Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Last week, Oshi no Ko dealt with some extremely heavy subject matter; how reality shows manipulate the images of those starring in them, online harassment, attempted suicide. All very stark and very real problems, depicted in a harrowing light that cuts close to the bone.
This week, the series continues addressing some of these issues, but takes a different, more pragmatic approach, one informed by the character of Aqua himself. If you have to play this awful game—and if you’re in the industry and want to stay in the industry, you really do—how can you win? Akane wants to keep acting in spite of everything, and won’t quit Love Now despite her own mental health being in the gutter. In that situation, what can be done to shift the public opinion? How do you take control of a narrative that’s spun out that far?
Well, if there’s one thing Oshi no Ko is good at, it’s getting us to understand (if not necessarily sympathize with, that’s going to be a person to person thing) Aqua’s big plans. He takes this entire thing exactly as seriously as it deserves to be taken, and considers Akane’s actions a cry for help. So, he’s going to help her, even if that means he and his Love Now co-stars have to get their hands dirty to basically rewrite their own show. His plan is simple; they’re going to use a combination of filming and editing to present a version of Love Now from their own point of view; the “real reality show,” as Aqua puts it, in the form of an online video. While the ethical mores of this particular plan might be questionable, its ability to get the public at large back on Akane’s side is less so. Even more because Aqua has Love Now’s whole cast on his side; the guy knows what he’s doing. When time comes to acquire a key piece of raw footage, he even guilt-trips the show’s director in expert fashion. It’s captivating stuff, a performance of a different kind. (It’s also honestly a little scary, but hey, he’s an antihero.)
Sleepless nights of editing follow, ended by a Monster energy-riddled Aqua needing MEM’s help to finally upload the video. But the ploy works, and things end in more or less a settled fashion, as the internet firestorm finally subsides. Even if, as Aqua himself points out, the incident will probably still trail Akane from time to time for the rest of her career.
Love Now’s cast openly suggest that Akane might feel a little safer if she puts on more of a performance during the show’s tapings. Somebody offhandedly asks Aqua what kind of girls he likes, to take a suggestion, and the predictable happens.
(Interestingly, he doesn’t actually name Ai directly. Instead, he describes someone in generalities, and MEM, in a true brain-to-brain moment, tosses her out as an example of the kind of person Aqua’s thinking of.)
Akane, thinking that this Aqua guy is really nice, and maybe playing the part of his ideal girl might get him to notice her, does some character study.
By which, it must be clarified, I mean she does a lot of character study. We learn something pretty interesting about Akane here; she is the sort who needs to really get into the head of any role she’s going to play. Since Ai is now just another one of those roles, she spends some amount of time (it’s not entirely clear how long, but it seems like at least a few days) learning literally everything about her that she possibly can. Not just her public persona, but pulling tiny social tells out of random photographs and videos, making notes and taping them to her wall. It’s genuinely a little freaky, and of Akane herself, it speaks to the kind of person who feels a deep need to get lost in a performance and to fully inhabit it. And, if I can turn her lens back on her a bit, seems to suggest that she’s not really happy with who she is.
Nonetheless, in an aside, we learn that Akane is famous in the theatrical world as a true force to be reckoned with, and in the episode’s closing scene, we see why. By the time Akane returns to the Love Now cast, she’s dived so deep into Ai as a character that, when the camera starts rolling and she has to start acting, a pair of hauntingly familiar star designs appear in her eyes. Her voice actress imitates Ai’s manner of speech, the animators draw her with Ai’s rhythm of motion. She basically becomes Hoshino Ai. Aqua definitely notices; his shocked reaction is the last thing we see in the episode. (Complete with a killer cut to the ED, which unlike last week’s, absolutely fits here.)
Despite everything she’s been through, Akane is an absolute monster talent, and it’s heartening to see her given a chance to shine here after the awful mess she went through last week.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Content Warning: The below article discusses self-harm and attempted suicide.
We didn’t cover last week’s episode of Oshi no Ko here on the site. (I’d like to pretend that’s for some grand reason, but to be honest it’s just a combination of the fact that I’ve been sick and also reading way, way, way too much Umineko: When They Cry.) So to give a quick recap; last week, Aqua was able to convince Kana to join Ruby’s fledgling idol group, the rebooted B Komachi. It was a fun, straightforward episode that has something in common with, say, last year’s Shine Post, even if Oshi no Ko on the whole is very different from that. Tragically skipping last week also means we won’t get to discuss Kana and Ruby’s “mentor” in the realm of online marketing, masked fitness Youtuber Pieyon, in detail. He’s a pretty great minor character, all told, even if Kana certainly doesn’t see it that way.
