One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
“I’ve set myself to become King of the Pirates…and if I die trying…then at least I tried!”
The very first person Luffy D. Monkey tells about his ambition to become King of the Pirates is a dejected, down-on-his-luck cabin boy named Koby. I don’t know what it is, but that’s just absolutely hilarious to me for some reason. He’s the Jimmy Olsen to Luffy’s Superman, except I think if you put Koby and Olsen in a fight, Olsen would probably win.
I said when I began this project that I wouldn’t sugarcoat my opinion if I felt One Piece did something problematic or just straight up bad. We don’t cross into the latter at all here, but the former….eh, yeah, kind of. There’s just something a little weird about this chapter’s villain, a beauty-obsessed overweight woman with a huge mace named Lady Alvida. That said; I’ve definitely seen a lot worse, so I’ll not harp on it too hard, here.
Mostly, she serves as a decent starter villain for Luffy. Her modus operandi seems to be very simple; she asks her crew, under her wood-deck tyranny, who is the fairest of them all. If they don’t say her, she hits them with a giant mace.
When Luffy confronts her, he has an obvious opening; since his body is made of weird magic rubber stuff, he can’t be hurt by the mace, which Alvida doesn’t see coming because, well, why in the living thunder would she? Luffy takes advantage of her confusion, and promptly decks her across the face. I really hope he keeps doing this to every villain, it’s funny as hell.
More important is that we get a little bit of exposition here! Koby balks at the very notion that Luffy could ever be King of the Pirates, which eventually leads him to reply with this article’s lead quote. He incredulously mentions that Luffy will have to go to the Grand Line if he wants to accomplish such a thing. What’s the Grand Line? Who knows! A “graveyard for pirates”, apparently, which sounds suitably dangerous for our hero. Also, I had no idea that One Piece was named after an actual thing within its universe, but apparently Gold Roger’s treasure is called the “One Piece.”
In general this chapter does a lot to establish that, yeah, even ten years after the prologue, Luffy is still kind of amusingly dumb. It’s a likable sort of dumb; he doesn’t really sugarcoat anything and speaks his mind in an extremely straightforward way, even when he maybe shouldn’t.
The beginning of the chapter reestablishes that he can’t swim (who am I to judge? Neither can I), and he almost dies by being sucked into a whirlpool. Only to emerge like this a few pages later.
Luffy is an odd one, and he ends this chapter with a new boat (still just a small dinghy, but hey, it’s a new small dinghy), and a new companion; the aforementioned cabin boy, who wants to eventually join the navy.
A pirates’ graveyard and a mysterious bounty hunter. I wonder what sort of adventure our boys are about to sail themselves into? I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow.
Until then.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also 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 Directoryto 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.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
The temptation when starting a project like this is always to make grand statements of intent and purpose. I’ve already explained my reasoning at length in the intro article, though, so all that’s really left to do is aweigh the proverbial anchors and set sail. As I mentioned there, some back of the envelope math tells me that even if I keep up the rate of one chapter per day, every single day, with no breaks, and even if no new material came out at all, it will take me somewhere on the order of three years to catch up to the current chapter. Lots of things can happen in three years, but the great cliché goes that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We take that step today, together. I do hope you’re reading along.
I wonder what it was like, on that hot July day in ’97, to read the first chapter of One Piece. Did people read this and just know that they had something special on their hands? I certainly didn’t, I was a mere three years old at the time and even if I could’ve read comic books of any kind, I don’t believe One Piece was translated into English for some time until after it debuted.
I suspect that most people took away from the first chapter back then basically what I took away from it today; it’s got some really great action scenes and some nice cartoony art. For the first step of a thousand-mile journey, that’s probably more than enough.
Another thing that strikes me right out of the gate is a strong—albeit, simple—theme. There’s some solid thoughts had about the true nature of strength itself here. We’re introduced to Monkey D. Luffy as a kid, and he has a kid’s idea of what it means to be strong. His role model / eventual hat donor Captain Redhair Shanks just taking it in stride when “mountain bandits” intimidate him and his crew in a bar confuses Luffy. (And because Luffy is a young boy in a shonen manga, he expresses that confusion loudly and angrily.)
But when they go after Luffy himself later in the chapter, Redhair’s crew dispatch most of them with minimal fuss, proving that they could have fought off the bandits all along. There’s having strength, and there’s knowing what to do with it, and over this chapter, Luffy learns the difference. (Or at least, gets the first of however many lessons.) I think the key is here, fairly early on, where Redhair pretty much lays it out plain.
I’m particularly fond of the scene where the bandit leader kidnaps Luffy. He’s eaten by a sea serpent—a properly cartoony-monstrous thing, all crocodile teeth and fish fins—and it’s up to Redhair to fight the thing off and save Luffy. The fact that he loses an arm in the process barely seems to faze him. He saved his little buddy, that’s the important thing, right?
So the prologue ends, and years later when Luffy sets out on his own journey, he avenges his mentor by clocking that “local sea monster” right across the face as he paddles out to sea in nothing more than a wooden rowboat. The two-page spread of Luffy womping the monster is nice and dynamic, incidentally, it’s probably the best art in the whole chapter.
If you’re not reading along you’re probably puzzled as to why he has Mr. Fantastic-esque stretchy powers. The answer is that he ate a magic fruit. Manga truly is a medium without parallel.
An image that strikes me even more though, is the final page of the chapter. Luffy, despite being alone on a little rickety-rack ship in the middle of the ocean, loudly declares to no one in particular that he’s going to become king of the pirates! To surpass Redhair Shanks (and eventually return the older captain’s straw hat!), presumably find Gold Roger’s buried treasure which we learned about in the chapter’s intro. All that good stuff! Adventure, hoy!
As in the ocean, so on land, and as he goes, so too do we.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also 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 Directoryto 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.
One Piece, Eiichiro Oda‘s magnum opus, is, by some metrics, the most popular manga ever written. It’s a defining work of the modern shonen landscape, and in a broader sense, massively influential to a whole generation of creative talents both within Japan and abroad. The adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, have been captivating audiences for 25 years; a quarter of a century as of next month. But, if you know enough about anime and manga to even be aware of this blog, let alone be reading it, you know all of that. So why am I telling you something you already know?
Well, to be frank, despite its massive popularity and a reputation that precedes it by a nautical mile, I’ve never read a single page or watched a single minute of One Piece. For whatever reason, until recently, I’d just never felt compelled to. This is, in its own way, strange for me personally. I’ve been a fan of anime and manga since I was pretty young, and I was a child of the Toonami era of American anime distribution. On top of that, I really like pirate stories! Around that very same time, the Pirates of the Caribbean films were some of my favorites (and I still kind of like them today, despite their poor critical reception and any thoughts I may have about a certain actor who was in them).
But I was a dumb preteen, and then a dumb teen, and when I was that age I had a vague snobbery to my taste in anime. I don’t remember, exactly, but I think, knowing myself at the time, I probably just assumed that anything that was that popular couldn’t possibly be worth my time. In hindsight, this was very stupid for a lot of reasons, but there’s not much sense in dwelling on it. Still, even as I’ve gotten older the time just hasn’t felt right.
It occurred to me a few weeks ago that this was also a very dumb attitude to have. A few things put it in perspective for me; the keen awareness that while I’m not old yet I’m certainly not getting any younger, the recent popularity of tumblr phenomenon Dracula Daily, and my own aforementioned thoughts on a certain actor in a trilogy of pirate movies that I used to like.
And then, about a week ago, I learned—spoiler for a recent One Piece manga chapter, I think, coming literally right after this interjection, you’ve been warned—that there is a trans woman in the series as of a recent chapter of the story. And that scrap of representation was, I think, what the last of my weird, completely irrational, totally pointless defenses against this shonen series needed to fall. “Fuck it” I thought. “What is there to lose?”
