Reina], is depressed. We don’t have the details yet, but it seems that she lost her family to some tragic accident some time ago. She wants to die, but she either doesn’t want to or can’t bring herself to end her own life, so she spends a lot of time gazing into the sea and waiting for her time to come. Early in the first episode she runs into a mysterious girl, Shiori [Ishikawa Yui], who warns her that leaning over the railing by the coast isn’t safe. She could fall in, after all! Nonetheless, when she returns to the same spot to do more or less exactly that later that day, strands of thick, dark hair creep out of the water like animate seaweed. Our heroine is thus attacked by an iso-onna, who drags her into the water to consume her.

In its way, this isn’t so bad, Hinako thinks. Sure, it was out of the blue, but this is what she’s been looking for, isn’t it? And nothing, not even the attempts of her best friend (the rowdy Yashiro Miko, played by Fairouz Ai), has really helped. But, in an even more surprising turn of events, the girl from earlier intervenes, sprouting fishscales and a long, sickle-wicked claw to drive the water ghost away.

This isn’t anything as simple as a rescue, though. Shiori wants to eat Hinako, too. She’s just not quite tender enough, yet. So begins a particular flavor of twisted love story.

These first two episodes, especially the second, largely take us through the paces of Hinako’s daily life, and how it changes in the presence of Shiori. Hinako technically never straight up says she’s infatuated with Shiori, but lines like the one quoted at the top of this article make it pretty clear how she feels. The dynamic Watatabe is building here is an interesting one. Hinako wants Shiori to kill and eat her. Shiori is explicitly interested in keeping Hinako alive until her flavor reaches its peak. She explicitly compares Hinako to livestock, in fact.

The important bit here is that Shiori is going to eat her eventually, but not right now. This actually bothers Hinako, not because she’s afraid or repulsed, but because if she’s going to be eaten she’d really rather it be soon. Despite the grim tone and the slow, creaking nature of the storytelling, there’s also an almost bratty overtone to the whole thing, as though Hinako is a needy submissive and Shiori, her domme, is teasingly avoiding giving her what she wants most.

This is, of course, the point. Watatabe’s premise is a take on the whole “domestic girlfriend” fantasy—found more often in heteroromantic romance manga, but it can be seen in yuri as well—wherein a depressed character is lifted to life and warmth by someone who insists on taking care of them. (There is in fact an entire style of romance manga and light novels built on this premise. If you’ve ever seen anything tagged “Rehabilitation” on Anilist or MyAnimeList, that’s what that means.) The roles of the nurturer and romantic partner are rolled into one in these scenarios, and Watatabe‘s playful skewering of them involves giving the caretaker/partner character an explicitly malicious overtone. Remember, within the world of the story itself this isn’t actually a metaphor: Shiori literally wants to kill Hinako and eat her, head to toe. But Hinako, depressed and longing to be reunited with her family, either figuratively in death or literally in the hereafter, is fine with that, and in fact wants that. In its way, Watatabe‘s story is quite a wicked little thing.

I don’t think it would work nearly so well without the audio component. The music here is straightforward but devastatingly effective, an arsenal of simple piano and string pieces that hammer home the oppressive summer that Hinako has been living for so long, and remind us that there is a final, sharp end to her relationship with Shiori. The voice acting here is excellent, too. Ishikawa Yui lends a breathy, ethereal tone to Shiori that really sells the idea of her as some otherworldly creature. She can also make Shiori sound forceful, which is helpful when the character needs to project ferocity (as at the end of the first episode), or make clear to Hinako that she doesn’t get to make all of her own decisions anymore (as at the end of the second). Ueda Reina makes Hinako sound exactly the right amount of withdrawn and closed-off. For an example, visually speaking, her daydreams about ocean life intruding into her everyday existence are reasonably effective but hardly flashy. It’s really the flat, deep-sighing tone of voice Ueda brings to the role that ties it all together.

