Tag: Love Live Superstar

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

Ranking Every 2022 Anime I Actually Finished from Worst to Best – Intro & Part 1

“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly, multi-part column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.

Here we are again, anime fans. Every year, it’s seemed more and more surreal that I actually made it to the end of the year and kept up anime blogging. For sure, I’ve had my ups and downs this year—honestly probably more of the latter, for the first time since I began writing here on MPA—but I’ve kept at it, and y’all have stuck with me. I truly, deeply, from the bottom of my heart, appreciate that. You guys mean the world to me.

In past years, I’ve often let this introductory portion of the list run a little long. Instead, this year I’m just gonna run down the basics for you. This list, released in parts over the next couple days, will be of every anime from this year that I, personally, actually completed, ranked from worst to best. (That’s a little over 30 of them, if you were wondering. Not that much in the grand scheme of things!) The criteria for inclusion is a bit fuzzy, but for the most part, to get on this list, I have to have seen the series, and it has to be a TV anime. But, I allow myself some wiggle room, so you’ll see one or two things that were OVAs or ONAs and one that hasn’t actually finished airing yet! Two notable exclusions I want to bring up are Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury and Summertime Render. The former not being here is a simple case of its first cour not yet being finished. The latter is absent because the show is still not legally available in the US, where most of my readers reside, and I’d rather not open that particular can of worms at the moment. (I do highly recommend both, just for reference.) Also; the amount of entries in each part of the list is not going to be consistent. Roughly, it’s probably going to break down into the bottom five (this column right here), a column of shows I thought were “okay” to “pretty solid” (tomorrow’s column), a column of shows I thought were good to great (Saturday’s column), and finally, the top five on Sunday. Some I will have only a paragraph or two to say about, some I will have quite a bit more to say about. Hopefully you’re excited.

Finally, before we jump into the list itself, I do want to make a small plea, here. I don’t usually directly ask for financial assistance in the actual bodies of my articles, but writing the year-end list is extremely labor-intensive compared to essentially any other article on my site. If you can spare the money, and if you think what I do here is worth it, you can support me here on Ko-Fi or here on Patreon. Every little bit helps, and to those of you who have supported me at any point in the past, you again have my deepest gratitude. I really cannot articulate how much that means to me.

Anyway! Enough of the mushy stuff. You guys are reading this part of the column for one reason and one reason only, right? To read about this year’s few true washouts, the worst of the worst. To tell the truth, most anime this year were pretty good! 2022 overall stands as probably my favorite year for anime since 2018, which is a hard fucking bar to clear. Nonetheless, there were a couple real stinkers. Some of these are going to be obvious, a few might be controversial. We’ll save the good and the ugly for another day; let’s meet the bad.

#35. LOVE FLOPS

Where to even start? LOVE FLOPS, the year’s worst anime—at least, the worst I actually saw end to end—is an endlessly self-impressed, completely clueless piece of derivative junk with no greater point, no aesthetic value, and of real importance to absolutely no one. It is horny without being the least bit sensuous, and pompous without the slightest bit of genuine intellectualism. A cobbled-together kludge of tropes from all over Japanese pop culture: other anime, video games, visual novels, and manga. It’s impossible to call Love Flops disappointing; no one had any expectations for it in the first place. But somehow, it still feels like a huge letdown. Perhaps just in that it manages to be the most tedious and annoying harem anime in a year that also included World’s End Harem, which was also a stupid and self-serious piece of garbage, but at least had a half-assed titillation factor going for it.

The line of defense for LOVE FLOPS as some kind of secret masterpiece is obvious; it pulls a classic trick of spending its first half foreshadowing a twist at its halfway point. People like this kind of thing; it makes them feel clever, and there is a real element of surprise. But what LOVE FLOPS neglects to understand is that the series must be compelling both before and after the twist, and LOVE FLOPS is neither. It is not compelling during its absolutely rancid first episode, which features a parade of harem cliches run through with a cocaine-snorting speed as well as two separate instances of a character being sexually assaulted by a dog. It is not compelling during its bizarre reverse-transphobia episode; it is not compelling when listlessly parodying some ancient idea of the magical girl genre and giving its token mascot character anal beads while doing so. It is, most damning of all, not compelling after its pretentiously built-up big twist; that the entire preceding series has been a simulation, after which the series simply switches to plagiarizing innumerable sci-fi works instead of a mountain of other ecchi anime.