Hence; this project. The premise is extremely simple. I will read the One Piece manga. Every single day, you will have a new article to read—usually on the shorter side—about a chapter of said manga. Starting from the beginning. In order. One day at a time.
It will take me, provided I take no breaks, and not accounting for any chapters that have yet to be released, about three years to catch up to where the manga is at the time of this writing, June 6th, 2022. I am setting myself a fundamentally absurd task, to not just read a very long story but to write about it, to write about every single part of it.
I have a lot of reasons for wanting to do this, but the biggest is simply to see if I can. I’m not quite brave enough to leave myself no escape hatches here; if the columns are pulling little interest by the time I’ve finished the first collected volume I’ll probably pull the plug and just continue reading the series by myself. Likewise, if I burn out on the project I will allow myself to take hiatuses. But still, I’m optimistic. The real honest core of this whole project is that I just Want To Do This. It’s a Mt. Everest for a lifelong couch potato.
Also! I want you, yes you, the girl, boy, enby, or whatever else you may be reading this, to read One Piece along with me. A chapter a day is not much; while One Piece on the whole is very long, the individual chapters are only a brisk 20 or so pages each. It will be entirely viable for you, dear reader, to settle in with a chapter of the story and one of my columns at night before you turn in for bed, or in the morning before you go to work. Is assuming that you want to arrogant of me? Maybe, but I think it’ll be fun, and I place a lot of value in fun.
As for how I’m doing this, here are the basics.
I will be reading the chapters myself in chunks, usually a few at a time, because I want to keep a nice buffer for myself so that way there will be—ideally!—a new One Piece Every Day, you know, every day.
I fully intend to give my honest thoughts on each chapter. Those may be very brief or very lengthy, and they may skew positive or negative. (I have already been informed by some well-meaning friends that there are some things in this manga that have Not Aged Well, but I have never shied away from earnestly evaluating art, even if it is problematic at times.)
These columns will have their own archive on the main page, as well as their own “recent posts” section. (They technically already do, that was the reason behind that unexplained change a few days ago, for those of you who noticed.)
And that’s basically it! Conceptually, this is all very simple. It is just a matter of effort. And there’s good news on that front; if you’re reading this, I’ve already read the first week’s worth of chapters, and already have the columns written. So, I’m already getting this ship ready to sail, you just need to decide if you’re on board or not.
I hope to see you tomorrow, for the proper casting off.
Until then.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also 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 Directoryto 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.
The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad.These articles contain spoilers.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; totally average person from our world dies and gets reincarnated as someone of note in a stock JRPG-style fantasy universe. This is, fundamentally, the rock that the modern iteration of the isekai genre is built on. There are many, many variations of it, but the central premise remains familiar to anyone who has even a slight familiarity with modern anime.
The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and The Genius Young Lady, monstrously long title and all, is really only different in one key way. Our protagonist—and her obligatory love interest—are both girls.
Yes, it’s true, a yuri fantasy isekai. There are a couple of these. I’m in Love with the Villainess is well-liked, and The Executioner and Her Way of Life has an anime airing right now. Revolution Princess is a bit simpler than either of those, though. It is, at least going by the nineteen chapters currently available in English, a more straightforward heroic fantasy. (That’s nineteen chapters of the manga, for the record. It’s based on a light novel, presumably much farther along, by Piero Karasu.) It also draws a bit on the “tech boost” subgenre, a style wherein the hero uses their modern knowledge to fast-track technological development in their new world. It’s a fraught, and frankly, very silly, style, but that doesn’t much matter here. We haven’t really seen many fruits of this pursuit of better living through magitek yet, and indeed some part of the series’ point seems to be in illustrating how difficult doing such a thing would actually be. But I risk getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the basics.
Anisphia (“Anis” for short) is the princess of a roughly medieval European-ish kingdom somewhere in a fantasy world. She used to be someone else, in another life. We don’t learn much about that “someone else,” but we do learn, crucially, that she was obsessed with the idea of magic. Now living in a world where it’s a reality, she’s hellbent on learning as much about it as she can. (Credit here, the scene of young Anis’ personality being “built” puzzle piece by puzzle piece, and finally completing as her past life memories come rushing back to her, is an intriguingly poetic visual.)
Because of a condition, she can’t actually use magic herself, directly. But over the course of her young life, she studies it extensively, becoming something of a magical mad scientist, creating useful gadgets for herself and inventing an entire field of study; a sort of “applied science of magic” called magicology. If that all seems a little dry to you, early parts of the manga are indeed a bit so. Things get more interesting when we’re introduced to Anis’ co-protagonist.
The daughter of a duke, one Euphyllia (“Euphy”), is renounced by the man she was betrothed to. That man? Anis’ older brother, the kingdom’s prince. It’s not totally clear why he’s dumping Euphy—he claims she was talking badly to a lady-friend of his who he seems to have far stronger feelings for, but the situation seems more complicated than that and we don’t learn all the details—but he’s doing it very publicly, destroying her reputation in the process.
Cue Anis, flying in on a magic broomstick of her own design. In an absurd—even in-universe—turn of events, Anis sees this as an opportunity. She reasons that if her older brother doesn’t need Euphy anymore, maybe Euphy should come with her instead. None of the nobles present are particularly okay with this, but Anis does manage to (eventually) convince the only person whose opinion on the subject really matters; Euphy herself.
Even this early on, Anis’ spur-of-the-moment decision to pick up this random disgraced woman as her (we soon learn) lab assistant is strange, but Anis is a beaming ray of pure personality, and it’s hard both for the other characters and for us the audience to not be charmed by her. Her sudden absconding with the Duke’s daughter somehow manages to scan as romantic.
Anis is, in general, an endearing protagonist, although not a flawless one. She’s charming when taken with the magic of her world, which she’s singlehandedly wrought into a science mostly by herself. She has an enthusiasm for admiring her own handiwork (sometimes to a positively Dexter’s Laboratory-ish degree).
But she also has a cool side. She was born without the ability to use magic naturally, and so Sciences her way around problems that would ordinarily be solvable with “regular” spellcasting. It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of thing nowadays, but Revolution Princess sells this characterization very well, partly by making it clear how into her Euphy is, and partly by cutting it with her general immaturity to not make her too perfect. She can occasionally come across as remote and, when pursuing her interests, reckless.
(There’s also the matter that her disregard for the spirits that are responsible for the world’s magic system, and the stones they leave behind that she uses to power her devices, does feel kind of Reddit Atheist-y at points. Thankfully it doesn’t come up enough to be a real problem.)
Euphy, meanwhile, is so dazed by the sudden shakeup in her life that it takes a while for her to know what to do with herself. She knows she likes Anis, at least in some way. She knows that all the training she did to become the future queen—remember, Anis’ brother is a crown prince—was for naught. She feels directionless and adrift. Anis doesn’t entirely get this, and the two come into conflict a few times over it. Anis, you see, is more than content to let Euphy do what she likes, but since she doesn’t know what “what she likes” even is, it just makes her feel restless.
They come to an understanding during of the manga’s first—and currently only—big, dramatic arc, wherein Anis decides to try stopping a rampaging dragon. Why? Well, aside from the fact that if left unchecked it might kill a lot of people, she wants the magical stone it carries within it to make more magitek gadgets. Fair enough. There’s a whole other slate of stampeding monsters to take care of, too, and Anis gets to really show off her action heroine chops here. (For those of you who, like me, just enjoy watching anime girls go full stone-cold killer, this is probably enough to sell the manga alone.)
The fight with the dragon is a visual treat, artist Harutsugu Nadaka‘s compositional skill is really something to behold in general, and he knocks the climactic battle scene here out of the park. I could easily fill this whole article with examples, and the dragon itself is worth highlighting; all shadowy wings beating the air, teeth and claws.
But I have to say my personal favorite is this absolutely bonkers page where Anis uses one of her gadgets, a magic dagger, to split the dragon’s breath in two.