Having the aural advantage is good. The elephant in the room here is that the show doesn’t look fantastic. It doesn’t look bad, I wouldn’t say—although its frequent use of frame-blending pushes things—but it’s definitely a shoestring production and looks the part, and doesn’t hit the visual heights of, say, the best episodes of the similarly-abbreviated Watanare. (Although that had its lesser moments, too.) Similarly, the actual shot composition is effective but largely unspectacular except for a few particularly striking moments. None of this is all that surprising for a low-resource anime at this stage in the medium’s history, but it is at least worth knowing going into it, and if it pushes people toward the manga instead, I don’t think that’s necessarily such a bad thing, even if they are missing out on the lovely sound design here. It is, in any case, a minor weakness. Or at least it is if I’m the one being asked.

The second episode ends set against the interesting love triangle building between Hinako, Shiori, and Miko, who spends much of the episode being jealous of the mysterious relationship that Hinako and Shiori seem to have suddenly developed.

She, in fact, asks Hinako to a festival. Hinako turns her down—it would seem that the accident that caused the deaths of her family is somehow related to this very same festival—but Shiori, not content to let her prized pig simply sit and girlrot, forces her to go. We don’t know how that’s going to work out for either of them, yet. (Or for Miko, for that matter.) But I certainly plan on tuning in to find out.

Posted on September 28, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Summoning the Start of a New Season with A WILD LAST BOSS APPEARED!

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Another season, another isekai thing that starts like a week before every other premiere. I’m not hating, TV anime being what it is, you have to pull out every trick you can think of to get your foot in the door, and sometimes that just means having it there before anybody else. (We’re conveniently ignoring several other anime that have already premiered, which I either did not watch or did watch but had nothing to say about. Still, the general point stands.)

You can glean a lot of what you need to know about A Wild Last Boss Appeared! from its title alone. If it’s bringing to mind images of overpowered protagonists staring at stat screens then, yeah, congratulations, you’ve figured the show’s general deal out pretty well. What is less apparent from a cursory look is that the series does boast a few distinguishing characteristics. First of all, our protagonist was a man in the real world but, upon being isekai’d into his favorite fantasy MMO, Exgate Online, inhabits the body of his female player character Lufas [Koshimizu Ami], a ludicrously-powerful winged person who, among other things, united the entire game world under her banner as a domineering queen before being killed by a party of heroes in a thrilling, violent opening fight scene. The heroes were, of course, other players. (The kind of stuff you can do in an imaginary MMO vs. a real one is truly mindboggling.)

The gender stuff is noteworthy but not entirely out of place, as there have been several “I was a boring, ugly guy on Earth but in the isekai world I’ve been turned into a totally hot babe with a great rack and magical powers” isekai over the past several years. Nonetheless, it’s still a lot rarer than the usual main character these sorts of things have, which remains “just some guy.” Lufas has a solid character design, too, with gigantic black angel wings and a cool red-and-gold outfit that makes her look appropriately regal. Characters like this tend to inspire a lot of hay-making in certain social media circles about whether they “count” as transgender. I have never managed to muster up a strong opinion on this subject in the broad sense despite being a trans woman myself, but, in this case it’s worth noting that Lufas gets over the shock of her transformation extremely quickly. So, if you’re trans and want to project onto her, I’m sure as hell not going to try to stop you.

^{It’s a magic HRT glowup anyone would envy, honestly. Where are}^my^{black angel wings, medical science?}

Second and perhaps more important to the success of a show in this genre, Last Boss has a fair amount of production polish. It comes to us from a new-ish but definitely not rookie director, Horiuchi Yuuya, whose prior two directorial credits were on the two seasons of NIJIYON ANIMATION, a chibi spinoff of Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, which he also served as the assistant director on the second season of. (His team are under WAO World, a studio who have a few sparse credits under their belt since the start of the decade but were responsible for Anime-Gataris back in 2017. That’s barely relevant to this piece, but you better damn well believe that if I can connect Anime-Gataris to a column I’m writing I’m going to do it. Watch Anime-Gataris.) This is all, in any case, basically the long way around of saying that the fight scenes that bookend the episode look good, although in the latter case it might be more appropriate to call it a full-on slaughter scene. (That’s not a compliment. We’ll get to it.) There are also some striking shots in the middle, particularly when Lufas, newly summoned 200 years after her defeat, returns to her old base, a massive tower decked with stained glass windows.