On the other side of the coin, we got Aqua finally joining the reality show, a dating / daily life program called Love Now, he promised to take part in a few weeks back. Love Now’s cast show is of decent size, but we’re mostly going to be focusing on three characters; the fashion model Sumi Yuki [Saori Oonishi], the livestreamer MEM-cho [Rumi Ookubo], and the actress Kurokawa Akane [Manaka Iwami]. Other than Yuki coyly flirting with Aqua, this part of the episode was mostly scene-setting. (It’s to OnK’s credit that it’s willing to walk around in the less obviously-glamorous parts of the entertainment industry. Few people dream of getting famous off of gimmick fitness videos or reality TV. It’s a stepping stone thing.)
The focus is again on Yuki as this week’s episode opens up; a theatrical outburst where she cries and talks about quitting the show is, of course, just her playing up her actual feelings for the camera. Aqua observes this—and seems to have observed a lot about his castmates—and places them into three distinct categories; Yuki and MEM-cho both get “skillful”, whereas Akane is relegated, in his view, to someone who doesn’t come across well and so gets little screentime. Indeed, Yuki remains the center of attention for the first part of this episode. Within Love Now itself, she sits at the center of a love triangle, and thus most of the show’s audience interest is funneled toward her. It’s easy to get the sense that while Yuki may or may not be manipulative, exactly, she definitely at least knows how to play to her own strengths. Through all this, Aqua and MEM mostly stay out of the way, and at one point MEM actually accuses Aqua of being rather unambitious.
One person that definitely isn’t true of, though, is Akane. Throughout the episode we see her taking notes on her fellow cast members, from the camera crew, and practicing various things; stretching, fencing, line-reading. Akane is a capital-A Actor, not unlike Kana. But that’s ill-suited to a reality TV series where the main draw is everyone acting more or less how they actually do, any playing up for the camera aside, and she happens to nearly walk in on her own manager being yelled at by one of the show’s producers. She needs to leave some kind of mark on the show, or she’ll be left behind.
Oshi no Ko does something interesting here; there’s a cut-aside to Ruby and Kana, where the former has to stop the latter from tweeting negatively about a lousy soft drink she bought. Kana’s point is solid, and she says it verbatim; in the social media era, the entertainers themselves are the product. This borderline-paranoiac attitude is normal in the industry, and it makes sense, in a way, too. The Internet is a big place, and the digital abyss loves nothing more than to gaze back.
For a while, it seems like Akane’s story might be one about what happens when you don’t keep that in mind. Determined to make some kind of strong impression on Love Now’s viewers after god knows how many sleepless nights of searching her own name on Twitter and finding very little at all, she tries playing the part of the bad girl, and makes a go at snatching Yuki’s not-quite-bfs away from her. This, to put it mildly, goes badly. In the middle of a (mostly-staged) argument, she makes a dramatic hand gesture and accidentally smacks Yuki across the face, scratching her cheek. What Akane and Yuki themselves think of this whole incident doesn’t really matter; the fact that it was caught on camera means that the audience is judge, jury, and executioner here. And if you’ve ever followed reality TV even a little bit, you know how nasty this kind of thing can get.
I don’t like to screenshot fake tweets, but it’s pretty necessary to discuss what happens here. There are a lot of them.
As we see this, the show dissolves into a swarm of voices; buzzing like flies around Akane’s head as she slowly withdraws from her own life, and encounters scathing rebukes of not just the inciting incident but everything she’s ever done and even her personality itself everywhere she goes, online and off. It’s pretty goddamn depressing, and it’s impressive that Oshi no Ko can manage to convey just how hard this stuff, which can seem trivial to an outsider, hammers on you.