These would be the obvious highlights of any hypothetical anime adaption as well, but don’t consider Nadaka a one-trick pony who’s only good at fight scenes. He can also excellently portray say, warm intimacy or imposing projection equally well, and it is this that gives the manga most of its visual strength. It’s immersive in a way that’s all too easy to take for granted.
When Euphy saves Anis from her first, botched run at the dragon, the princess is undeterred, and the panel makes her look positively majestic. You can practically see her cape flapping in the wind, feel the breeze blowing, and smell the sulfur and burnt fabric. It’s only natural that this eventually leads to that page of Anis splitting the dragon’s breath above. How could someone this confident not be able to do the impossible?
This is the difference between a relationship that feels convenient and one that feels real, and it’s here where Anis and Euphy seem to finally “click” with each other for good. The general sentiments here are old—far older than the manga format itself—but they’re expressed very well. Reading Revolution Princess, I get why Euphy and Anis are into each other, and the visuals play a huge part in selling that. At a ball, some weeks later and held in celebration of Anis’ victory, Euphy straight-up confesses. I’ve seen a lot of confession scenes over the course of my time reading manga, and I have to say that this is one of the sweetest. I absolutely love how we get to see a rare shot of Anis being totally, sincerely flummoxed by someone else’s actions, the brave isekai heroine reverts to a blushing schoolgirl in the face of such strong feelings. (Note also how this scene and the one immediately above mirror each other. I like that, it’s a nice visual touch.)
I’d tell you more—because goodness dear readers, do I ever want more people to pick this up—but in truth, there isn’t much more, at least not yet. Revolution Princess is still a fairly young serialization, and as good as it’s been so far, I feel as though its best chapters are ahead of it. I can only hope it picks up the following it deserves. In addition to its obvious appeal to the WLWs of the world (or just anyone who likes a good romance), there are other, intriguing plots forming in the background; dragon prophecies, jealous older siblings, and and an eccentric girl who “collects curses.” A world is being built here, and while Anis and Euphy are at the center of it, they aren’t the only interesting parts of it.
I often lament that so much yuri focuses solely on the romantic aspect. I like romance (I’m covering two romance anime this very season!), but having some other plot as well definitely helps things feel more fleshed-out and lived in. In general, I’m fond of this current wave of yuri isekai manga, and I hope that Executioner is not the last to get an anime adaption. Stories like this are built on old foundations, but Revolution Princess is a breath of exhilarating, magical fresh air.
Update: If you liked this article, be sure to check out my writeup on the anime!
Wanna 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 Directoryto 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.
The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.
I’ve been a bit sick over the past week. Not enough to impact my blogging, thankfully. I was originally going to have just three shows for you this week, but, what the heck, why don’t we start with a new face?
Seasonal Anime
Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure
If you write about a chosen medium, it’s generally good to know what your Geek Buttons are. A Geek Button is a thing–and it can really be anything, a series, a whole genre, a visual style, a specific actor, whatever–where the more “objective” part of your critical toolkit just fails to work, and you are reduced to a blubbering fangirl (or fanboy, or fanby, as the case may be). For me, magical girls in general, and especially Pretty Cure, are a Geek Button. I cannot pretend to be remotely reasonable about them. I love almost all of them like they’re my children and the few exceptions are girls who I just wish were in better shows. I will die on the hill that the magical girl warrior archetype is one of anime’s best and most important contributions to general popular culture.
So with that in mind, please say hello to the newest Pretty Cure series. And indeed, the newest Pretty Cure; Yui Nagomi, AKA Cure Precious (Hana Hishikawa in what is, astoundingly, her first named character role in an anime.)
She is adorable. Dare I say precious?
The first episode of a given Precure series has a lot of beats to hit; introducing the protagonist, introducing her mentor / helper characters, if any, establishing the broad strokes of the plot for the season, nailing down the basic thematic overtone it’s going for, and of course, introducing the bad guys and their particular version of the monsters of the week. It’s a lot of stops to have to hit in a 22-minute episode, but DePaPre swings it admirably. The general direction in this first episode is really just fantastic, and notably, it’s helmed by animation director Akira Inagami, who had a role as a character designer all the way back on the original Futari wa Pretty Cure. (A hearty shout out to my good friend Pike, curator of Dual Aurora Wave, for that information. I’d have never known!)
The whole thing is bouncy and joyous and just alive in a way that really defines the best kids’ anime. The episode is great looking from start to finish, though obviously the real Peak TV moment is Cure Precious’ first henshin sequence.
Also scattered throughout are the traditional “Precure Leap,” a fun nod to an episode of Futari wa, and some truly ludicrous attack names (a 500 Kilocalorie punch, huh?)
I’m also fond of Yui’s “mentor” character here, the lavender haired gnc king Rosemary. He’s delightfully camp in a way that doesn’t feel overbearing or like it’s making fun of anyone.
Her fairy is adorable too, of course.
And I must make a nod toward Gentle (or “Gentlu” as Crunchyroll’s official subs hilariously render her name), who both puts in a supremely cool showing as the anime’s starter villain and is also the smart pick for Character Most Likely To Undergo A Face Turn And Possibly Become a Precure Herself. It wouldn’t be the first time the series has done that. (My favorite example being from Fresh. Which, fun fact; was the first Precure series that Hana Hishikawa watched as a young child in nursery school, going off an interview she gave a few weeks ago.)
Gentle wouldn’t even be the first villain with this specific hair color to eventually become a Precure. Will history repeat itself? Time alone will tell.
The only “bad thing”, really, about DePaPre, is that it won’t appear in this column much. I’ll try to make exceptions for particularly great episodes but given that I watch it with friends on its premiere night, much like Tropical Rouge Precure before it, it can be difficult to find the time, given that these Reports go up on Sunday.
Still, I’ll absolutely be watching every single week. And if my opinion is worth anything to you, I think you should be too.
CUE!
I don’t really know what to think about CUE! Any time I feel like I should just write it off and stop following it entirely, it does this.
“This,” for reference, is another subtly great episode about the inside of the voice acting profession. It doesn’t start out that way; the first third or so of this episode is actually mostly about Haruna’s pet turtle, about whom she says increasingly ridiculous things. (To wit; it’s not a turtle because he has a name, she asks him for advice, and he looks like “an old man” and “a philosopher. It’s all pretty funny.)
But the episode gets serious at around its 1/3rd mark, honing in on the art of injecting emotion into even very short exchanges of words. Haruna’s role, remember, is just “additional voices.” So in her first scene in Bloom Ball, which the girls record here, she only swaps a single sentence with Maika’s character, who only replies with one of her own. And we hear those two sentences some four or five times over the episode’s duration.
I’ve said this before, but running the same scene back-to-back, for any reason, is challenging. You risk boring your audience, and when the scene in question is this short you risk it even more. But, somehow, CUE! pulls it off again.
The mechanics are very simple; the girls learn a little bit about how voice acting works. They record their lines, Haruna and Maika’s get held because the author (present at the recording) remembers that the bit character Haruna is playing comes up again way later in the story. Once again, this is supposed to sell Haruna as someone with an immense amount of untapped voice acting talent. It doesn’t work quite as well as the showstopper she drops in episode 2, but it’s still pretty good, and it proves that when CUE! is on, it’s on.
For something that should be super dry, it manages to stay quite interesting, employing its favorite trick, jumping in and out of the world of the show-within-a-show. Here, since all present are actually recording, things are further embellished by the show being mid-production. No full-color cuts here; it’s all monochrome and pre-correction. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate the nightmare that making a finished cut that looks convincingly unfinished must be.)
Flummoxing as it sometimes is, if CUE! keeps making episodes like this I will continue to watch them. Just, please, I’m begging you, either focus on the idol girls less or make them more interesting.