All told, the show looks good enough that, if you were just looking at stills, you might be able to convince yourself it was compellingly-written, too. Anime is after all a visual medium, so if something is strikingly directed and animated, it’s halfway there, right? Arguably more than halfway.

Sadly, this isn’t entirely the case. For one thing, Last Boss falls into the same trap as essentially every other “totally OP protagonist” isekai, which is that if the character is monstrously strong, we already know who’s going to win every conflict, and thus, there aren’t really any stakes to, at least, any physical confrontation. What saves the script from being a total wash is that Lufas does actually have some genuine charisma and dignity. Koshimizu Ami’s performance does a lot to uplift the broad writing of the character in this first episode. She’s commanding and has gravitas, and sitting alone in her all-but-abandoned fortress, you can, briefly, see her how the people of this world might see her. Regal, with a quietly crackling power just waiting to be unleashed.

This itself is, unfortunately, undercut by her interior monologue, which seems to switch between Koshimizu’s narration for Lufas herself and Horie Shun‘s interior speech for Minamijuuji Sei, the #epic #gamer who was Lufas’ real-world player, and whose narration’s generally goofy tone and loose fourth-wall jabbing jibes very badly with the rest of the narrative. The very first scene after Lufas is resurrected actually seems to imply that these are two separate characters somehow, and they seem to briefly be in conflict as Sei struggles to communicate to his summoners in a non-domineering fashion, but after turning off some passive skill or another on Lufas, this problem is immediately overcome and the now seemingly just-one-person Lufas flies off, free.

On its own, this would be easy enough to overlook, but this paper tiger problem of setting up some kind of conflict, only for the main character to interface with a poorly-defined Skill (in the video game / D&D sense) of some kind and then resolve it immediately is illustrative not just of the flaws in Last Boss‘s first episode, but of those in this genre in general. No matter how many times I see a show do this, I am always going to have this base-level negative reaction to it. It’s just no fun to watch.

Handled a little better is Lufas’ relationship with Dina [Usui Yuri, in what seems to be her debut role as a major character]. In the actual MMO, Dina was quite literally just a prop, an NPC that Sei plunked down for decoration in his base and never gave much thought beyond this. But, seemingly because he gave her a loose backstory, Dina is recontextualized in the world of Exgate as Lufas’ advisor, a trusted confidant who is overjoyed to see her ruler once again. It’s nothing terribly complex, but that she has an attachment to Lufas beyond fearing her is a massive step up from essentially every other character in this episode. This is vaguely reminiscent of the whole Machina / Veltol dynamic in Demon Lord 2099, although I’m sure there are other examples across the genre as well.

Other than this, Dina’s ultimately also a fairly basic character, at least in this first episode. The second half of it consists of Lufas taking up adventuring odd jobs. (Because she needs money, because it’s been 200 years since she ruled anything and the coffers Dina was watching over are empty.) Upon entering a tavern, Lufas and Dina take a gander at a quest board, and, ultimately, Lufas decides to do what she does best. Thus, the last few minutes of Last Boss‘s first episode are dedicated to adding to the growing number of anime scenes that just consist of a character brutally slaughtering orcs, goblins, demons, or whatever particular humanoid bugbear the writer has decided are not worth consideration except as cannon fodder.

Sigh.

Look, the fraught-ness of orcs is a well-trod topic and I’ve gone into it and similar things myself on this blog before, so we’ll skip past that for the time being. The problem here is that orcs just aren’t interesting opponents. I have no problem fighting them in a video game, but in an anime, which I am watching and not playing, I want some visual panache to the bad guys at the very least. Not helping matters is that Lufas, upon goring a bunch of them by summoning a huge cluster of glowing swords, feels the need to remark that doing so does not disturb her. Mere seconds after wondering in her mind whether she actually has the stomach to do this. Once again, problem raised and immediately surmounted: can Lufas bring herself to kill living, thinking creatures? Sure seems like it! What a boring thing to write.