This, too, has been done elsewhere, far better. Listen, I am a colossal sap, it’s not hard to get me to care about characters given twelve weeks to get to know them. This show’s (admittedly not terrible!) final episode made me feel nothing, it is a total emotional black hole. Like The Day I Became a God, which bottomed out the list the last time I did one of these back in 2020, it’s not that there are no good parts to LOVE FLOPS, and in fact it has frustratingly solid production values for something this utterly empty, it’s that those that exist make the bad parts—which vastly outnumber them—seem even worse by comparison. Bringing up The Day I Became A God is appropriate for another reason, because it is damningly clear by its end that LOVE FLOPS, in addition to being a terrible ecchi anime, also desperately wants to be a Jun Maeda show. And if Jun Maeda can’t even do Jun Maeda’s particular style right anymore, what hope did this ever have?

There is nothing of value here, and more than anything else I actually finished this year, I actively regret my time spent watching LOVE FLOPS. Let me be a cautionary tale; do not watch this. Neither you nor anyone else needs to.

#34. RWBY: Ice Queendom

There are a lot of tacks one could take in criticizing RWBY: Ice Queendom. It relies strongly on you having a prior investment in its parent franchise despite being billed as a reboot, but to be honest, that isn’t really one of them. Instead, it’s much easier to cite the slapdash production—some cuts look great, others look terrible, but in both cases it’s obvious no one is really steering the ship, because there is no visual coherence whatsoever—or the bizarre pacing, which somehow makes a single 12-episode cour feel like an eternity, or the strange decision to end the show on a lavishly-animated foodfight that is better both visually and narratively than the entire preceding 11 ½ episodes.

But really, you already know what the real problem with Ice Queendom is if you’re reading this. Yes, the tired, awful, no-good Furry Racism Angle, which Ice Queendom shamelessly resurrects and spends an ungodly amount of time focused on. Ice Quendom’s world features the Faunus, kemonomimi people, who are the repeated target of naked bigotry by several members of the cast, mostly secondary protagonist Weiss Schnee, and a truly stunning amount of Queendom‘s narrative resources are spent futilely trying to make this seem like a grey and grey moral situation, instead of a people being badly oppressed for their physical differences. Everything else takes a backseat to this, including basics like character development and plotting. For some reason, an inexcusably vast majority of Ice Queendom is fixated on the empty metaphor of humans vs. the Faunus, and it completely kneecaps the series. What separates Ice Queendom from LOVE FLOPS is the very thing that makes this series in some ways the worse of the two; it had potential! If it were more focused on the fundamentals and less on trying to wring some life out of one of the most overdone and undercooked stock metaphors in fantasy fiction, it might have been a good, or at least decent anime, but it doesn’t, so it’s not.

This is another one where it’s less a lack of anything good and more the presence of its very serious flaws that brings the series down. You can watch episode 4 and see what this show could’ve been if it had more focus on anything other than the oh-so important plot of Weiss working through her racist upbringing, and then you can weep, because it never gets back there. For the most part, it does not even try.

Even elements that ought to be interesting, like the surreal dream world that much of the show takes place in, are generally wrung dry of any real fun or intrigue by the fact that this show is so focused on trying to make you feel bad for Weiss that it forgets to do almost anything else. It is bizarre, it is offputting, and it is only through the fact that LOVE FLOPS basically doesn’t work on any level as a visual-narrative project that this is not on the bottom of the list. To be honest, I was tempted to put it there anyway just because I have gotten so thoroughly sick of writing about this show. Still; it at least is a show in its own right, and tells a coherent (if very bad) story from start to finish, which is more than can be said for LOVE FLOPS. So, second from the bottom it is.

#33. Sabikui Bisco

Let’s be honest, here. I covered this thing week to week and even I barely remember it aired. I can’t imagine how anyone else feels about this particular action anime washout.