Princess Connect! Re:Dive
One of the reasons I declined to give Princess Connect! Re:Dive its own dedicated column is that I know my limits. A picture truly can be worth a thousand words, and a gif from a show like this can be worth a short novel. What am I supposed to say about this?
Okay, fine. If you wanted to, if you were some kind of joyless miser, you could be mad that this episode is all set up and no resolution. Frankly I think that’s an absurd criticism, and the idea that everything must be resolved within the space of a single episode just because this show started out as a “slice of life series” is so far removed from how I experience art that I have a difficult time even comprehending it. Nonetheless it is what some people think, and I’ll give those people their moment of acknowledgement here.
For the rest of us; holy shit.
Princess Connect season 2’s fourth episode is the sort of absurd instant-classic that demands rewinds, screencapping, and a visit to Sakugabooru. And it’s the fourth episode of a twelve-episode season. That’s nuts. That’s the kind of comically overconfident flex that usually presages some great disaster. But why would that be the case here? CygamesPictures aren’t working on anything else this year. It’s amazing what a well-equipped studio can do when actually giving its workers proper time to do so.
The actual plot here is cartwheeling fantasy screwiness that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the many, many books with dragons and swords on the cover that I read in middle school. That sounds like an insult, but this sort of high-stakes epic-in-the-old-sense-of-the-word plot is what’s missing from a lot of modern fantasy anime. It’s spectacle; even down to details like Karyl still playing both sides, the guild of animal girls we meet here, and the giant golem fight that caps the episode.
I feel legitimately bad for the other fantasy anime airing right now. It’s not like In The Land of Leadale or Reincarnated as a Fantasy Knockout don’t have their merits, but they aren’t this. The only competition Priconne really has in this regard is Demon Slayer, but while that show definitely looks great, it’s always had issues with making its flashy animation feel like it entirely fit with the rest of the world. Priconne never even sniffs that problem; the compositing is as excellent here as anything else. Even moments where characters are literally just standing around look incredible.
The only real issue is that Priconne’s plot is so mile-a-minute I could see it getting hard to keep up. (I’m already a bit lost myself. Having not played the game probably doesn’t help.) But even so; at least for me, that feeling actually adds to the exhilaration of watching this thing in motion. The Proper Noun Machine Gun has rarely been put to such good use.
Tokyo 24th Ward
Unfortunately we must end this section of the week’s writeup on something of a sour note.
If I had known I was going to be covering Tokyo 24th Ward this frequently, I’d have just made it another weekly column. Maybe that would’ve been a bad idea, though, given how the show’s shortcomings are generally more compelling to me than its strengths, which I increasingly think are actually rather modest.
Fundamentally, the problem is this; if your anime (or movie or book or album or whatever) invokes political themes, you are inviting all comers to scrutinize it from their own political point of view. Everyone on Earth has such a point of view, whether or not they’re cognizant of it. In of itself, that’s fine, but if your work’s political themes are, say, shallow and inadequate, it raises a problem. Are Tokyo 24th‘s shallow and inadequate? I don’t really know. The signals are, shall we say, mixed.
Getting a big head over this kind of thing is nothing new to mainstream TV anime. Turn of the decade classic Code Geass, for example, managed to be good largely by trading away any actual meaningful political commentary for sheer camp value. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to nail more specific and well-thought-out political messages. Akudama Drive did it only two years ago. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Akudama Drive myself, at least not yet, but I trust Inkie’s judgment on the series utterly.) It’s also possible–although both less rare and not as impactful–to make broader statements without rendering them entirely meaningless. Something as goofy as Rumble Garanndoll managed that much just last season.
The gist of the plot forming over Tokyo 24th‘s last two episodes has been this; the graffiti artist / hacker Kunai (Souma Saitou, who has been in many support roles like this) is going to blow up a cruise ship full of the ultra-wealthy.
Normally I’d here provide his motivations, and just from what little we’ve learned about him–his upbringing in the ridiculously named Shantytown ghetto in the poorest part of the Ward, his grandmother’s illness, the fact that Ran has eclipsed him artistically–one could come up with a good half dozen motivations for why this poor man might feel motivated to extreme action.
Kunai’s actual motives are different, and much more personal. He’s been tricked into selling an app he developed by the owner of an enormous corporate megalopoly, a fellow named Taki. Taki rewires the program to turn it into that mysterious “Drug D” we’ve been hearing so much about over the past couple of episodes. Kunai’s resentment, then, is borne not from his situation but from something very specific. He feels as though he’s been used. And he’s right about that! He has been used. Ran correctly points out, when the two meet at the episode’s climax, that Kunai is not the “criminal” he self-laceratingly claims to be. He’s a victim of circumstance. On one level, Tokyo 24th humanizing an actual terrorist to this degree is admirable. On another, it seems like an easy out to give Kunai a single grudge motive rather than anything more circumstantial and messy. Plus, there is what actually happens to Kunai.
At the episode’s end, Kouki–that’s Cop Boy, if you’ve forgotten–bypasses the advice of his friends and orders Kunai shot dead by a police sniper. Kunai bleeds out in Ran’s arms, begging his friend to continue to be the one thing he couldn’t: an artist.
It is difficult to know how to take this.
Is it a shocking display–and condemnation–of police brutality? Does the show think he’s in the right to have done that? (I don’t want to think so, but I’ve gone broke overestimating anime before.) Or is this another thing where Shuuta’s enlightened centrist fence-sitting is going to somehow turn out to be the solution? Tokyo 24th has given me very little reason to believe the former might be what it’s going for, but I suppose it’s not impossible. A number of details about Tokyo 24th‘s worldbuilding lead me to believe that won’t be the case (it’s insane that an anime that uses so much graffiti aesthetic has perhaps two Black characters and zero major ones), but I’ve been wrong before. Honestly in this specific situation I’d be happy to be. But for the record, I’m not alone here. Some critics have been far harsherthan me. And I’m split between feeling like I’m giving the anime way too much slack and coming down on it way too hard.
It’s unfair, in a way. An anime that tries to be a Statement opens itself up to all kinds of nitpicking from audiences both domestic and abroad that other anime could easily dismiss out of hand. Should I not be giving it some points for even trying? Maybe, but “some points” might add up to a 3 or 4 out of 10 depending on how badly it fucks up the landing, and I’m not at all confident it won’t. Wanting to be a critique of the state of the world isn’t the same as actually being one. All of Tokyo 24th‘s effort will be meaningless if it cannot find some way to intelligently apply it.
We will see Tokyo 24th here again, maybe as soon as next week. For good or for ill I cannot yet say.
Elsewhere on MPA
Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 4 – “Ride the Crab” – For an episode that features absolutely zero Pawoo, this was still quite a good 30 minutes of Sabikui Bisco. There must be a solid Milo / Bisco shipping community out there, right?
That’s most of what I’ve got for you this week, anime fans. But before I go, a small recommendation! A new manga was picked up by Jump recently, and is available officially in English on the MangaPlus website. It’s called Magilumiere Co. Ltd., a magical girl-action-office comedy whatsit that poses the question; “what if being a magical girl was, you know, a full-on career? And what if an ordinary college grad seeking to enter the workforce suddenly found herself basically dropped into a small Magical Girl Company’s employ?” That’s kind of a long question, admittedly, but Magilumiere does have answers.
It’s to soon into the manga’s run for me to have any terribly detailed opinions on it, but I like it so far, and “magical girl + other stuff” is always a fun combination. Give it a read if you’re so inclined.
See you tomorrow for more Sabikui Bisco, friends!
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 Directoryto 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.
The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad.These articles contain spoilers.