Generously, you could say that Lufas’ lack of a reaction is the result of Sei more fully merging with his character, that her mentality has begun to override his. Mostly though, it just feels handwavey. I don’t expect a show like this to get into the ramifications of how it feels to take another life, or what it means for a species to essentially be born evil, a point of view Dina outright reinforces—this, after all, is quite literally the old Tolkien-derived Problem With Orcs, it’s not like this convention is Last Boss‘s fault—but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that, either, the series just not bring this kind of stuff up in the first place, or, if it’s going to do so, actually explore it in some depth rather than just dismiss it out of hand. It is of course possible it will return to these ideas later and actually grapple with them in some way, but if I’m honest, I kind of doubt it.

The word I’ve been dancing around this entire column is “edgy.” It’s very passé, and ironically, kind of childish, to dismiss something out of hand for being edgy. If Last Boss wants to have its protagonist aura farm by slaughtering a bunch of monsters, I’m not going to tell it that it can’t do that. (Aura farming is great, and gets a bad rep.) But there needs to be some craft to this stuff, and while Lufas ruthlessly slaughtering the orcs is definitely striking and well-animated, it’s not actually interesting. They’re not dragons, they’re not sinister-looking demonic beasts. They’re just orcs like you’d find in any other fantasy series. She says herself that she’s not even expending a modicum of effort. Everything interesting about the scene is in spite of the fact that they’re orcs. Why are we going through such lengths to portray the equivalent of killing Level 1 Rats like this? There’s just a mismatch in what’s actually happening and how impressed the show wants you to be. This does not warrant this treatment! Yeah, this is a brilliant and creative way to show the disparity in power that the orc feels as Lufas kills them, but why, if orcs are just brutish pests worth no further consideration, should I care how an orc feels in the first place?

Combined with the fact that a different significant chunk of the episode is taken up by just straight-up exposition about the game systems of Exgate, this all adds up to a first episode that is fun in spots but, overall, is mostly dry and, for something that looks this good, surprisingly boring.

In the end then, I think whether Last Boss can manage to wring a compelling narrative out of its setup is going to boil down to whether or not it’s willing to let Lufas actually struggle a bit. This doesn’t have to be in terms of combat, it could be anything. Just, some way in which she’s not solving every problem the minute it happens. There are some seeds of a longer-term plot in here! Mentions of some of Lufas’ old comrades defecting to the army of the mysterious Devil King, a figure she seems to regard with complete contempt, are something to grasp onto. So I’m not going to dismiss this series out of hand and say that this can’t work as an idea. It clearly can! It does in the show’s opening minutes! It just needs to commit to some actual narrative buildup. The question of course is if it can actually do that. And I do want it to! Fall is looking like a pretty barren season as far as new anime go, I only have three other anime on my personal shortlist, and one of them is a sequel. So I have every reason to want Last Boss to succeed here, but admittedly, I’m keeping my expectations tempered.

Posted on April 7, 2025April 7, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: This City Knows Your Name – Remembering and Forgetting in KOWLOON GENERIC ROMANCE

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Look at them individually, and no part of Kowloon Generic Romance seems all that strange. Its setting, the historical Kowloon Walled City, is probably the most individually unusual factor, but still, oddball places to set a romance series are hardly a new idea. The romance itself? An ice queen and a guy who’s too pushy by half, maybe more. Nothing strange going on there, even if it really is leaning into the self-deprecating part of its title. The atmosphere? Wistful. Thoughtful. Slow. But still, nothing too out of the ordinary.