It’s bad enough that in the episode’s final scene, Akane leaves her apartment in a half-awake daze. She tells herself (and the group chat that seemingly all the Love Now actors are in) that she’s just going to the store to pick up some food, this in spite of the fact that a typhoon is blowing through and wind and rain are pounding down outside. It eventually becomes heartbreakingly clear that no matter what she might’ve said, Akane left the house to die. It takes the absolutely miraculous intervention of Aqua—just passing through by chance, or did he have some idea of what was about to happen?—to literally pull her back from the ledge mid-jump. (The harrowing moment is spoiled only very slightly by the rather inappropriate choice to fade the show’s ED song in. I think total silence might’ve been a better call this time around.) The real visual jewel here is a match cut between how Akane feels—tragically free—and how she actually looks standing in the pouring rain.
There’s no such thing as a pretty suicide. Thankfully, good fortune saw Akane saved in the nick of time, but it’s worth thinking about the context that Oshi no Ko was originally written in. The entertainment industry is no stranger to performers being pushed to the brink by an uncaring public, and the arc happened to originally serialize not long after the tragic Terrace House incident. [Just as an additional content warning, that article discusses a real-world suicide in detail, please exercise caution before deciding to read it.] The parallels are not subtle.
To some, there will never be a sufficiently tactful way to depict this kind of thing, but the horrors gestured to here are very real, and turning away when a light is shined on them doesn’t make them vanish. Not for nothing, “Egosurfing” is the only anime episode I can recall ever seeing that ends with a card showing the National Suicide Hotline’s information. Oshi no Ko is a work of fiction, so Akane was always going to be okay here. Real people, obviously, do not have that luxury, so the hotline card seems like a good inclusion.
There is no real suitable way to transition from discussing that kind of subject to my usual outros for these articles. Nonetheless, I will see you all again next week.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
In with an out with a bang. If you’ll remember the closing minutes of last week’s episode, Aqua promised to make his performance in the final episode of Sweet Today count. And, implicitly, that was the show also promising to dazzle us. So, the question of how exactly it goes is what’s on our minds as we enter this week’s episode, and rain drips in to the leaky, abandoned warehouse that serves as the site of the shoot.
As we open, we actually lead with Kana’s side of things. A quick recap of her whole situation; former child prodigy-actor, now the subject of waning public interest, is given the lead role in a crappy live action miniseries adaptation of a beloved shoujo manga. She’s desperately trying to make her co-stars look decent in spite of their own lack of acting chops and nearly everything else about the series. This is something she cares about, she wants to be back in the spotlight and she wants to make a good show from this manga that, we learn, she loves too. It is just not happening; in particular her co-lead, played by the character Melt [Seiji Maeda], is an absolute cardboard cutout. She is getting nothing off of him, so she can’t give anything back.
This is when Aqua steps in. Improvising basically anything in a scripted performance—be it film, TV, whatever—is usually quite a bad idea. But Aqua does it anyway, in an admirable show of sheer audacity. He really leans into his role as the villain within Sweet Today, here, playing his character with an appropriate amount of sleazy grime and even deliberately antagonizing Melt just out of earshot of the camera.
Right or wrong, Melt’s sudden burst of emotion in response gives Kana something to actually play off of, and suddenly the child prodigy who can cry on command is back. Some of the show’s staff are a little annoyed (honestly, they’re not wrong to be, this isn’t the sort of thing one should try at home), but the series’ director isn’t, so it stays in, despite the alterations to the program it ends up necessitating. The staff aren’t the only people who’re charmed; this is the last shot of Kana while she’s being filmed that we get. Look at that blush!
Another group of people are grateful for the step up in Sweet Today‘s finale; the actual manga staff themselves. Not the least of which is the series’ actual mangaka. There is some palpable irony in the discussion she has with her assistants—about how manga artists often tell each other to keep their expectations in check when it comes to adaptations—being had in an adaptation of a manga. And indeed, the necessities of the format curtail a bit of the emotional punch. Still, it’s an effective scene, and we learn that the Sweet Today miniseries develops a small cult following on the internet off the basis of its strong final episode. (Previously mediocre shows suddenly and inexplicably becoming a lot better happens in anime, too, although it’s rare.) The mangaka ends up actually thanking Kana specifically during the show’s wrap party.
That party is also where we get our next plot thread. Kaburagi, who you’ll remember is the show’s producer and one of the many people on Aqua’s suspect list, ends up talking to him about Ai after casually remarking that they look rather similar. Aqua, who’s already crossed Kaburagi off the suspects list, presses him about how he knew Ai in the first place. Assuming Aqua to be more of a simple stan than anything else, he offers to trade a piece of little-known gossip for something; an appearance on a reality TV show that he’s the producer on.