“104.3a A player can concede the game at any time.“ -The Comprehensive Rules of Magic The Gathering
I rarely find reason to bring it up on this blog, but I really like trading card games. I have since I was young, when a nascent infatuation with Yu-Gi-Oh! led me to the medium and I developed a fondness for the Empty Jar deck type as soon as I knew enough about the game to know how it worked. There is something compelling, even slightly mystical, about TCGs. And beneath all the corporate politics that drive the practical, business side of their development and proliferation, card games have a magnetism that is rare in popular leisure. They combine the strategy of classic board games like Chess with the brain-teasing presence of concealed information inherited from age-old traditional playing card games. They’re good fun.
But all this is true of me, and even I think that we don’t really seem to appreciate TCGs here in the west to quite the same level that they do over in Japan. Some would blame, again, Yu-Gi-Oh! I’d be more inclined to thank it. For whatever reason, while the anglophone scene has always been dominated by Magic The Gathering, YGO imports, the Pokémon TCG, and more recently, Hearthstone and its competitors, Japan has developed dozens upon dozens of TCGs which seem to wax and wane in popularity with fair regularity. In doing so, they have gained a foothold in popular culture rare for a pure leisure activity. Naturally, this has an influence on anime and manga. Once again, the original Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is by far the most well-known, but there truly are quite a few of these things. And in the manga format, where there is less pressure to actually push product and more allowance to simply tell a story, the card game genre has taken on some interesting forms. Near the top of the year I covered Destroy All of Humanity, It Can’t Be Regenerated, a romcom with an official blessing from Wizards of The Coast and a title nicked from one of the most famous Magic cards of all time. A fair bit older than Humanity is the subject of today’s column; Wizard’s Soul ~Holy War of Love~. It comes to us from back in 2013, and from the pen of Aki Eda, probably best known as the artist for one of the official Touhou manga, Silent Sinner in Blue. Technically, it is also a romance manga. Besides that, it and Humanity have shockingly little in common. (Although like that series, non-TCG aficionados may find themselves a bit lost with this one.)
Frankly, while it does meet the genre’s criteria in a very technical sense, calling Wizard’s Soul a “romance manga” seems fundamentally misaimed. There is romance in it, but the real focus is on our lead, Manaka Ichinose, in a more general sense. She’s a wonderfully full character, and even at her lowest it’s a serious treat to spend most of the series’ relatively brief 22 chapters by her side.
Wizard’s Soul setting is genre-typical. Like the King of Games before it, everyone in Wizard’s Soul takes the titular card game extremely seriously. Skill in “Wizard’s Soul” can ensure entrance to a good college, defines one’s social groups, and informs one’s outlook on life. It’s a bit less camp than the most extreme examples of the genre (a good recent example of the far end of the scale being this season’s Build Divide: Code Black), and there are no supernatural elements, but the core elements of the setup remain. The game itself is some hodgepodged mix of, yes, Magic The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh!, with a few other elements from other games sewn into the fabric for good measure. The rules are never detailed to us at length (although a dedicated reader might be able to reconstruct most of them from what we do learn), because they’re less important than the general feelings of playing a trading card game. Feelings both positive and, importantly, negative.
Manaka herself sticks out by dint of being a card game manga protagonist who has a complicated, thorny relationship with the game that defines her world. There are several aspects to this part of her character, and it’s worth going over them in detail and one at a time.
For one, she does not play the game much at manga’s start. And it’s implied that on the rare occasion she does sit down to play “Wizard’s Soul”–mostly with her younger siblings or occasional customers at the card shop she works at–she deliberately softballs, not caring terribly much about winning. This in spite of the fact that, as we learn, she’s actually very good.
For two, she is that widely-reviled archetype of TCG player. Her specialty is permission control, and it is hilarious how seriously some characters in the earlier parts of the manga take this revelation, acting as they do that her being the equivalent of a mono blue player is “disgusting” and “twisted.”
And the most important bit. Manaka learned how to play WS from her late mother, also a deadly-serious permission player who spent most of her daughter’s childhood holed up in a hospital with some unspecified but evidently very serious illness. Manaka’s mother is an absolutely merciless opponent, and over the course of a number of flashbacks we learn that Manaka never beat her even once. Her mother spent her waning days on Earth beating her daughter in a card game over and over again, offering thorough, detailed criticism each and every time. She pairs this with a superstition that the worse her luck is in real life, the better her card draws are. We see her essentially playing the game on her deathbed, and it’s genuinely pretty disturbing!
This has, understandably, given Manaka quite the complex about playing WS. The specific feelings she describes; remembering positive experiences with the game only as vague blurs but her constant losses to her mother and the ensuing sharp criticism with haunting clarity, almost scan as abusive. (If that sounds silly, consider that the terminally ill angle aside, this is roughly similar to something that happens in real life with chess prodigies.) I’m not sure she’s meant to be read that way, but the signs match up. As the only real opponent that Manaka never beat, and now never can beat, she hangs over the darker parts of the manga like a ghost.
What does all this add up to? A monstrously skilled protagonist who borderline loathes something she’s very good at. And worse, something that is supposed to be fun. We do get little hints that she somewhat still enjoys WS in spite of herself, but only with a pretty heavy sidecart of guilt until the very end of the series.
So what pushes her into actually playing more “Wizard’s Soul” and kicking off our plot? Well, her father falls for a scam and plunges her entire family into debt. A WS tournament–and the associated prize money–offer a simple, if not necessarily easy, way out. Wizard’s Soul, then, is us rooting for her to overcome these impossible odds and the social stigma that comes with even trying. While her playstyle is a million miles away from that of the flashy card combinations that are the norm for the more bombastic angles of the genre, Manaka is a true card game protagonist with regard to her near-prodigal skill. She remains quite compelling to follow throughout the whole series.
About that tournament; to secure enough “ranking points” to be able to enter it, she challenges and, of course, swiftly defeats the strongest player she knows; her close friend and (unknowingly mutual) crush, a boy named Eita. Wizard’s Soul from here on out takes on the structure of a tournament arc. We get into Manaka’s head as she builds and tweaks her deck and, during her matches, gain similar (though more limited) insight into her opponents’ minds as well.
Manaka reworks her deck several times over the course of the manga. Here, she’s reworked it into a mill deck. As an aside, I couldn’t help myself from thinking about how WS must allow a crazy amount of sideboarding.
All of this leads to a rather complicated knot of human drama where the card game is both part of “the point” in of itself but also a lens through which this is all explored. (Not a new innovation in this genre by any means, but more grounded here than most examples.) Manaka is unable to truly enjoy “Wizard’s Soul” itself because playing it dredges up memories of her late mother’s brutal tutoring lessons. Eita is probably actually the most adjusted of the group, as he gets over the sting of his abrupt loss to Manaka rather quickly, before eventually coming over to her corner as a silent cheerer-on during her run in the tournament. Eita’s “fangirl” Koba attempts to sabotage Manaka’s play at every turn, hating her for stealing his attention and affection and then seemingly spurning it.
Her opponents run the gamut in both character archetype and play style. There’s a “romance decker” named Roman who stubbornly refuses to build anything that’s not a convoluted, flashy combo deck, a snooty metagamer, a big-fish-small-pond incarnate in the form of a country girl who’s hit her skill ceiling, an overweight girl who loves playing huge, direct creatures and smashing her enemies’ faces in (and is subject to more than one fat joke, one of the manga’s few real negatives), and many more besides. A lot of them also underestimate her; dismissing her skill as the product of either fluke luck or metagaming. Something that is both true-to-life, and which generally ends quite badly for them.
Manaka triumphs over all of them eventually, furthering both her own personal growth and with the help of Eita himself, who also slips her a rare card into her deckbuilding box at one point.
That card–“Holy War”, from which the manga derives its subtitle–is a pretty direct riff on MTG’s own “Wrath of God”. Which means that improbably, Wizard’s Soul is the second manga I’ve covered this year to indirectly derive its title from this same specific Magic The Gathering card. TCG nerds; eat your heart out. Manaka in fact becomes decently close with almost all of her opponents. “Wizard’s Soul” is, after all, a game, and it’s through her friendship with these people; people she actually has something in common with, that she can grow as a person.