Tying these things together, and making it clear that we have something strange on our hands, is the final element. Kowloon doesn’t actually take place in the historical Walled City, you see. It takes place in an alternate past-future present of it. The year is nineteen-exty-something, and a bizarre 3D-rendered floating octahedron hovers above the city, looking for all viewers like a nepo baby whose mom played Ramiel in Neon Genesis Evangelion. A mysterious pharmaceutical company has a hand in everything. Everything too, true to life, is old, used, and hand-me-down. Reiko [Shiraishi Haruka] our protagonist, points out that new shops rarely last in Kowloon, as though the city itself rejects the march of time. That may well be true of Reiko herself, too, although if it is, she doesn’t seem to be aware of it.

Reiko has a hot-cold relationship with her coworker Kudou [Sugita Tomokazu], she knows that this is a crush, but hasn’t acted on it. I can’t personally sympathize with that because, honestly, Kudou, easily the weak link here, is an unlikable dipshit, but people who aren’t me have crushes on unlikable dipshits all the time, so, fair enough. (Sidebar: He is clearly hiding something and I’m sure the narrative will take great steps to paint him as pained and with a heart of gold. This is whatever to me, I am passingly interested at best in the Generic part of Kowloon‘s Romance.) Their rapport works as well as it needs to, which is to say, I buy that Reiko genuinely likes this guy even if I wouldn’t. More interesting is where they go, after a day of work, Kudou takes Reiko out on the town, to a variety of small bars and eateries, before eventually showing her the Goldfish Tea House, a place with an eerie, unstuck-in-time atmosphere that feels very intentional.

The bartender—an odd term for a guy in charge of a teahouse, but I can think of no other—makes a comment that Kudou, evidently an old friend of his, has brought his girlfriend along again. This flusters Reiko, who is further perplexed by Kudou’s lack of a reaction. This sticks with her even more after an incident at their workplace, where Kudou, half-asleep, pulls Reiko into an impassioned kiss. (He seems half-asleep anyway. I don’t really buy, and I don’t think we’re supposed to buy, that this was entirely accidental. While forced kisses like this are an unlikable and common element of much romance fiction, the context makes me think we’re supposed to find this strange. If not, well, there’s no accounting for taste I suppose.) All of this then comes to a head when Reiko uncovers a mysterious photo among Kudou’s belongings, which seems to depict him with….her. But the woman in the photograph is smiling and cheerful, and it’s clear that even though the two look almost identical, physically speaking, Reiko doesn’t feel a direct connection to this other woman. The episode ends there, leaving us to ponder the mystery of what, precisely, is going on here.

The mystery, and the various visual bits and pieces that float through the episode, that is. Goldfish, watermelons, cigarettes, the moon juxtaposed with Generic Terra, the aforementioned octahedron, cramped city alleys marked with numbers, including 8s, which Kudou makes a habit of brushing against, defining it as a personal quirk. Plus noisy neighbors, traditional music. The episode’s slow pace and emphasis on the visual and aural, despite not having what we might traditionally call a “strong production”, makes it clear that it intends to plant them in the minds of its viewers, this array of symbolic objects contains, somewhere within it, the key to understanding just what exactly is going on with the woman in the photograph. A drifting mix of signifiers meant to rouse our interest without answering too many questions upfront.

Kowloon Generic Romance is based on a manga, so if one wanted to, it would be trivial to spoil themselves silly. Even the anime’s Anilist recommendations tab tells a story, being populated more by the likes of Sonny Boy and Summertime Rendering than any romance anime. This all but spoils that there’s something weird going on here, something weirder than simple coincidence. The involvement of a pharmaceutical company makes my educated guess induced amnesia, but honestly, who can say?

Something I’ve learned over the past few years of doing these previews is that there are two kinds of anime whose premieres strike me less as good or bad and more as puzzling. Those where the mystery is clearly an intended hook to rope in the audience, and those where I—and sometimes others as well—are reading in a subversiveness or intrigue that’s not actually there. Shoshimin Series (despite its mundane subject matter) and Summertime Rendering are the former, Reign of the Seven Spellblades is the latter. These categories are only obvious in hindsight, so while I think Kowloon is the former, only time will tell. Still, its mystery is enough for me to stick with it for now.