We don’t get to see that just yet. The episode’s final third actually revolves around Aqua and Ruby’s new high school, a performing arts academy where Kana is their senior. Here we split off and mostly follow Ruby for a while. This is good, because it lets us get, say, her impressively bisexual reaction to entering her class for the first time.
She also makes a friend in the form of effusively pink gravure model with a fake Kansai accent Kotobuki Minami [Hina Youmiya]. In general, Ruby’s side of Oshi no Ko will tend toward the light and comedic for a good bit yet. She is very much the secondary protagonist after her brother, although this does mean we get to see more of her silly wild takes when something funny happens.
We also meet Shiranui Frill [Asami Seto] here. Regarded in-universe as a top entertainer even in high school, Frill mostly serves as the indirect conduit for the other upcoming plot line. (And as fanservice for Kaguya-sama:Love is War! fans. She’s the younger sister of minor character Shiranui Koromo.)
Ruby, a huge fan of Frill’s, feels insecure about not having a job in the industry yet. This leads to her pressuring Miyako to get her idol group together more quickly, but just as Miyako retorts that unaffiliated showbiz-grade cute girls are in short supply in Japan—precisely because of things like idol auditions—Aqua pipes up that he might know somebody who’s looking for an opportunity.
Namely, Kana.
Once again, though, that’s a development for next week, as the episode cuts there.
Until then, anime fans!
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
We open last week’s episode of Oshi no Ko on a smiling face and some cold, hard numbers. Ruby is applying to join an existing idol group as an add-on member. Her chances are literally one in hundreds of thousands, but nonetheless she swings into the episode’s opening moments in a whirl of joy and determination. Ruby is easily the more upbeat of our two leads (which is probably why, sadly, she’s the one who tends to get less screentime), and these first couple minutes are a cheerful pastiche of the past decade and change of idol anime. Juxtaposed, of course, with a reminder of the grim fate of Ruby’s mother / oshi in a past life / it’s complicated, Ai. A few of her friends at school razz her over the fact that she can’t sing, as though that’s ever been an obstacle to being a star anywhere in the world.
More pertinent are her brother Aqua’s objections. Idols, he points out as though Ruby doesn’t already know, make relatively little money, live under constant scrutiny, and are mostly pushed out of their line of work by their early 30s. Ruby does know all this, of course. But in a little exchange that cuts to the heart of why people do this stuff in the first place, she asks Aqua what his point even is. People do not chase the kind of dream Ruby’s chasing because they want to be rich or because they want job security. The dream is, itself, the point, for better or worse. This is something Oshi no Ko comes back to, underscoring and undercutting it in equal measure, throughout its whole story as part of its larger themes.
Something else that recurs not just throughout Oshi no Ko but throughout Aka Akasaka’s work in general is that simply wanting something badly enough does not make it happen. Ruby eventually gets the phone call responding to her audition, and is flatly rejected. She’s comforted by Miyako [Lynn], who is now serving as the twins’ mother figure as she runs the revamped Strawberry Productions by herself (they manage net talent these days, we’re told), but the comfort is a cold one. And as it turns out, Ruby hasn’t really been rejected on the basis of her own abilities in the first place. The person on the other end of the phone was actually Aquamarine, who, we learn, has been going through incredible lengths to keep his sister out of the industry. Being so deceptive about it is pretty shitty (to the point where the phone call “from the idol agency” was actually Aquamarine himself, he’s got quite the vocal range), but one does, in an abstract sense, understand his trepidations. You’d be paranoid about the whole thing too if your mother was stabbed to death by a stalker. Still, he’s clearly going about this entirely the wrong way, and this is absolutely going to come back to bite him somehow.
None of it ends up mattering; Ruby is promptly scouted for a different group—this one an indie—just days later.
Miyako and Aqua are rightly concerned that this might be a sketchy situation (which would not be a first for an underground idol group), and Aqua handles it in a rather unscrupulous way yet again, pretending to scout one of their idols and, with a little effort and a false promise of possibly hiring her himself, manages to squeeze all kinds of reasons to not let Ruby join out of her. (Incidentally, this character, Lala, is pretty cute, but I don’t think we ever see her again, unless I’m forgetting something.)