They eventually help her build a new deck, partly out of some of their own spare cards. It’s symbolic, y’see.
This particular plot development is, in fact, about as close as Manaka and Eita ever get, some fluff in the final few pages aside. But if the romance feels perfunctory, perhaps that’s because equally important to Manaka learning to love Eita is her learning to love play again; something sorely resonant to a person like me, who was raised in a pretty work-first, no-nonsense household. (That’s without accounting for the added layer that I, too, enjoy trading card games.) Honestly I suspect it’s a more broadly relatable theme than one might first assume, given the sheer amount of millennials with ‘productiveness’-related anxiety that I know.
If there’s a takeaway here, it’d be that. Wizard’s Soul will probably never be considered a classic, but it’s certainly a worthwhile manga. As one, it’s a fascinating reminder of how we can find reflections of ourselves even in unlikely places, and a study on the difficulty of slipping out from under anxiety. It’s all quite nicely done; a tournament finish if ever there was one.
Wanna 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 Directoryto 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.
The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad.These articles contain spoilers.
There are numerous ways to start a work of fiction. You have your classics; “once upon a time”, “it was a dark and stormy night” and such that are true arch-clichés. Then, far, far on the other end of the spectrum, you have real head-scratchers. Unique opening lines that make you spit out a mental “huh?” before you even know what kind of thing you’re reading. The Maria Kodama Literary Corpus starts with one of those.
“These leaves are like Jupiter, aren’t they?” Asks the title character. Before you go flipping this particular simile over in your mind, trying to untangle it, know that that’s not really the sort of story Kodama Literary Corpus is. Corpus revolves around both Kodama herself and her male companion, our ostensible main character, Fueda. Together they make up the sole members of the school’s Literary Club, and their conversations comprise the bulk of the series. Fueda is something of a dazed everyman (although it eventually becomes clear that he’s stranger than might first be obvious), awestruck by the evident brilliance (and perhaps more obvious to us than him, the mercuriality) of Kodama. They have a fun dynamic that shines through even their more convoluted interactions. It’s cute, which is a good beating heart for any romantic comedy to have.
Of course descriptors like “romantic comedy” and “school life comedy” only loosely apply to Kodama Literary Corpus. It is perhaps more accurate to say that it uses their structure to examine topics that ordinary entries in those genres would not. In this way, it is somewhat reminiscent of Imitation Crystal’s work in the school life genre, though it’s far less emotionally dire than something like Game Club. (More distantly, it has a cousin in the more downtempo, conversational parts of Bakemonogatari.) Much of those topics consist of the structure of literature and storytelling itself, something that Kodama is keenly interested in, and is what gives the manga its name. She’s fond of blithely quipping “it’s literature.” when laying another lesson in the subject on Fueda. This is the core “storytelling loop” of Corpus, although there are other aspects to the manga as well.
The series’ somewhat flippant attitude towards fairly serious subjects (such as teenage drinking, here) in the non-Kodama/Fueda sections also pushes it further toward the IC camp of subversive pseudo-school life manga which use the format to accomplish non-traditional things.
Corpus even comes with its own dedicated “recommended reading” list, in the form of the books namechecked underneath each after-chapter doodle. This is perhaps the rare school life manga it is possible to be under-read for. (And lest it sound like I’m trying to make myself seem smart; I may well fall in that category myself. I have read just one of the books the manga mentions, and some of them I’ve never even heard of.)
The series sometimes likes to poke at its own format’s tropes as well. For example; at one point Fueda’s sister is introduced, and he takes a thoughtful lean against the fourth wall to ponder whether or not he even had a sister until a few days prior. There are also occasional shorter segments that offer looser, more surreal ideas. These are fun, although not the norm for the manga. It also picks at its romantic comedy side on occasion. One chapter establishes that Fueda can’t see very well and probably should be wearing glasses. It’s his perspective that the manga is filtered through, so the person we see as “Maria Kodama”, the long-haired school beauty, is in part his own wishful thinking, and isn’t how she actually looks in reality. Despite this, Kodama claims at one point that Fueda’s delusions “protect her”, giving away that she cares for him more than she might outwardly admit. To really nail home the point that Fueda is not purely in love with his idea of Kodama rather than the girl herself, we eventually learn that he does know what she actually looks like, and even has a picture of her reading at her desk.
Of what currently exists in English of Kodama Literary Corpus, the eleventh chapter is perhaps both its best and most representative. This chapter features a storyline wherein Fueda is asked to improve his schoolday diary. Kodama suggests he do this by thinking of the many mundane tasks he and his classmates do through a mythological, literary lens. In other words; Literary Corpus takes a chapter to analyze itself, taking a critical scalpel to its own worldbuilding and by extension those aforementioned genres. (You may notice this also means it’s basically doing my job for me, but hey, I’ve never been above an easy mark.) Fueda’s writing is greatly improved by doing this, but more importantly Kodama brings the entire thing back around to her and his relationship. She ends the chapter with another quip of “that’s literature”, and in a very real way, she’s right.
All but explicitly stated here is the idea that stories are how we connect to each other; Kodama understands that more than most, so it’s not unreasonable (or even uncharitable) to read this entire endeavor she sets upon Fueda as simply a way to bring them closer together. After all, these are the final two pages of the chapter.
The after-chapter doodle also (half-jokingly?) claims a kinship with James Joyce’s Ulysses, drawing a line between two wildly different literary traditions in a way that only an oddball underground manga could. Given the presence of both a fixation on the goings-on of daily life, and a tendency to subvert or reanalyze those expectations present in both works, it’s not really an inaccurate comparison, either. (Whether Literary Corpus is anywhere near as good as Ulysses, or indeed, vice versa, is up to you, of course.)
Not that Kodama’s intentions are all good. A few chapters after this, she slyly destroys a burgeoning poet’s interest in the form, simultaneously using Fueda as a mouthpiece to do so and doing so specifically so he doesn’t take an interest in her. It’s hard to say, the work still incomplete, whether this mildly darker undertone will be explored in detail. One could also quite easily argue given what we see that Kodama is–by intention or by side effect–saving the girl from a fairly lonely life. After all, Kodama doesn’t entirely seem to think that her own being a “literature girl” is an admirable thing, as previously established in several chapters. (And either point of view assumes this will even stick. It’s hard to say if Inoue, as the girl’s named, will return as a character in any major capacity.)
Maria Kodama Literary Corpus, all told, is a unique little thing. And really, I have no reason for writing about it here beyond that fact. Strange little underground manga like this are perhaps my favorite thing in the medium, and if I can share them with my readerbase, all the better.
Wanna 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 Directoryto 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
What to make of Otherside Picnic? Named after a famous Russian novel to which it bears little resemblance, and drawing on a twenty year tradition of Japanese “net lore” for its inspiration, one might initially peg Otherside Picnic as a fairly heady, intellectual kind of horror story. But while it’s certainly creepy enough in its most unsettling moments to earn the genre tag, it’d be a mistake to box this one in as being solely for those with an SCP Foundation addiction.
A more proper indicator of where Otherside Picnic is coming from might actually be its opening theme. A rollicking, adventurous pop-rock tune with a romantic slant from accomplished anisongsters CHiCO with Honeyworks. Otherside isn’t not a horror series, but it’s important to consider what else it is; an adventure anime, and also a show with some pretty prolific lesbian subtext. It’s not at all dour, is what I’m getting at.
Instead, Otherside is a surprisingly breezy watch. It’s the story of Sorawo, a depressed college student who, through her vast knowledge of online urban legends, wanders through a gateway to another world; the titular otherside. When we meet her, she’s lying flat on her back in a puddle, pursued by a mind-invading monster known as a kunekune¹, and about to accept her imminent death. What, or rather who, saves her is a gun-toting Canadian-Japanese woman named Toriko, who she quite quickly develops a very obvious crush on.