Posted on April 6, 2025April 7, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: UMA MUSUME CINDERELLA GREY at the Starting Gate

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Somehow, this is the first full article I’ve devoted on this site to Uma Musume. I have to admit that that’s mostly my own fault, I was very late to this particular party, and only got onboard the proverbial horse-drawn carriage earlier this year. (I still haven’t seen the series’ proper third season.) Uma Musume, occasionally also called Pretty Derby, is a series whose reputation precedes it, given its odd premise and ties to a large, very successful franchise that most English-speaking anime fans are unfamiliar with beyond said premise.

The long and short of it is this; Uma Musume takes place in a world where horse-eared animal girls compete in vigorous races. The horse girls are named after actual, real horses—and in Uma Musume’s fiction they actually are those horses, reborn into the show’s setting—and the races themselves are largely patterned after real races. Using the real-world horse races as a scaffolding, Uma Musume then constructs a triumphant, pulse-pounding sports anime. Visually, the later Uma Musume entries, especially the OVA series Road To The Top and the movie Beginning of a New Era (which I have been trying to write an article about for months, incidentally) are some of the best and most intense anime of the 2020s, and one ignores them because they’re “silly” at their own peril. The rough-around-the-edges first season followed ambitious sweetheart Special Week. Season 2 traced the path of rocketship superstar Tokai Teio and her shonen rivalry girlfriend Mejiro McQueen. The Road To The Top OVAs studied a trio of often-intense rising stars, and the New Era film explored a rivalry between its leads that bordered on a deranged, psychosexual obsession. Each entry in the series has been increasingly spectacular, especially visually, which only makes sense. Remember: this is a sports anime.

All this in mind, Cinderella Gray has big horseshoes to fill, following as it does the story of Oguri Cap [Takayanagi Tomoyo] and her rise to fame. Perhaps wisely, right out the gate, Cinderella Gray actually engages in some scaling-back from the New Era film, the otherwise most-recent Uma Musume anime. We don’t begin our story at Tracen, the prestigious racing academy from the previous three seasons of the anime. Instead, our setting is a smaller academy that trains racers for regional competitions.

Our point of view character for most of this opening bit of scene-setting isn’t actually Oguri Cap herself, but rather Berno Light [Seto Momoko, in what looks to be one of her first roles], a much more ordinary horse girl (although one whose cute hair decorations shaped like capital Bs should not be ignored), and it’s through her that we get some sense of the reduced grandeur here. When she asks her homeroom teacher about the national races, she’s just straight up told that it’s not something she needs to worry about. A little rough! Inauspicious beginnings for what’s sure to be a tale of a meteoric rise to the top!

In fact, the very first character we follow isn’t even Berno, but rather Kitahara Jou [Konishi Katsuyuki], a trainer—and a human, as is traditional in Uma Musume’s trainer / horse girl setup—who laments the sorry state of the local scene. He’s looking for a star, and he’s pretty sure he’s not going to find one in the Gifu regionals.

Enter, of course, Oguri Cap. Cap, whose real-life counterpart was nicknamed “The Gray Monster,” is presented here as, essentially, an old-school shonen protagonist. She’s kind of dim, eats her own weight in food on the regular, and trains way, way harder than anyone else. She’s an archetype to be sure, but an instantly likeable and endearing one. “Someone you can root for from the bottom of your heart,” per Jou’s own words.

Not everyone necessarily feels that way, though. For much of her first day (and thus much of this episode), Oguri Cap is actually bullied by a trio of delinquent horses; the gyaru Norn Ace, the mean-looking Rudy Lemono, and the decidedly short Mini the Lady.

Lest anyone get the impression that Uma Musume is taking a sharp turn into being a school drama however, Oguri Cap is actually so oblivious to anything that’s not food or running that these attempts to get under her skin completely slide off of her. Up to and including Norn Ace, her dormmate, making her sleep in a supply closet. (Oguri, the very definition of a cartoon country girl, is just stoked to have her own room.)

