Tag: Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/5/24]

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

Hello, anime fans! I don’t have much to say this week, so I won’t belabor the point. Let’s get into things.

Anime

Mayonaka Punch – Episode 4

In a development I definitely wouldn’t have predicted even a week ago, the title of “first anime to make me cry this season” goes to Mayonaka Punch.

This is very different in tone, structure, and even subject matter to every prior episode of this show and, judging by the previews, probably many of the later ones, too. Rather than focusing on the main group, this is a spotlight episode about Fu, probably the least-focused-on member of the group so far, and an old friend of hers named Aya. It’s much more poignant and heartbreaking than funny, and I think MayoPan, somewhat surprisingly, manages to make this massive shift in mood completely work.

Before now, the series hasn’t really grappled with what it means to be a vampire. It’s been an obstacle or inconvenience or a role that comes with a set of rules or even a prop for some of Masaki’s videos earlier in the series. With this episode though, MayoPan drills down on one of the oldest tropes in vampire fiction; the tragedy of immortality.

Fu met Aya when the latter was, going by her appearance, roughly a high schooler. She got Fu into western rock and pop music, and the two played music together, with Fu singing and Aya providing guitar. Aya eventually gets the idea that Fu is such a good singer that they could even go pro. Fu knows—and Yuki tells her this much—that this cannot possibly work. She can’t go out in the sunlight and doesn’t age, so people will start talking at some point. The entire thing is a foolish dream, and Fu knows this. But she can’t bring herself to tell Aya, and she ends up stringing Aya along right up until the very moment that they’re supposed to debut as a duo on an outdoor stage. The sun catches her outstretched hand, which briefly alights, and scared and confused, she runs away.

Back in the present, Masaki finds out about all this from the other vampires and gets it in her head that she should record Fu singing covers. Fu is initially very reluctant, but after a somewhat strained heart to heart she ends up seeking Aya out upon learning that she moved to New York some years ago. Then, upon meeting a friend of hers, the episode delivers its solemn last twist; Aya is dead. Fu will never see her friend again.

All of this loses something in the retelling, but in the moment it’s really, truly heartwrenching. (I love Masaki and Fu’s conversation, too. Fu goes back to this idea several times that she doesn’t deserve to sing, since she abandoned her friend, but Masaki contends that there’s nobody who doesn’t deserve to do the things that make them happy. There’s something really powerful in that, and I think it’s a theme the show will come back around to.) Fu makes a kind of peace with Aya’s passing, and the episode has a semi-happy postscript in that she does end up singing for the channel, pouring her passion into a new version of her dream in her friend’s memory, but it’s definitely bittersweet as opposed to just straight-up happy.

With this episode I think Mayonaka Punch has firmly placed itself in roughly the same category as Zombieland Saga, another show about undead entertainers that is fully willing to mine that status for both comedy and pathos. ZLS was, until now, a one-of-one, so I’m really happy to see something picking up its torch in this way. I don’t know if it’ll ever touch this territory again, but I’m glad that it did. Not only does this do an amazing job of making Fu immediately one of my favorite characters, it’s just also a frankly incredible piece of character work top to bottom, a story so self-contained that it’s almost a great anime all on its own.

Wistoria: Wand & Sword – Episode 4

Full credit: giving Will literally any other motivation beyond his vague crush on a character who’s barely on screen is probably a good move, and overall I liked the tavern showdown scene at the end of this episode, since it was the first time in this entire series that it has felt like there’s something riding on anything that’s happening. Also, hey, Wistoria recognizes that racism is bad! The subject is handled pretty poorly and with all of the inherent problems of the “fantasy racism” proxy, but at least it knows it’s bad. That’s something. That’s more than you get from some fantasy anime. Also we have our first actual arc set up now, which is good, too. Maybe I’ll end up liking this show by the time it ends after all! Who can say?