The story of Sabikui Bisco is one of potential unrealized. Solid foundational points like an interesting setting, creative character designs, and an opportunity to put forward some legit social commentary are all squandered on a show that slowly and methodically weathers away its initially strong characterization and story over the course of its run. The animation and general visuals follow not long behind.

If you were to binge-watch Sabikui Bisco in a single day you could see the series degrade in real time like a fading photo, until nothing is left but a vague, shapeless gray spot. This fact ended up presaging what one of the two studios behind this thing, NAZ, turned in for the adaption of The Lucifer & Biscuit Hammer, which, if I had actually finished it, would probably beat out even the dregs we’ve already seen to bottom out this list. Maybe, for the fans that Sabikui Bisco, the manga, must surely have, this anime is as bad as that one. For me, it’s mostly just a footnote. While it aired, I went back and forth a number of times between whether I thought Bisco was mostly a good show with some flaws or mostly a bad one with occasional bright spots. With its ranking here, you can see where I eventually landed.

#32. Love Live! Superstar!! Season 2

There is no reason this should be as much of a nothing as it was. What happened here? The first season of Love Live! Superstar!!, from just last year, was not the blow-off-the-doors affair of a certain other Love Live anime from the year before that, but it was still decent. It had some warmth to it, some color, some liveliness.

Let this be an illustration, then, of how fragile “decent” truly is. Superstar’s second season is not the worst anime of the year, certainly, but it’s probably the most disappointing for me personally. A series of absolutely baffling writing decisions—doubling the size of the cast, shoving the first season Superstars mostly out of focus for large chunks of the second, having the admittedly-cool antagonist character show up in a total of four episodes across a 12-episode series—completely sink the second season of Superstar as anything more than a curiosity. Yes, it still looks pretty nice in spots, yes, the concert visuals remain appealing, and yes there are one or two solid episodes. None of this changes that a good 3/4ths of this thing is a gigantic letdown. More than anything else, it is simply boring. None of the new characters ever rise above mildly amusing, and their meager story is not an adequate replacement for, nor an interesting addition to, that of the original Liella crew, which this season has a bizarre obsession with sidelining wherever possible. There is really just no merit to this thing for anyone who doesn’t have a truly crippling idol anime addiction.

But that’s the real nail in the coffin. If it’s underwhelming on its own terms, Superstar’s second season is an absolute embarrassment in context, being totally knocked out the ring in simple quality; in visual pop, story-arc writing, and character development by not only its own sibling, the second season of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, but by a totally unknown, very different idol anime that aired in Superstar‘s own season. Spoiler alert; that show will place much higher on this list than Superstar does.

#31. Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie

Rounding out the firmly not-good part of the list is this piece of romcom cotton. In a year that had Kaguya-sama, Call of The Night, even My Dress-Up Darling, there really just isn’t a place for a romance anime that had this little going on. Crucially though, Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, unlike the last few entries, is not an actively bad show. I can actually imagine why someone would like it, which is more than I can say of Bisco or Ice Queendom or fucking LOVE FLOPS, but it truly is just a very standard piece of genre fare in a genre that had plenty of better options to pick from this year. Its weak central gimmick—that the titular Shikimori is, in some sense, “cool” (read: very nebulously kinda-sorta masculine. Sometimes.)—is not enough to push it past being, at best, a curiosity.

But I do have to give Shikimori some due respect on the basis of its visuals. Shikimori’s fairly nondescript story is still brought to glowing, gentle, pastel life by studio Doga Kobo, and it manages to accrue a handful of standout episodes that are much better than the show on the whole. (The best of these focuses on main character Izumi’s unknown other crush, Kamiya, a character whose elemental melancholy adds a touch of the truly human to a show that otherwise largely lacks that.)

I give Shikimori a little extra credit for another reason, too. This specific team at Doga Kobo is also the one who will do an anime that I am really looking forward to next year. And that story, set to premiere with an astonishing triple-length first episode a few months from now, seems like something far more deserving of their talents than the fairly anonymous stuff here. Shikimori itself is so-so, but in a very literal sense, it is a sign of good things to come.

And that’s the very bottom of the list.