She has the last laugh anyway. The episode’s final stretch consists of a practice race where Cap is set to run against Rudy, Mini, and Berno, and the former two prank her by undoing her shoelaces before the start of the race. In spite of having to stop to re-tie them, Oguri absolutely annihilates her competition, leaving them in the dust as she blasts past them, completely outpacing them.

Uma Musume has developed its own visual language with which to depict racing as its gone on; broad sweeping ‘karate chop’ hand motions, coiled cock-and-fire pistol shots of forward, springing motion, glowing Black Rock Shooter eyes and electrical auras, and so on. Oguri is drawn in a subtly different way, telegraphing her unusual gait, the secret weapon that makes her interesting to Jou beyond her raw talent, it’s explicated in just a line or two of dialogue, but as is often the case with Uma Musume, seeing is believing.

Can we root for Oguri Cap from the bottom of our hearts? It doesn’t take much to convince me when the show looks this good, but I do really think that this is not only a treat for longtime fans of the series but also an ideal jumping-on point for anyone who’s been waiting for one. Being set chronologically earlier in the franchise than seasons 1-3 means that the attention-grabbing cameos of previous seasons’ characters are kept to a minimum. There’s no real risk of feeling lost here, so I would say that just about anyone should check this thing out. You really have nothing to lose. (If anything, I think longtime fans are the ones more likely to have nitpicks. One could argue this is a slower start than, say, the first episode of season two. But this feels like such a minor point that, to me at least, it isn’t really worth making.)

Personally, what interests me most is not just Oguri Cap and the way she runs. We’re introduced to another horse girl here as well, alongside Cap, Berno, and the delinquent trio. That girl, Fujimasa March [Ise Mariya], who shares Cap’s white-gray hair and her immense talent as a runner, but is distinguished by an intense, sharp gaze, and a serious demeanor, seems like she’s being set up as Cap’s long-term rival. As Oguri Cap wins her practice race, blowing her competition out of the water, March is watching from the sidelines, ignoring the trainers trying to get her attention. Fujimasa March clearly knows that something big has just happened. In a subtle way, here in this particular place, the world has changed, and she can feel it. Can you?

Posted on April 3, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal Anime First Impressions: The Thorny Debut of ROCK IS A LADY’S MODESTY

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Suzunomiya Lilisa [Sekine Akira] is repressed. The daughter of a rich family by marriage, she doesn’t really feel like herself at her prestigious finishing school, the kind of all-girls mannering academy that’s all but extinct in real life but lives on through cultural touchstones such as anime. It’s not that her classmates dislike her, quite the opposite actually, she’s very popular. It’s that the academy’s curriculum of education, culture, and politeness does not come naturally to her, and she works very hard to keep up appearances. This is in spite of what’s implied to be a pretty strong culture shock from her current living situation. Throughout this first episode we see glimpses of a very different home life than the one Lilisa currently lives: not one of wealth and class with a real estate mogul father who’s yet to be seen on camera, but one with her loving, guitar-playing biological father. Unless I missed something, we don’t directly hear that said father is no longer alive, but that’s certainly the implication.

What does all of that add up to for Lilisa? Well, she’s left most of her passions behind her, and is focusing on getting a prestigious award from her school. (She has a reason for wanting it, we don’t yet know what that is.)

The internal turmoil of a repressed rich girl is not that interesting on its own, and I will be honest in that Rock is a Lady’s Modesty took a while to hook me here. It does help that there’s an eclectic set of influences being worn on the show’s sleeve right out the gate: the shoujo and Class S yuri manga responsible for keeping these sorts of girls’ schools in the public memory, Love is War!‘s later arcs, with their fixations on the often-empty inner lives of the wealthy, and of course the broader girl band current of which Lady’s Modesty is undeniably a part. (Although, as a matter of record-keeping, this is an adaptation, not an original series. The manga dates from late 2022, and having to adapt an existing story explains some of the more unusual structural choices, as we’ll get to.) These disparate sources add up to a very straightforward core conflict: the person who Lilisa is trying to be and the person who Lilisa is do not match up, and this is getting to her.

