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.
“Be forewarned that what’s to come isn’t a very pleasant story.”
-Opening line of the series.
You really need to know what you’re doing if you’re going to open a show with a deliberate, tone-setting monologue. That quote up there is just the tip of the iceberg, where Gorou Ono [Kazuki Ura], the protagonist of KamiErabi God.app, tells us that this show will not have heroes, will not have a love interest, won’t be about friendship, and won’t “tug at your heartstrings.” It’s a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing, in other words, and he encourages us to just “laugh it off” if nothing else. That kind of acidic cynicism is certainly more likely to elicit laughter than any actual bracing for serious, cerebral storytelling in this day and age, that’s true. So is there actually anything to this show, or are we in for a hopelessly edgy bleed-out of self-indulgent misanthropy?
Time will tell, but if KamiErabi‘s first episode proves anything, it’s that it has enough style to be worth giving a shot. Although I’ll freely admit I’m not sure how many will make that leap. The show is a highly-stylized all-CG affair, and while this is not the instant death sentence it used to be in terms of general reception, it’s still a hard sell for a lot of people. Which is a shame! The show’s modeling and animation are very good, and I’d only point to a tiny handful of quibbles with regards to things like eyebrow clipping as faults in this regard. The series’ environments look stylish, too, with a minimalist color palette that tends to focus on making single colors pop at a time. Each main character has a distinctive image color, as well, both in their eyes and in underdye form in their hair. All told, KamiErabi looks pretty sharp.
What will probably draw folks in is the nebulous involvement of Nier: Automata creator Yoko Taro. I’m only passingly familiar with the man’s work, but nothing here sticks out to me as an obvious thumbprint of his. In terms of plot, what we have here is actually a fairly direct riff on the whole Future Diary1 setup. The show’s opening minutes aren’t worth recapping in detail, but they establish a few fundamentals; Gorou is a typical teenage boy, but also kind of a misogynist, and is an idol otaku obsessed with the singer Iyo Futana [she doesn’t show up in this episode, but the credits list her as played by Tomori Kusunoki, whose prior role as Love Live‘s Setsuna Yuki seems worth mentioning here] and also interested in a classmate of his named Honoka Sawa [Sara Matsumoto]. Interested enough, in fact, to be jealous when his own friend, the shark-toothed Yutaka Akitsu [Shuuichi Uchida] points out that she’s dating a soccer player. And jealous enough that, when the convenient plot machination of a wish-granting phone app pops up, much to his own skepticism, he still idly asks it to let him “fool around with Sawa-san.” Not a terribly pleasant guy, all things considered, although how much we’re supposed to identify with vs. be disgusted with the kid isn’t entirely obvious at this point (and does matter, as far as establishing the themes of this kind of story go).
Initially unbeknownst to Gorou, his wish actually was granted, and fate just so happens to convolute itself such that he can invite Sawa to a secluded location. From here, things get….weird. Weirder than they already were.
Sawa starts coming on to Gorou pretty strong, apparently influenced by the wish-granting app. Gorou (seemingly involuntarily? The visuals get confusing here) exposes himself (thankfully we don’t actually see anything), and is promptly interrupted by a literal exposition fairy named Lall [Ayane Sakura], who takes a moment to explain the whole Mirai Nikki-esque state of things.
And Gorou promptly freaks the fuck out—understandably so!—and runs away, protesting that he wants no part of this. Sawa follows him, not actually because she’s under the influence of the wishing app, as it turns out, but because she’s also one of the candidates. To prove her starter bad guy bona fides, she promptly kills an innocent bystander and uses some kind of arcane ritual to turn his corpse into a huge cleaver-sword-thing.
The battle scene that immediately ensues here is, unquestionably, the easy highlight of the episode. We can sit here and talk about the show’s actual writing (spotty) and directing (interesting but a bit confusing), but the fight here looks absolutely great, as Gorou runs through a version of the stages of grief for his own ordinary life; first just straight-up running, then trying to persuade Sawa that this whole thing is stupid, then passively accepting his impending death, and finally steeling himself to fight back (which he does with some kind of magic book, because KamiErabi is not keen on explaining itself).
At the end of all this, Sawa dies, although Gorou and his impish partner resurrect her somehow, possibly sans-memories of the whole death game thing, and the episode ends on a very sudden, uncertain note.
The specifics of any of that are deliberately unclear, and a brief explanation is offered only in passing, but the case seems to be that in return for Sawa coming back to life, Gorou is now living an altered life where everyone believes he sexually harassed her. There are a couple ways to take this. On the one hand, yeah, he’s genuinely taking the fall for someone else in a very immediate and direct way; he did literally save her life when he had no real moral obligation to do so given that she was trying to kill him. On the other, the show sure does seem to want to twist itself into knots to justify or at least excuse Gorou’s earlier, apparently completely genuine, misogynistic behavior.
Ultimately though, it’s too early to tell for certain what KamiErabi is going to do here, but the fact that Sawa hasn’t been entirely written out of the story is, itself, a good sign. Especially given that she, not Gorou, is the one with the real killer scene this episode. (Now, if the series proceeds to do nothing else with her for weeks and weeks, that’ll be another story entirely.)
All told, the gist of it is simply that while KamiErabi isn’t anywhere near the strongest premiere of the season so far, it’s definitely one of the most out-there. And while strangeness shouldn’t be confused for quality (a mistake I myself have made a few times this year), there is some inherent value in just not being afraid to get weird with it. KamiErabi is bizarre, lurid, stylish, and disturbing. And those are good words in my book, as far as evaluating an anime’s future prospects goes.
1: Many other works of fiction have since used this general premise of course, to the point that I think you could easily argue that the whole “god candidate” thing is its own subgenre within the broader death game setup. I’m not even entirely sure if Future Diary originated this trend or just popularized it.
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