To be honest, I always feel a little bad writing criticism this negative, even though people seem to enjoy reading it for one reason or another. If you’re in the camp who prefers more positive anime criticism—and if you are, don’t worry, I’m right there with you—then you have quite a bit to look forward to starting tomorrow. Even the least of the anime from this point on are a lot better than what we just discussed. (And to be honest, LOVE FLOPS and Ice Queendom are so rancid that I felt bad putting the other three anime down here with them. It just feels cruel, you know?) But I pride myself on critical honesty, and I did honestly dislike all of these shows. Hopefully you’ll appreciate the more positive stuff going forward, too.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit: SHINE POST, LOVE LIVE! SUPERSTAR, and The Shape of Idol Anime to Come

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

“Idols don’t ‘do the right thing.’ They do what they want.”

I’m breaking a personal rule with this one. Generally speaking, I don’t really like to compare currently-airing anime. Especially not if the main reason they’re being compared is that they share a genre. In my view, people generally vastly overstate the importance of genre and tend to use what should be a guideline as a box to lump dissimilar things together. Or worse, to rag on something for not fitting a particular, narrow ideal of what something in a given genre “should” be. Comparing seasonal anime on the basis of their genre alone is usually pretty basic and uninteresting.

Yet, something about the idol genre specifically reignites an old fire of partisan fandom within me. I latch on to favorites pretty hard, and even I’m sometimes at a loss as to succinctly explain why, both in terms of individual characters and—as this column will go into—entire shows themselves.

So today, I’m letting myself do something I normally wouldn’t; I am comparing two things that I fully acknowledge have little business being compared. Those things being the second season of Love Live! Superstar, about the idol group Liella, and new girl on the block SHINEPOST, about the idol group TiNgS.

But come on! How can I not? We have here two idol anime airing in the same season, appealing to the same groups of people, but with wildly different approaches. One operating from within the established Love Live franchise, and the other, a punchy outsider that evokes 2011’s seminal The Idolmaster. (Bonus points; Superstar is from the long-established Sunrise, and SHINEPOST comes to us from the still relatively young Studio KAI, perhaps best known at this point for the second season of Pretty Derby and last year’s Super Cub. They’re also working on the excellent Fuuto PI this season as well.) One is pure fluff; sunny, goofy, and, in its best moments, purehearted and warm. The other is a down-to-earth look at idols as players in the idol industry, focusing on ground-level character dynamics and getting into the heads of its significantly smaller cast.

So here we go; two idol anime, two very different takes on what that phrase even means in 2022. We will look at them one at a time, and then consider how we might use the knowledge of what each is doing to look ahead into the future.

We’ll start with SHINEPOST, the one I prefer by a fair bit. TiNgS were introduced to the world with their trailer PV toward the end of last year, and it (and the accompanying song, the scintillating banger “Be Your Light!!”), immediately hooked me.

SHINEPOST is a scrappy little anime, one that seemingly rather few people in the Anglosphere are watching. But for my money, it outstrips Superstar in a few respects; it’s more ambitious, and the particular suite of emotions on display here resonates with me more. I don’t think SHINEPOST is a “better” show in any absolute sense—I rarely think of anime in that way, and Superstar has its merits too, as we’ll get to—but it’s easily the one that’s captured more of my heart.

Part of that, I think, comes down to the fact that SHINEPOST has what is for me more relatable character writing. Particularly in the form of Kyouka Tamaki (Moeko Kanisawa, lead for the real-life idol group ≠ME). Kyouka does fall within a firmly established character archetype; she’s straightlaced, serious, a good student, and considers herself very ordinary. She turns to idol work out of a desperate desire to be special, to mean something to somebody as more than just another person. The devil’s in the details here; Kyouka’s desperation to be noticed also gives rise to a farily pronounced self-loathing streak. See, for instance, the way that she convinces herself that she’s not “really” talented in the weeks following a performance of a new song, in which she sang lead, gone awry. Throughout the show’s second major arc, she tries to settle for less, only for that to end up making her feel worse. It’s a punch to the gut. She reaches her lowest point when she slips into a McDonald’s incognito, hoping—and then actively fantasizing—that one of the other patrons will recognize her. It is, and I mean this with no malice in my heart whatsoever, truly pathetic, in the most profound sense of that term. I have been this person; lots of people have been this person, seeking petty validation from random strangers, only then to feel even worse when we don’t get it. It is a truly miserable feeling, the sort of thing that can swallow a performer’s psyche whole if left unchecked.