Like, very obvious.
Otherside Picnic follows the two, as they grow closer, make trips to and from the Otherside, and contend with the many strange creatures that live there. Sorawo often gives a brief rundown of what these things are, which is helpful if you, like me, only have a pretty limited knowledge of Japanese creepypastas. The “net legend” angle is a big part of the setting’s appeal, so if the idea of even something as out there as the bizarre and disturbingly violent “monkey train dream” getting a nod appeals to you, the series is a must-watch.
Really, I was surprised at how much I liked Otherside Picnic in general. Horror isn’t really my genre, but Sorawo is just the right kind of relatable reserved nerd. (Although I will admit, the one thing the series is missing from the light novels is her delightfully gay inner monologues about how attractive she finds Toriko.) Her character arc over the course of the series is fairly simple, as she starts out as said reserved nerd and by the final episode, having along the way developed what are essentially magic powers, and having been through so much with Toriko is, well, decidedly no longer that.
On a less literal level, the series also hums a simple theme of the importance of finding people who you just vibe with. In the finale, this is all but stated outright, as Sorawo and Toriko both recount how the other saved them. It gives Otherside Picnic a point, adding some substance to its afternoon anime binge-friendly nature.
Much of the rest of the fun of the series comes from setting details or technical aspects. The monster design is quite strong, and combined with the often surprisingly good animation², this carries the series’ weaker episodes. There’s also quite a few running sub-plots tucked in to the show’s single cour. These range from fairly serious (a lost group of US Marines who the pair eventually rescue), to clear set-up for seasons yet to come (Sorawo’s apparent and only briefly touched-on ability to not-quite mind control people, the late-game introduction of minor character Akari), to the just plain odd (there’s an episode about cats who are ninjas) or funny (the pair accidentally buy a multi-purpose miniature harvester on a drunken spending binge at one point).
It’s hard to imagine that Otherside Picnic will exactly change anyone’s life, but like last year’s Dorohedoro, it’s strong genre fare in a genre that is under-represented in mainstream TV anime. That it is perhaps only the second-best anime of the Spring 2021 season to revolve around a heterochromiac who travels to an otherworld that also has a lot of queer subtext speaks more to the strength of the competition than it does any problems with Otherside. This is a series I could see getting sequel seasons for years, frankly, as there is a lot of unadapted material and a lot of mysteries left unexplored. Perhaps if we’re lucky, that will be the anime’s eventual fate. Either way, there’s a lot to love about a brief trip to the Otherside.
1: The subtitles somewhat astoundingly refer to these things as “wiggle-waggles”, which is pretty damn funny.
2: Surprising because this is a LIDENFILMS production. I’m not an expert on the company by any means, but what I’ve seen from them has traditionally had outright bad animation. While the CGI used for some distance shots won’t impress anyone anytime soon, I was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked at other times.
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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.
The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad.These articles contain spoilers.
Destroy all creatures. They can’t be regenerated. –Rules text of “Wrath of God“, and namesake of the manga.
What we have here today is, without beating around the bush, a simple boy-meets-girl romance. There are hundreds of manga like this, probably thousands, so it’s difficult for one to stand out without some kind of twist. Something that grabs the audience’s attention. That twist here is simple, but surprisingly important to the general flow of the story. As its lengthy title hints at, Destroy All of Humanity, It Can’t Be Regenerated is deeply entwined with, and is basically about, seminal trading card game Magic: The Gathering. It is, in fact, licensed, which is why the manga can get away with showing you all of its period-accurate power combos faithfully reproduced from the actual card art without having to censor them. It is frankly sensationally geeky, and it’s less a flaw and more just a fact that if you don’t have some level of MtG knowledge, the manga will be a touch hard to follow.
And yes, period-accurate. Because Destroy‘s other big deviation from the norm is that it is something of a period piece, though it’s closer to present day than the term normally implies.
The year is 1998. The global mood shifts from optimism to wariness about the impending year 2000. In Japan, Obuchi Keizō becomes Prime Minister and the Nozomi Mars probe launches. In the world of anime; Cardcaptor Sakura, Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiments Lain and, perhaps most pertinently, Yu-Gi-Oh! all premiere. In other words; it’s not the worst time to be a nerd living in suburban Japan. Perhaps less specifically associated with Japan is the growing global popularity of Magic: The Gathering. At this point in time, Magic–and the entire medium of TCGs–was just five years old, younger than contemporary competitor Hearthstone is now in 2021. The game is about to enter one of the most infamous phases of its first decade. And it is in this environment that we meet our protagonists, and, indeed, they meet each other.
Left: Hajime. Right: Emi.
Hajime and Emi are ordinary middle schoolers*. They compete for the top spot in their grade but don’t otherwise really know each other, until one day Hajime discovers that Emi–shock of shocks–plays Magic: The Gathering, just like he does. What initially seems like it might be the setup for a very stupid “what? Girls have hobbies?!” kind of comedy eventually proves itself to be a surprisingly thorough look at both young love and the transience of youth in general. That’s a lot to put on a manga about a card game, but it’s not exactly unique in this regard, as we’ll get to.
Destroy All of Humanity‘s real ace in the hole here is an ability to transmute pop-culture ephemera into actual, meaningful pathos. Obviously, the connection to Magic: The Gathering is what runs deepest. There is an ongoing thread wherein the release of various sets–especially those in the Urza block–is directly and deliberately correlated with the basic inevitability of time moving forward. “Growing up” is a big theme here. Another occasional reference point, Revolutionary Girl Utena, is tied explicitly to the arc of a specific character, Yakumo.
It’s good to know the shadow girls are still getting work.
Elsewhere, everything from the Boogiepop series that spawned the Light Novel format to Final Fantasy VII, to Eurodance hit “What Is Love?” come up. Sometimes, as with the many anime referenced, these appear to just be namechecks, but they tie into the wider narrative often enough that the interpolations feel meaningful rather than simply clever.
So why this, why all of these allusions? Well, they’re merely the methodology. Destroy All of Humanity runs on the same internal logic as a sports movie. Personal growth is tied, directly or not, to persistence, determination, and skill at a game of choice. In that way it’s very classic, maybe even old-fashioned. What prevents it from feeling maudlin or corny is a shock of wistful melancholia that shoots through much of the series. There is a palpable sense that with the end of the 20th century comes a kind of end of innocence. Everyone, Hajime most of all, is keenly aware that teenage years don’t last forever.
Running alongside the many references to pop culture media is a lone nod to one of the phenomena of the day. A fixation on the idea that the year 2000 would bring about the end of the world–in recent memory this has largely been supplanted by the later 2012 debacle, but it was definitely a presence at the time. Here, it serves as the simplest of the manga’s many metaphors for the waning of youth. But in that would-be apocalypse, it sees a kind of romance, and it is for that reason that it’s so easy to root for Hajime and Emi. Even if the world were to burn, they’d have each other.
Tip for all the straight boys in the audience: if she asks you to “be with her when the world ends”, that means she dreams of kissing you under the moonlight.
Visually, Destroy All of Humanity‘s default mode is a sort of nostalgic charm. The character designs aren’t throwbacks exactly but they don’t quite feel contemporary either, aiming for a sort of timeless middleground that works more often than it doesn’t. The backgrounds similarly hit an ageless “suburban Japan nostalgia” feel that is so ingrained in the medium it’s practically invisible if you don’t take the time to notice it.
The main thing that departs from all this is the actual Magic duels themselves. There’s a certain type of person who will want to pick this manga up just for the wonderfully nerdy sight of things like a mill combo (specifically, the “Turbo Genius” deck, and yes, they do use that very name in-fiction here) getting the full Yu-Gi-Oh! treatment.
Destroy All of Humanity is also good at capturing how control players see themselves.