The Elusive Samurai – Episode 5

I was a little worried after last week but we fully bring it back here with a return to properly interesting visuals and a new character to round out the cast. The new guy, the master thief Genba [Yuki Aoi], I quite like him! It’s interesting that he’s something of a foil to Tokiyuki himself and how the series plays that up by having him actually morph into Tokiyuki with his magic mask in the last scene here.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! – Episode 4

A lovely and lightly meta episode this week. Let’s ask a question, does being a boy prevent Nukumizu, our lead, from being one of the “losing heroines” of the title? I would venture—even setting aside shenanigans from a few episodes back—that it does not. This episode sees him prematurely “dumped” by Anna as the two go through a fairly protracted series of misunderstandings as they more clearly work out what their feelings for each other actually are. Nu-kun clearly likes Anna, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if she liked him too on some level, but things are not lined up at the moment for our leads to get together. So they don’t! They’re just friends instead. At least for now.

In their final rooftop conversation—the second of the series—Anna mentions that as part of the lit club’s whole composition assignment she’s started writing, and that she also likes the books that Komari has recommended her. This is interesting to me because it’s a direct reference to Makeine’s own status a romance novel about romance novels, a romcom that is in part about how romcoms themselves tick. A lot of this episode is actually fairly somber because it’s in the midst of Anna and Nukumizu’s sort-of disassociation from each other after the latter overhears some popular girls talking about how Anna’s out of his league. The show represents this visually by repeating a key shot three times, once during an ordinary day, a second time, during all of these misunderstandings, in the middle of a downpour, and then a third time the day after the rain breaks as summer vacation lurks just around the corner. It’s a great visual trick in an episode full of them.

On that note. I read something earlier today which, to put it mildly, I did not agree with, about how considering an anime’s visuals and story separate is something only people who don’t consider the artform particularly seriously would do. A better and more true way to rephrase that sentiment, I think, would be to say that when the visuals and story work together this well, you tend to not be able to see the seams. I can only imagine how thorough the adapting process must’ve been for this series, it doesn’t seem like it’d be an easy thing to turn a light novel into an anime that’s this visually sumptuous, but Makeine keeps pulling it off.

I haven’t even talked about the whole Komari <-Tamaki-> Koto setup that is resolved in the first part of this episode and is, in some ways, a pre-reflection of what happens with Anna and Nukumizu (and their mutual friend, Anna’s crush Sousuke). It’s really quite astounding how a show that’s so simple at first blush has so many layers to it.

Bye Bye, Earth – Episode 4

As always, Bye Bye, Earth feels more like a highlight reel of its source material than a real adaptation, and as a result the story strains against awkward runs of internal narration and exposition. Nonetheless, because the setting of the series is just that odd, it’s still a compelling watch. This episode is an outpouring of odd, fascinating ideas; flower-cats that the solists test their swords on, question marks as symbols from “the age of the gods” that can render swords inert, a literal battle of the bands that sees our protagonist conscripted into a militarized marching band and sent to the slaughter.

It’s not nonsense; there’s an obvious extension of the theme of finding a place where one belongs, here, but it’s all a bit opaque. I can’t help but wish this had gotten more episodes or even just been adapted at a slower pace so it really had room to breathe. Nonetheless, it’s one of the season’s weirdest, most underrated anime, and I do think it’s worth keeping up with.

Oshi no Ko – Season 2, Episode 5

I don’t know how to explain it but watching this show is legitimately intoxicating. I need more anime where the entire cast are just complete maniacs, man. We don’t have enough of that.

Obviously, at this stage of this season’s plot, tensions are running really high as everyone has a ton of emotional investment in how the Demon’s Blade play does. The way this episode makes you feel that by plunging you into all of this huge spiderweb of entangled neuroses is just the absolute best. Half of the cast completely hate each other! Akane and Kana consider themselves rivals, obviously over Aqua, but arguably more importantly as actresses with wildly diverging styles and with a personal history that goes back to their respective childhoods. They spend so much of this episode openly taunting and seething at each other, it’s great. It is some Grade-A Toxin.