But SHINEPOST is not a show that wallows in these kinds of things. The point, after all, of showing you what this kind of character is like in the dark is to then lift them out of that darkness. Kyouka’s manager—an important character in his own right—is able to convince her that actively wanting to be special, that selfishly, shamelessly wanting to feel, even if just for a moment, like the center of someone’s universe, is not just okay but is expected of her. That’s where this column’s header quote comes from; and it’s one that will stick with me for a while. Sure enough, when she’s able to get out of her own head and adopt the mentality of just letting herself honestly want what she wants, she absolutely aces the next performance of her song. In doing so, she shoots her biggest fan, the one person to whom Kyouka really is so much more than just another face in the crowd, through the heart. She straight up faints; it’s hard to blame her.

Granted, this is just one particular arc. (Not even the most recent one, as Rio, the spunky short girl of the group, is the star of the current arc.) But it’s illustrative of SHINEPOST‘s character writing strengths, which make the series feel far more grounded than Superstar despite its rather weird high premise. (Would you believe something this good is being sold on the premise that the idol group’s manager can tell when people are lying? He’s a good character and all, but it’s a downright bizarre thing to hook your whole show on.)

Speaking of, let’s pivot to Superstar. Comparing the shows along a character writing axis in particular is rather unfair. After all; the Love Live series has never dealt with the ‘industry’ side of the idol industry, preferring to bubble its wholly fictional school idol concept off from real world concerns, which severely curtails the possibility of any kind of industry drama plotlines. (This despite the fact that, of course, any of the actual idols who voice the Love Live girls are industry professionals who’ve generally had to work very hard to get where they are, but that’s a conversation for another day.) Inherently, this isn’t a huge problem, and a different Love Live series, last season’s followup to Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, managed to turn that lack of serious engagement with what being an idol means ‘in the real world’ into a strength. Nijigasaki envisions, essentially, a utopia, where the distinction between idol and fan is nearly nonexistent and not only can everyone be an idol, but everyone should at least give it a shot. It has a particular kind of rare fervor that you don’t see in most of its peers over on the sunny optimism side of the idol anime spectrum.

Superstar, meanwhile, has what one could easily argue are higher stakes; its main cast are trying to win the titular Love Live. This is, in theory, a fertile ground for, if not the same kind of character drama as SHINEPOST‘s, at least something in the same general ballpark. Instead, though, most of Superstar‘s best episodes, especially here in its second season, have been a lot sillier than the looming presence of any serious competition would imply. One of season 2’s biggest developments so far is Liella expanding to eight (and eventually nine, although we’re not there yet) members. Two of those members, the stoic oddball Shiki Wakana (Wakana Ookuma), and the willful idol otaku Mei Yoneme (Akane Yabushima), recently got an episode all their own.

Shiki and Mei seen here in their natural states of “looking kinda stoned” and “being flustered and embarrassed.”

And while there was some focus on the twos’ relationship with each other (which goes past “best friends” all the way into borderline homoromantic, a plus for some viewers, certainly), the episode was mostly about wacky misunderstandings. It was a very good episode about wacky misunderstandings, but this, and similar examples throughout the series so far have made Superstar feel like a bit of a lightweight in comparison. Cheerful, fun, amusing, but not anything more than that.

Part of this, I think, comes down to Superstar‘s idols themselves. Liella are not by any means a bad group, and I’d put them on par with SHINEPOST‘s TiNgS in a vacuum, but none of its members come close to the sheer magnetism of, say, Nijigasaki‘s Setsuna Yuki or Lanzhu Zhong. You really need a certain level of camp to elevate this sort of story beyond the merely pleasant. And unfortunately, while there is camp and theatricality present in Love Live! Superstar, it’s mostly not from Liella themselves.