In the end, Ruby does sign with an agency; Strawberry themselves, who, under Miyako’s guidance, are putting together a new group for the first time in a decade. Both she and Aqua reason that if Ruby is really going to insist on this, it’s better for her to be managed close to home. In a different sort of show, this would be where things pivot back into a heart-pounding underdogs-race-to-the-top narrative, akin to something like The Idolmaster or last year’s surprisingly great Shine Post. But that is not what Oshi no Ko is, and that’s not where our story (or even the episode) ends.
Aqua has been helping the Director out as an editor and general assistant since his mother passed away, but when the Director approaches him (not for the first time) about becoming an actor as well, Aqua brushes him off, saying that he doesn’t have any true talent and doesn’t have what his mother did. This leads into the only real miss of episode 2, a gag where the Director keeps trying to give an inspirational monologue but is interrupted by his mom barging into his room. This is decently funny, almost Simpsons-y, the first time it happens, but it happens several times before the scene is over, and by the end it just feels vaguely meanspirited. (Which is also pretty Simpsons-y, now that I think of it.) It’s easy to miss that despite being interrupted, the Director’s speech is actually a pretty good one. He touches on how Aqua, who’s only a teenager, is way too young to be giving up on his dreams and clearly wants to be an actor. Aqua is so focused on finding his mother’s killer that he may be blind to his own love of the craft, which is pretty tragic in its own way and explains no small amount about his character.
Episode 2 ends with a fun little diversion. Aqua and Ruby enter the integrated middle / high school where Ruby will be getting her performing arts education. Here, we’re reintroduced to Kana, who Aqua doesn’t initially recognize. She gets the last line of the episode; initially relieved that Aqua’s returned to acting (crush much?), she flips out when Aqua tells her that he’s actually taking the general education track. Cut to credits!
All told, despite a few minor missteps, episode 2 is an essential bit of scaffolding, establishing both Ruby and Aqua’s respective personalities and motivations and their (rather lopsided) relationship with each other. I imagine Aqua’s serious, manipulative characterization might lose some people, and I’ll admit that the already-great series might be even better if we perhaps swapped the personalities around here, but really, these are petty complaints at best. And we’re not even done! Since my life has been in a bit of a shamble lately, I didn’t get to cover episode 2 last week, which means we’ve got two to talk about this week. Cut to (opening) credits!
We pick up right where we left off, with Aqua and Ruby meeting Kana again for the first time. Initially, they essentially lightly bully her, which gives us a feast of Good Kana Faces to kick off the episode with.
This quickly take a somewhat more serious turn, though, and it becomes clear that while the previous episode focused mostly on Ruby with an Aqua segment in its last third, this one is going to be Aqua’s show. (Ironic, given how much of the episode he spends still denying that he wants to act.)
We should talk about Kana first, though. This is our first real look at her post-her child actress era, and while her star has dimmed, it hasn’t gone out. She’s happy to leverage the fact that she’s the lead role in the fictional shoujo manga drama web-miniseries adaptation Sweet Today to attempt to get Aqua back in the game. (If Sweet Today sounds familiar, that’s because it also shows up in Kaguya-sama: Love is War. This and a few other connections make it clear that the two series take place in the same universe. Is this relevant to anything at all in either of them? Not to my knowledge, but it’s a fun fact.) Kana herself spends much of this early part of the episode bouncing around the screen and just generally being lively and engaging. I realize I’ve really hammered this point home over the last two columns, but this kind of charisma is deadly important if you’re trying to sell a character as a performer, and Kana is yet another Oshi no Ko cast member who has it in spades. (For that matter, Aqua does too, although his is more of a cold and dark kind of compelling. If he were a real person, I imagine he’d have quite the fandom over on tumblr.)
Aqua’s not interested until he hears the name of the drama’s producer, Masaya Kaburagi. As for why, we here swerve over to the show’s darker side once again. We learn that in his search for Ai’s killer, Aqua’s compiled a list of candidates. How? Well, he found his late mother’s secret personal phone, and spent four entire years trying to guess the correct passcode. (He’s lucky it only used numbers, frankly.) That gave him a list with a good dozen industry people on it. Masaya Kaburagi was one of them.