If you told me they were the eventual endgame couple I’d completely believe you. (I’d only even be skeptical because of Akasaka’s generally lacking queer representation in his works.) They genuinely look like they wanna kill each other by the end of the episode, it is the best.

This, too, is yuri.

Melt, who would be a complete nothing of a character in almost any other series, has an amazing scene here where he tries to tell off one of the other actors—who is acting like a complete scumbag, mind—only to be insulted by him because of his poor performance on Sweet Today last season, so he spends the whole episode, appropriately enough, melting under the pressure and angry with himself for lacking talent.

Aqua, of course, is trying to wring a good performance out of himself here because of his own ongoing goals. Aqua has spent a lot of these past two episodes wrestling with his demons (almost literally, given that his past life self is represented as a flickering mass of shadows) but somehow the most “ha ha, yes!” moment of the whole episode to me was him casually dropping to Akane that he plans on murdering someone and her just rolling with it. Does she think he’s just floating a thought experiment? Who knows! Akane is so fucked up that it’s hard to guess! Everyone in this show is so fucked up that it’s hard to guess!

Anime – Non-Seasonal

BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!! – Episodes 7 & 8

Speaking of messy, emotionally driven storytelling in a cast full of complete wrecks, hey, remember It’s MyGo!!!! ? One of my favorite anime premieres of last year? Yeah, it feels a little silly to whip out that whole subheader for a fairly short writeup but, hey, one of the anime I really liked from last year that I didn’t finish! I’m finally getting back to it! Honestly y’all, why did I ever stop? The drama, holy shit. I love every part of this show that feels like two ex-girlfriends arguing in the middle of a tumblr moodboard, which is, thankfully, much of the show.

I could write a whole article comparing Girls Band Cry‘s emotional realism to this show’s incredibly melodramatic, over the top theatricality. I don’t have that article in me today, but maybe someday.

Again, I’ll have to beg your patience with the lack of pictures again this week. Things will be hectic here at home for a while going forward, and I’m trying not to burn myself out by worrying too much over details like that. I’m also going to again gently plug my Ko-Fi, I have a doctor’s appointment in a few days and those can jumpscare a person with unexpected expenses sometimes, so it seemed like as appropriate a time as any.

I hope to see you next week. Until then, please enjoy this Bonus Thought, a shot of Komari from Makeine munching.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, Tumblr, or 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Out of Luck, Out of Love in MAKEINE: TOO MANY LOSING HEROINES!

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.

Like so many of this season’s premieres—the good, the bad, and the strange—the real meat of Makeine‘s first episode is in its closing few minutes. Unlike with some of those shows, though, we’re going to start from the beginning. Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines, deserves to be taken on its own terms.

Nukumizu Kazuhiko [Umeda Shuichirou] is a cynical sort. Not in a bad way—this is not the sort of show that tries to pass off an asshole male protagonist as having depth by making him a snarky jerk—but he’s pretty sure he’s got some things figured out. Nukumizu is a big light novel reader, fitting considering that that’s his own home medium, and he loves romance LNs. These are stories he clearly deeply appreciates, despite or maybe even because of their generally cliché- and trope-ridden nature, and as we’re introduced to him, he’s sitting in a café finishing one up by himself. Now, Nukumizu isn’t delusional, he’s aware that romance novels aren’t reality, and in fact, he has a little opening monologue here about how most high school couples break up. “Nearly all,” in fact, if you count people who break up after graduation, according to him. ([citation needed] But it’s the kind of thing you can’t blame a single teenager for believing.) Still, he wonders, and maybe even wishes—and who hasn’t wished for things, every now and again?—that he could know what it’s like. He’s never had a girlfriend, and he doesn’t know how it feels to have your life upended by fleeting and sudden feelings. You can’t really blame him for being curious.