Let’s talk about Wien Margarete (Yuina). Or Vienna Margaret, depending on whose subtitles you’re looking at.

Introduced in Superstar‘s third episode as a rival not just for Liella on the whole but for center Kanon Shibuya (Sayuri Date) specifically, she actually hasn’t appeared in person in the two episodes since. She almost doesn’t need to; Wien has an absolutely electric magnetism that, honestly, none of the Liella girls can really match. What you have here is perhaps the classic problem of simply making the antagonist too cool. (And make no mistake, with her sneering dismissal of Liella and the entire Love Live competition, Wien is absolutely a villain, in as much as Love Live ever has those. Kanon frankly even seems a bit scared of her, despite the fact that Wien is literally a middle schooler.)

Granted, if a middle schooler with lavender hair started showing up outside my house to tell me how bad I was at singing, I might be scared of her too.

But at the same time, I’m unwilling to slam Superstar too hard over this. It is entirely possible that in the season’s back half the rest of Liella will rise to the occasion. Their actual talent, both in-universe and, outside of it, that of their voice actresses, is not remotely the problem, it’s just that you can’t beat crazy shit like glowing butterflies, iron clockwork, and a gothic lolita dress adorned with black feathers by being a pretty good idol group. (And honestly the show itself seems to be on my side here; go watch that clip and look at how Liella react to her. Those are the faces of girls who know they’re outclassed.)

Perhaps, then, Liella will meet that challenge at some point. As it stands, they just don’t have this kind of theatricality, but seeing the group transform into the sort of people who could pull that off would be very much worth watching. (If, still, an entirely different universe than what SHINEPOST is doing.)

In a sense, and to return back to our opening question, this is really less a criticism of Superstar and more of an open query. Now that this genre is entering its second full decade of being among the most successful and popular anime subgenres, where is it going? There’s a lot I haven’t touched on here, outside just these two shows. Right now, Waccha Primagi, a children’s anime that blends the idol and magical girl genres has been unwilling to let the possible outbreak of a war between humans and magic users—after the local Beyonce stand-in ascended to divinity and became an angry Sun God, naturally—interfere with its once-an-episode CGI idol performances. Last season, there was Healer Girl, which I would not really call an idol anime, but its dynamic approach to music certainly borrows something from the genre, and which it spun into hallucinatory dream sequences of rare beauty. And this very season, there are a few idol anime I simply haven’t seen; namely League of Nations Air Force Aviation Magic Band Luminous Witches, whose full English title is an absolute joy to have to copy and paste every time and which is a spinoff of the polarizing Strike Witches series, and Phantom of the Idol, which simply by starring a male lead, is already so far removed from almost everything else on this page that it’s almost another conversation entirely.

Perhaps, then, trying to say much about what idol anime will look like next year, in 5 years, in 10, is foolish in the first place. Writing this piece has been an exercise in perspective. Always a valuable thing, and I hope you’ve found reading it interesting as well.

Nonetheless, the fact remains. Whether the rest of the ’20s brings us more stories of passion and drama within the idol industry, and whatever twists they may have, more sunlit visions of a world where anyone and everyone can become the performer they’ve always dreamed of being, or something in between or even farther afield, the idol genre does not look like it’s going anywhere any time soon. People love pop music, and they love pop stars. That much seems unlikely to change.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [9/19/21]

The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture. Expect some degree of spoilers for the covered shows.

Hello folks. Not much to say this week, it’s just been a good, solid week of anime. I’ve got some full-on reviews planned for the weeks ahead, but we’re not quite at the finale of any anime of this season yet. In fact, one started this week, which is quite unusual, but Science SARU can just do what they want, apparently.

I’m also trying a slightly different format with the show writeups this week, now that they’ve developed the habit of exceeding a single paragraph in length (whoops). Hopefully you’ll find the new format a little more readable.

Heike Monogatari

The advantage of a show starting with a public execution is that you immediately know what you’re in for. Heike Monogatari is all period-piece Japanese political drama and haunting omens of future ruin. This story of the prophet-eyed orphan Biwa and her benefactor (Shigemori, a prince of the very same Heike clan that kill her father in the opening. He sees dead people) is backed by a deliberately-anachronistic soundtrack that blends the biwa music after which she’s named with head-down, guitars-plucked shoegazey indie rock.