This in mind, he accepts Kana’s offer. Although because Kana happened to have just mentioned that the male lead in the production was attractive, she suddenly gets the wrong idea. (To be honest, the fact that she cares, even in a girlish “ohmigosh” sort of way, slightly bugs me. It’s not like Aqua would be the first gay actor in the world, and Kana’s been in the industry since she was a child.)
We actually get to see a minute or two of Sweet Today, and it is truly dire, with canned, wooden acting from not only Kana herself but also her co-lead. On Kana’s part, she’s deliberately acting well below her level, since most of her co-stars are male models, not actors, and without someone with equivalent chops to play off of, she risks barreling over the rest of the cast if they can’t keep up. Thus, she tries to act the same way they are, and hopes to at least present the series as “watchable”, if not great. She points out that acting well and making a good show are different things, and we get the point again here of acting being primarily about communication. This is a lesson she had to learn the hard way; the reason her roles dried up as she got older was that she was initially so difficult to work with. Things are different now, and she makes a point of being a good coworker.
All this said, Sweet Today‘s production is still a disaster. The main reason Kana wanted Aqua for the job, any personal feelings aside, is that Aqua genuinely is a great actor. All of the off-camera stuff—initial script run through, full rehearsal, etc.—is being blended into a single practice take, and that’s all the practice anyone gets. With Aqua onboard, Kana finally has someone at her level that she can play off of. If acting is communication, these are two people who speak the same language.
As for Aqua’s actual role, he is, irony of ironies, playing a stalker villain who appears in the show’s finale. (Aqua in fact mentions this directly, which I’d qualify as a minor weakness. Rarely do you need to actually point irony out!) During the rehearsal, he does fine, and Kana compliments him afterward. Her little speech here is actually quite nice overall, and conveys the strong sense of kinship that she feels with Aqua, someone else who was also a child actor, left the field for a while, and is now trying to come back (Aqua has his own reasons for doing so, but she doesn’t know that). The animation—in fact, the kind of animation often known as character acting—bumps up here, and Kana’s broad smile and her huge, wide hand gestures are really something lovely.
They are contrasted quite a bit by a something Aqua overhears. The producer, Mr. Kaburagi, says to the director that Kana is great to throw into “any random role” because she’s so easy to work with, and says it’s great how they can leverage her remaining name recognition for such little money. In fact, his only complaint is that she’s so focused on acting in the first place, dismissing the entire show—his own production!—as little more than pure promo material. This seems to get under Aqua’s skin in a major way, and as he collects one of Kaburagi’s discarded cigs (remember, he’s trying to catch his mom’s killer at the end of the day, and the cigarette serves as a possible source of material for a DNA test), he decides that even if he’s already done what he came here for, he might as well make a strong impression on the way out the door. “Out with a bang” as he puts it.
On that note, the episode closes, so we’ll have to wait until next week for Aqua’s actual performance. It’s great to be back, and since I haven’t gotten to say it in a while, I’ll relish saying it here; see you next week, anime fans.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.
Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
This has been a weird season, particularly for speculative adventure anime. The two original frontrunners, Hell’s Paradise and the unrelated Heavenly Delusion, have respectively gotten kind of boring and completely unhinged in a way where I, personally, am holding off on covering it for now. That leaves a gap, and where there’s a gap, other things will step up to the plate. If you’re asking about what adventure anime I’ve been enjoying in a comparatively uncomplicated way, there are two answers, neither of which I would’ve expected giving just two weeks ago; Magical Destroyers (which was unhinged from the start) and this, Dead Mount Death Play. Neither are flawless by any means, but the nature of expectations is sometimes such that you end up enjoying things that you expected less out of in the first place more than things you had high hopes for that may or may not live up to those hopes.
As for DMDP itself, the gist since we last checked in with our necromancer boy Polka and his funky phantom friends is this; he’s joined the organization that was hunting him down back in episode one. He’s a coup, really, for this shady group of assassins, and their leader, the mysterious Clarissa [Atsumi Tanezaki]. (A side note, we’ll be calling “Polka” “Kabane” from this point out, referring to his character bio, because distinguishing him from the guy who used to be Polka Shinoyama is going to be important shortly) Misaki, predictably, is also around again, having been revived at the end of episode 2 following some exposition about Polka’s past. I was not crazy on the show’s attempts to sell both Kabane and Misaki (who seem to be co-headlining as leads at this point) as “sympathetic bad guys”, but the rest of the episode was quite good, including a sequence where Kabane rescued some kids from a fire in an unlicensed orphanage via summoning their parents’ souls into skeletons. He even caused a huge social media firestorm in the process, setting up a lurking background plot thread as we roll into episode 3 here.