Some of that feeling might vanish though, by his meeting (or really, getting to know) our other main character, Yanami Anna [Toono Hikaru]. Anna and her friend Sousuke [Oosaka Ryouta] are having what at first seems to be some kind of lovers’ quarrel, but as Nukumizu eavesdrops, it becomes clear that Anna is actually encouraging Sousuke to make his feelings for someone else known. Somewhere in the conversation, it slips out that Anna, a friend of his since childhood, loves him too.

This is all quite awkward. Moreso when Sousuke has little hesitation in making his choice, despite Anna’s own hurt feelings, she encourages Sousuke to tell his crush how he feels before she transfers to England in the coming months. Thus encouraged, Sousuke runs off, his own romance story beginning off-screen and somewhere else. Meanwhile, left behind, Anna pathetically nips at the bitten-down straw of the soda he’s left behind, an act that Nukumizu happens to catch her in. Unfortunately for him, Anna notices and pulls up to his table.

Thus begins a full-on unwelcome venting session. A torrent of TMI traumadumping that makes Nukumizu feel equally awkward and unable to really wriggle out of the situation. Worse, Anna orders a bunch of food and stress-eats all of it (relatable) while getting over what she charitably describes as her “breakup.” Anna, as you may notice, is not the most considerate person in the world, but as a noted fan of anime girls with bad personalities, I enjoy her antics. Especially when she complains further about how they’re too lovey-dovey later in the episode when they invite her to karaoke and she has to hear them sing duets.

This is, in fact, the central comedic conceit of this series. Nukumizu acts relatively normal, everyone around him is a font of romcom light novel clichés and bad coping strategies post-getting rejected. This applies to Anna throughout the episode, who runs Nukumizu’s charge up at the cafe ordering first a big plate of fries and then, we later learn, several other things as well. (This sprouts a whole side-plot where the reason that Anna and Nukumizu keep interacting after this point at all is because Nukumizu wants Anna to pay him back. When she eventually reveals that she can’t, she starts making lunches for him, giving them further reason to talk to each other.) It also seems like it’s going to be true of the other main girls. Lemon [Wakayama Shion], for example, laments that her boycrush only likes smart girls. I am interested to see what bad decisions she ends up making as a result of this.

Mind you, I’d also be fine with it if Lemon just got to be uncomplicatedly happy. She’s like a sad puppy here, it really got to me.

The joke is thus Nukumizu’s constant pinballing off of everyone’s antics and drama, essentially making this a harem comedy where the girls more want the main guy as a shoulder to cry on than a love interest. However, if this were to just be a harem series where the protagonist is also secondarily the girls’ therapist, it might get a little formulaic. Thankfully, more than that, there’s a slightly deeper world being built here. Since Anna and, eventually, all of the main girls, seem to have unrequited crushes on other people, there is an entire cast of minor supporting characters who are off living happy romcom stories of their own. Our main characters are, thus, “the losers,” hence the title of the show. Admittedly, it is also true that the “winning and losing” nature of romcom media discussion can feel tedious and childish, but that is perhaps more a consequence of their being read largely by teens and teens-at-heart than anything else. Even so, this seems like something that Makeine wants to seriously engage with rather than simply inverting.

This creates an interesting effect whereby Makeine feels like the B-Side of a “normal” romcom anime that doesn’t actually exist. Our characters are the weirdos, the outcasts, or simply the awkward. People too shy or too strange to properly make their feelings known to others. Makeine‘s protagonist being somewhat genre-aware of all the clichés the other characters speak and do is not terribly original in of itself. Indeed, you could argue that “protagonist somewhat aware of the clichés of the genre he’s in” has become a cliché itself over the years. But this broader, wide-net arrangement of characters where the entire cast feel like the background characters of another anime certainly is. This is Makeine‘s subtle innovation, and it’s why, of the 3 (to 4, it depends on how you count) romcom premieres I’ve covered on the site this season, this is easily the best. It extends to the character designs to a certain extent, even. While our own hero and heroines have nice designs of their own, the supporting characters meant to come off as the “real protagonists” of their own stories often have similarly striking ones. This is particularly true for Karen [Waki Azumi], Sousuke’s love interest, a pink-haired sweetheart who seems for all the world like a born romcom lead and is even the rare contemporary anime girl with hair vents1, but who is nonetheless a minor character in the actual story of Makeine.