Which again, would not be that interesting, were it not for Kurogane Otoha [Shimabukuro Miyuri]. Otoha is a similarly well-mannered girl from a rich family. She and Lilisa meet by chance when they literally bump into each other, causing Otoha to drop a guitar pick. Lilisa tries to find a good time to return it to her—a classy lady having a guitar pick is uncouth, of course, especially one with a Hot Topicky skull-and-blood design like this one has—and in doing so learns that Otoha has been using an abandoned building on campus as a makeshift practice room. Now, small twist here, Otoha is actually a drummer. We don’t know who that guitar pick originally belonged to or what its significance is, but Otoha doesn’t use it herself.

Instead, she talks Lilisa into a jam session, first just by asking, and then, when Lilisa pushes back, by insinuating that Lilisa might not be very good at guitar.

Our heroine takes this very personally, and what ensues is a 1v1 music battle, the two trying to outdo each other, Lilisa on guitar, Otoha on the drums, over a backing track called “GHOST DANCE.” Lilisa, tellingly, imagines Otoha’s overpowering, thunderous drumwork as akin to being made to submit by a dominatrix. Those are her words, not mine.

And it only makes sense that she sees it this way, because Otoha really does overpower her completely. Which is to say, Lilisa’s guitar playing really isn’t that good. It’s fine. But not only are her actual skills not all that impressive for this genre but the show doesn’t really pick up any slack for her visually. (Most of the visual panache goes into her fantasies of being tied up in thorned rose vines instead.) We get shots of her playing, clearly very intensely focused and pouring a huge amount of sweat and effort into what she’s doing, but it lacks that ephemeral quality to make it truly memorable.

That’s how I’d put it, anyway.

Otoha is significantly less nice.

So that’s our big first episode twist. Surprise, you were supposed to think her guitar playing is kind of lame! It’s an interesting idea, certainly, but it’s not actually that unusual given that at this point a show actually having a barn-burner first episode performance would be the more surprising thing. (My baseless guess is that we’re saving that for, I don’t know, episode three?) Still, it’s a nice setup; Otoha flips her off before instantly flipping her ojou-sama switch back on, and just fuckin’ leaves, leaving Lilisa to stew in her own failure. The implication being of course that she’s realized that she cares about being good at this much more than she cares about being a good student. It’s a good hook, and I’m interested to see where the show takes it.

Of course, all of this is dodging a simpler question: is this show, at least this first episode, like, you know, good? I’d say so, but that comes with some caveats. The great Girl Band Renaissance in anime is, in the grand scheme of things, a recent and ongoing development. Bocchi the Rock, for reference, only aired in 2022, and the source manga for this series is from around the same time. Still, I have a hunch some might find the relatively slow start here a turnoff, and it is admittedly hard to imagine it stacking up, in the long run, to elephants in the room like Girls Band Cry or the It’s MyGO!!!!! / Ave Mujica subseries of BanG Dream! But Bocchi itself isn’t a bad reference point here, that show also took a bit to really get going, but once it did, it was one of the best anime of its year and is easily as iconic—moreso, honestly, if we’re talking simple name recognition, at least in the Anglosphere—than the other two shows I just mentioned. Still, by directly making competition part of its narrative, Rock is a Lady’s Modesty invites these comparisons, which I would probably otherwise avoid.

Can it live up to those expectations? I’m not sure, but I want to at least see it try, and that counts for a lot all on its own. Besides, I really do just need to see what is going on in Lilisa’s head that makes her imagine a guitar/drum duet as some kind of BDSM thing, although admittedly, the fact that she refers to Otoha in her narration as her “lifelong partner” might be a clue. I think you might be repressed in more ways than one, girl.

The Magic Planet

Tag: fantasy

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