Episode 3 quickly confirms that, regardless of whether or not he’s truly “villainous”, we are going to get to see Kabane properly fuck some people up. It’s really pretty straightforward; for as much as he might want to live a peaceful life in his new home, he does need money, and his talents point him toward assassination as a possible career path. He doesn’t even hand-wring over it, really, and his only token objection is shot down by Misaki pointing out that he was competent enough to kill her, and, after all, she’s a professional assassin too. Kabane and Misaki get a good dynamic going here when the time comes to smack around some yakuza. (Or something. They sure seem like yakuza to me but the show never uses the term.) Misaki, now basically a zombie, is immune to minor inconveniences like gunshots and such, so she handles all of the rough-and-tumble physical aspects of fighting. Kabane, the necromancer, finishes things off with his magic.
It’s also because of Kabane that they end up in this situation in the first place. One of Dead Mount Death Play’s recurring tricks is to set up a scene in one way—here, by making it seem like Kabane is talking to a guy who comes to Misaki for protection—and then reveal that he’s actually been talking to ghosts. In this case, that means deliberately leading himself and Misaki into a trap to get some vengeance for the many children-spirits that haunt this particular group of bad guys. These aren’t really meant to be twists, exactly, but it’s still a cool way to convey the narrative. It’s especially helpful when the show’s visual chops are otherwise more functional than great. (Although there is a really wonderful moment here where Misaki Naruto-runs for a couple seconds. That can make up for a lot of so-so cuts.)
Death Play seems to be setting up this thing where Kabane is, in a sense, less of a villain than the real-world sorts he crosses swords with; hitmen and so on. There’s an intriguing bit in here where he and Takumi, the hacker who’s now serving as his mission control of sorts, have a conversation about the value of human life. Kabane likens human life to toys. But, he says, he’s fond of toys, because they make children smile. This prompts Kabane to reflect on whether the real disconnect in their thinking is not how they value people but how they value things. It’s an interesting little dialogue, although the larger points it might be trying to make have not really connected just yet. Oh, somewhere in here it’s also mentioned that Polka—the real Polka—is still alive, and his soul is bound to a small drone that Kabane took control of last week. Where is all that going? Who knows!
We also learn about “Lemmings” here, in a separate exchange, apparently some kind of assassin-boogieman with a codename that, personally, just makes me think of the computer game. “Lemmings” doesn’t really remain a mystery for long. The closing minutes of the episode introduce us to two new characters who’ve shown up before but not gotten any spotlight before now. These are Tsubaki Iwanome [Takuya Eguchi] and Kouzaburou Arase [Nobuhiko Okamoto], a pair of cops who work for a branch of the government that deals with the paranormal. They get on Kabane’s trail because of the aftermath of the yakuza fight; a massive knot of clumped-together earth and mangled bodies, all of whom are still alive, because Kabane is hardcore like that. Thus, our first major arc sets its wheels in motion, and Dead Mount Death Play seems to snap into focus.
This is not a flawless show by any means; it’s visually a bit too dark (enough that it’s occasionally hard to puzzle out what’s going on), and the sense of humor is markedly dated. Sometimes in a charming way (Misaki’s whole kooky murder-girl personality) and sometimes in a very grating one (basically everything else), and its use of totally shameless fanservice feels pretty out of place in something like this. Still, the show is solid fun, and I enjoy tuning in every week.
Of course, what I would really love is to see it take that extra step up and go from good to great. Will it? Only time will tell.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.
Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
It’s not common, but it happens; an anime that is decidedly fine but not great will unexpectedly just tap into something: a raw vein of resonant or intense emotion, a particularly strong theme, an exceptionally charismatic character will appear, etc. In doing this, the show goes supernova, breaking itself out of whatever little genre-box it’s stuck in and becoming something pretty unique—or at least interesting—in the process. If not permanently, at least for a while. Thus, we have the anime adaptation of The Magical Revolution of The Reincarnated Princess & the Genius Young Lady, a series that has been on Magic Planet Anime before, though not actually in its anime form.