She even talks like the lead in a “normal” romcom.

This might even explain the otherwise-puzzling decision to give the girls’ uniform a vertical array of four bowties for each character, as it draws some attention to the lightly heightened nature of the setting. That it looks funny (and provides an opportunity to color-code each character’s ties to their general appearance) is a nice bonus.

I want to pause there, because these claims of subversion are the kind of proclamations that get anime saddled with heavy, meaningless terms like “genre deconstruction” or its equally-meaningless cousin “reconstruction.”2 Makeine is neither of these things. By all indications, it is not going to sit you down and lecture you about why Romcom Light Novels Are Bad, nor is it going to gently reassure you that Romcom Light Novels Are Good. Makeine is taking it as a given that you understand the value of its own genre. The B-Side feeling is a structural trick—a very impressive one, no doubt, but a structural trick nonetheless—a way of delivering this story in an intriguing and engaging way.

As Nukumizu finds out, a romantic comedy that takes place on the B-Side, underneath some other story, is still a romance story. Despite his own cynicism, his own awareness of how these things usually play out both in reality and in fiction, the final scene of the episode sees him shot through the heart. He sees Anna on the school’s rooftop—a shamelessly stereotypical occurrence, completely unrealistic, lifted from a hundred other anime, other manga, other light novels—her sky-azure hair against the backdrop of a billowing white cumulus cloud, and the wind catches it just so. Just like that, it is completely fucking over for our boy.

Anna doesn’t clock his smitten stare. The two talk for a while, and after spotting Lemon running track in the field below, she suddenly begins crying. This, she says, is her heart catching up to her head that she won’t ever be with Sousuke, which threatens to leave the episode on a bitter and sad note.

Instead, after she lets it out, she and Nukumizu talk for a bit about how “getting dumped” feels. There’s something very subtle and sweet about the complexity of feeling captured here. How the utter hole left by a love lost can hijack your thoughts in strange, unintuitive ways. Anna says it herself; thinking about Lemon running track down below her suddenly crashes into the feeling of rejection. Makeine is very observant here; rejection is not a “logical” feeling. Anna describing this whole thing as “getting dumped” in the first place is frankly a little generous, as she admits in an earlier scene she and Sousuke were never dating in the first place. But the human heart is not driven by what does and doesn’t make sense, and so here she is, crying on a rooftop, she and Nukumizu looking absolutely miniscule beneath the massive sky.

They talk, eventually Anna stops crying, and after collecting herself—admitting in the process that it doesn’t even “feel like a fresh start”—she takes a massive, hearty chomp out of a chikuwa. All the while, Nukumizu is thinking. Thinking about himself, about Anna, about boys and girls, and about the romance novels he loves.

He repeats the episode’s opening monologue to himself. Perhaps in denial, perhaps in realization that he is not immune to a good yarn, even if he’s the one living it. The episode ends here, on a soaring, hopeful note. It’s an open question as to how long it will take Nukumizu to realize what’s happened to him here, but I’m sure he eventually will. Because this, after all, is a love story.

1: A kind of hair style that was popular in anime character designs in the ’00s. Sadly, it seems to have fallen out of favor somewhere near the turn of the last decade. Perhaps it’s starting to come back? We can only hope.

2: I am here referring to both of these terms in their latter day TVTropes-y usage. I would actually argue that both are wholly artificial concepts and neither really applies to almost any piece of media, but even if we take the framework that these terms create to be a real thing, Makeine doesn’t fall into it.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, Tumblr, or 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.