In general, Science SARU’s work is always distinct, but this is a positively enrapturing first episode. War is coming like storm clouds on the horizon. Biwa can see it, but can’t stop it. This is to say nothing of the other colorful characters we’ve already been introduced to. There’s Shigemori’s father, the immediately-unlikable, obnoxious, head of the Heike, prone to calling things “amusing.” There’s Biwa’s surrogate siblings in her new family. And lastly there’s the mysterious white-haired figure chanting those prophecies of war, death, and violence, who may well be Biwa herself. As for all of us? Well, I suggest giving this thing a look. You won’t regret it.

Kageki Shoujo!!

The most recent episode and a half of Kageki Shoujo!! essentially consists of running the same scene of Romeo & Juliet, performed in-audition by the cast, back to back several times.

There are many reasons this should absolutely not work. Structurally, showing your audience the same thing more than once in a row is a nightmarish prospect. Doing it multiple times is narrative suicide. But Kageki Shoujo!! can pull it off, because it remembers an important truth of the arts. Any work that engages with acting will eventually hit upon the question of what acting is. The reason we can watch the same scene run back multiple times without getting bored is because each time, a different subset of the cast is highlighted. The focus is ostensibly on the characters’ actual performances of Romeo & Juliet, but the real gem is their meta-performances. For an actor, the stage is everywhere. Both the characters themselves and their own actors–the seiyuu who voice them–understand this. This is the point where all the blood, sweat, and tears becomes worth it. What redeems the amount of pressure they’ve had to put themselves under and the things they’ve had to neglect or discard to get here.

Each character who is spotlighted grapples with the question of how to best portray their character in their own way. Ai channeling Juliet by remembering the strong impression Sarasa made on her and Yamada doing the same by reflecting on her first love (and a love lost) are both show-wide highlights.

I never wholly bought into the narrative, perpetuated on some corners of the internet, that Kageki Shoujo!! was the “hidden gem of the season” or anything like that. It has, in my view, too many flaws for that (and a particularly nasty dead spot in episodes 8 and 9 are why I haven’t covered it on this column in a while.) But if it does gain a cult following over the years, it will be on the backs of both its harrowing depiction of Ai’s trauma in its first half, and on these final few episodes. They present the show’s core thesis in as concise, yet resonant, fashion as is possible. The only thing left for the series to do is stick the landing.

Love Live Superstar!

People don’t always believe me when I tell them that I make every effort to appreciate the anime I watch. Sometimes the secret to really “getting” a show is a change in perspective. I’ve previously been a little sour on Superstar because it doesn’t quite nail the more comparatively serious character moments the way I’d like it to. (And that’s true in this week’s episode too, where we’re treated to an unintentionally hilarious sequence where our cast spies on future group addition Ren Hazuki as she details her life story to her own maid, who almost certainly knows it already.) But as a comedy I think I’ve been under-appreciating it. It’s easy to take Superstar‘s very visual sense of humor for granted. Rewatching some bits from earlier episodes, I found myself liking them more. This week also had a truly excellent sequence in which the perennially silly Keke Tang imagines herself and her fellow idols as the victim of some kind of AKB0048-esque crackdown on school idol stuff.

Also; even if you’re not watching this show at all, take a moment of your day to appreciate the performance at the end of episode six. The CGI choreography for this stuff has gotten a lot more advanced over the years, and while it’s not quite to the level of Nijigasaki‘s full-on music video dreamscapes, it’s still a really impressive bit of visual showmanship.

Elsewhere on MPA

Magic Planet Monthly Movies: WORDS BUBBLE UP LIKE SODA POP is Simple Summer Sweetness – This is, as the first half of its title implies, the start of a new recurring column for the site. I feel like the central conceit is pretty explanatory; I plan to watch an anime film per month and review it. We’ll see how it goes! I’ve also retroactively added last month’s Evangelion 3+1 review to the tag, just because it happened to fit. Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop is a wonderful movie, by the way. Give it a watch if you have the time.

If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

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 owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.