And about that whole “rival in love” thing. The main pairing remains pretty uncontested throughout, but Destroy does manage to shake things up a few times, and the duels also being the emotional centerpieces of the story is a big part of how. The aforementioned Turbo Genius duel is actually surprisingly intense. (Making a Blue artifact deck the one the “bad guy” of the match uses may be a little obvious, admittedly.) It’s not the only one of its ilk in Destroy All of Humanity, either, mangaka YOKO really seems to have a knack for this kind of thing.
In general, Destroy All of Humanity has few notable flaws. It is noticeable how often the skeevier side of 90s otakudom is simply brushed off. One minor character’s bouts of misogyny are even played as an obvious joke–no one takes him seriously–which frankly just kind of seems like wishful thinking. But this is a minor complaint and I find it hard to hold against the series.
It is also worth noting that Destroy All of Humanity isn’t finished. The series releases fairly slowly, though scanlators The Fallen Angels are diligent about translating it when new chapters do release. So there is of course, time for all of this to go south, but it seems unlikely that it will. Things aren’t this well-written by mistake.
The most recent chapter ends with the delightfully sitcom-y revelation that–oh my!–our lovebirds are in the same class after years of being assigned different classrooms within their grade.
It’s the kind of slightly-cheesy twist that suits this sort of thing well. Where is it going to take it? Who knows. But when Destroy All of Humanity finally ends, I think I do know where Hajime and Emi will be; right beside each other.
*I think. They’re called “middle-schoolers” in the scanlation but act more like high schoolers and I can’t tell if that’s artistic license or due to that thing where Japanese and American high school years don’t line up exactly right. I suppose it ultimately doesn’t matter.
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.
Content Warning: This article contains art that depicts, and frank discussion of, suicide and self-harm. Reader discretion is advised.
The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad.
“Monsters of the dark mind–Disappear!”
One of my original goals in starting the “Manga Shelf” sub-column was to shine a spotlight on stuff where my opinion may not’ve been totally settled, but I did definitely think it was at least interesting enough to be paying attention to. And today, we have something that fits the bill perfectly, and with one hell of a high concept. Suicide Girl, to not bury the lede, is a manga about a depressed magical girl who is conscripted by the owner of a mysterious café to combat and hopefully rid the world of “suicide demons” called Phobias, which cause people to kill themselves.
As far as elevator pitches go, it’s both wild and initially quite offputting. I’ve never been shy about being a skeptic of the whole “dark magical girl” movement. Even if in recent months (and hell, days) I’ve come around somewhat. Add to that the understandably extremely touchy issue of suicide and the manga’s irreverent, sometimes jokey tone, and Suicide Girl really feels like it should be a complete disaster.
However, while it’s too early to definitively say that Suicide Girl is a total success or anything like that (only five chapters are available in English at the time of this writing), it does feel, strangely enough, like it actually does have its heart in the right place.
To explain, first some brief recapping: our lead is Kirari Aokigahara (named after the suicide forest, yes). She meets the aforementioned mysterious café-owner while attempting to kill herself. The man foils her attempt (it’s complicated), and senses within her the power to fight the Phobia. She has a vision of, and is sent to, the site of a suicide-to-be. There, she seemingly talks the would-be victim out of her mistake, only for her to suddenly fling herself onto the tracks anyway. So far, so edgy.
It’s in the second chapter, where we get a bit of Kirari’s backstory, that Suicide Girl started to pick at the heavy coat of skepticism I’d built up from reading too many seinen manga in my day. And where, I suspect, it’ll do the same for others. The gist is simple: Kirari had a fiancé once. She doesn’t anymore. Adding to the weight of her retelling is the art; Suicide Girl‘s panel composition is something to behold.
The image of the looming silhouette of a building physically shunting Kirari’s flashbacks off to the side of the page, as though dominating her memories of the event, struck me. My initial (admittedly unfair) assumption had been that Suicide Girl was essentially a deliberately way-over-the-line gag manga. And while there is an element of that, this was the page that convinced me that it was trying to tell a meaningful story, too.
I don’t mean to sidetrack into my personal history too much. But while I’ve (thankfully) not struggled with physical self-harm in many years, suicidal thoughts have never entirely been gone from my mind. And I struggle with my self-worth every day. The externalization of suicidal ideation present in Suicide Girl–that is to say, the Phobias–initially struck me as crass. I generally hate it when stories try to pin real problems on supernatural causes. But ruminating on it, I had a different thought.
The chemical imbalances and societal factors that cause depression do have real scientific or sociological explanations. However, to those suffering from them, suicidal thoughts can certainly feel as arbitrary and loathsome as being possessed by a demon. It’s a thought I myself have had before, if not in so many words. In that light, what followed in that first story arc struck me as less frivolous and more, perhaps, as cathartic.
First: Kirari learns that she has not actually failed her mission quite yet. The death of a Phobia victim comes with a timer. If the Phobia itself can be defeated in time, time resets, and their victim returns to life unscathed.
So off she goes. In fighting the monster, she transforms for the first time. Again the art plays a big role in bolstering the manga on the whole. Her henshin sequence is striking, morbid, horrifying, and incredible.
Yes, she hangs herself to transform. What I might’ve otherwise considered to be a gross parody of a traditional transformation sequence strikes me as a lot more nuanced in the broader context of Suicide Girl. Kirari, finally understanding that her boyfriend’s suicide was not her fault (nor, indeed, his) rejects literal death as an escape and substitutes it with a metaphorical and transformative death of the old self.
It is also partly a parody of traditional magical girl-isms, of course. A nod to the famous “Precure leap” gag occurs just pages later.
It is worth noting that Kirari does not immediately and instantly turn her entire life outlook around. She still misses her departed boyfriend, and when she tries to go out and act like everything’s fine, she can’t. What a later chapter proposes is that if one can’t find happiness within the self, they can find it by helping others. An idea that is, for something as ostensibly edgy as Suicide Girl, an emotional thesis that is perhaps surprisingly mature, even optimistic. Add this to the catharsis mentioned earlier that just comes from seeing Kirari beat the living daylights out of physical manifestations of the worst parts of the human mind, and Suicide Girl seems less like it’s making fun of those with Brain Issues, or using us for storytelling fodder, and more like it’s actively rooting for us.
There’s another, even simpler, layer to all of this. Which is that Kirari also has another of my favorite traits in a magical girl; she’s kind of a huge badass. An almost dorkily-grimdark one? Yes, but tell me you don’t think dialogue like this is cool on at least some level.
The manga’s wild facial expressions could honestly fill an article of their own.
In general, Suicide Girl manages to pull-off an impressive tight-rope-walk between being grim almost but not quite to the point of corniness, genuinely pretty cool, and surprisingly sincere when and where it really counts.
Now, Kirari and the café owner’s stated goal of eliminating suicide from the world may be a little ambitious. (The café owner himself points out that Kirari was not possessed by a Phobia when they first met.) So time will tell how the manga handles that plot point. There are other wrinkles on the page, too. A second Suicide Girl (a burned-out idol named Manten) debuted in the current arc, and her philosophy is almost perfectly counter to Kirari’s, adding an interesting twist to things.
It’s hard to say if Suicide Girl will prove if it’s “earned” the right to its doubtlessly controversial subject matter or not. It is, of course, entirely possible I’m simply wildly misreading the whole thing and it actually just is supposed to take the piss, but there’s worse sins one can commit as a commentator than giving something too much credit.
And, of course, as much as I’ve found watching Kirari pummel literal emotional demons to be cathartic and even oddly liberating, not everyone is going to take it that way. It must be emphasized that that’s perfectly fine; people deal with things in different ways.
But for me at least, many of my favorite magical girl stories are, ultimately, feminine power fantasies. Stories where empathy, love, and hope do always win out over evil in the end. Time will tell if Suicide Girl follows suit, but at the moment, it certainly seems to be headed down that road. It’s just taking a darker side-path than most.
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.
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