I haven’t covered the series’ anime adaptation until this point because, frankly, until today, I wasn’t terribly impressed with it. I fell off following the manga not long after writing that original Manga Shelf column. And since then, Magical Revolution—MagiRevo, to its friends—has stuck in my mind, certainly, but not been at the forefront of it. Its anime, in particular, I have been a bit down on; just by being an anime, it has the obvious baked-into-the-format disadvantage of simply being of fixed, linear length, meaning that the balancing act between the more lighthearted yuri elements of the series and the more serious, dramatic, and intrigue-driven plot of the series has not always been easy to keep up, given that it’s stripped of the flexibility presented by reading a manga nor novel at one’s own pace. Sometimes, it has felt like watching two anime glued together. But no longer! Over its past few episodes, MagiRevo has largely discarded any pretense of being light and fluffy and has dived headlong into some surprisingly big ideas. Any feeling of trying to split the difference is long in the rearview by now.
To very briefly get the uninitiated up to speed: after what I previously discussed in the Manga Shelf column, MagiRevo starts getting into the story of Anis’ (Sayaka Senbongi) brooding younger brother Algard (Shougo Sakata). It was clear from day one that Algard was up to something, but over the course of, in particular, episodes 8 and 9, the series paints a compelling portrait of a man who is deeply troubled by the feudal realities of the world he lives in, and who takes drastic steps in reaction to them. It’s not long before he’s literally ripping the magical power out of supporting character and basically-a-vampire Lainie (Hina Youmiya), leaving her for dead in the process, and attempting to stone-cold murder his sister to secure his ascension to the throne.
This goes poorly for Prince Al, who at this point has basically ruined his own life as part of this harebrained plot to get Anis out of the picture. The tragic thing is that his motives are quite sympathetic! We see him moved by the plight of the poor, and furious at how his fellow nobles turn up their noses at those commoners. But tragically, he has no real idea of how to turn that righteous indignation into an actual plan to fix things. He conflates these systemic issues with his own complicated jealousy of his sister, and throws any real shot at repairing the underlying problems of the show’s world away for petty score-settling. He is, honestly, pretty lucky to get out of the whole ordeal alive at the end of the arc. Although being exiled to the kingdom’s borderlands ensures he won’t be playing a major role in the plot again any time soon.
Look at how smug he is about it.
That exile creates a new problem, though. With Algard out of the picture, Anis is once again the kingdom’s only valid heir. Her father, Orphanse II, restores her hereditary rights, and Anis is suddenly faced with the prospect of being forced into a queenly role that she neither wants nor is suited for. Perhaps surprisingly, she accepts all of this without much of a fight, resigning herself to her “duty” to the kingdom and to the other nobles, in spite of the fact that it’s not what she wants and that she isn’t the right person for the job anyway.
There’s an element of sad irony here; Anis, a genius in what is basically her world’s version of a STEM field, can’t seem to quite pick apart the systemic issues that her brother could. (We don’t get a great sense of what Anis actually thinks of the whole socioeconomic setup of her kingdom. She clearly likes the commoners as people, but it’s not clear if she really understands what makes them commoners in the first place the same way her brother did.) Algard, of course, wasn’t smart enough to come up with a way to solve those issues. One gets the sense that if they had been working together from the start, things would be much more on-track at this point, but complex interpersonal problems have gotten in the way, and the situation, as it stands at the end of episode 10, is very complicated all around.
This leaves Euphie in quite the spot, too. Episode 10 does a wonderful job of capturing just how powerless Euphie feels to really help Anis in any meaningful way. The succession issue is her problem too, since she loves Anis—she actually explicitly says as much here for the first time, no subtext here—and can’t stand to see her making forced smiles through the whole process of preparing for queenship. (This seems to mostly involve winning over the country’s nobility, which, given what we’ve seen of them, and given that we already know that they hate Anis because she can’t do magic, would seem like profoundly thankless work even if the show didn’t outright say as much.) She eventually goes to curse scholar and only slightly toxic friend of Anis, Tilty (Yuu Sasahara), for advice, and Tilty eventually gets it out of her that it’s not just that Euphie can’t solve Anis’ problems, it’s that Anis’ problems are her own, given how close they are. It’s worth reiterating the feeling of powerlessness captured here; the inadequacy, the friction between Euphie’s own feelings and the outside world. It’s surprisingly intense stuff, especially given that it’s mostly conveyed solely through dialogue, which, it’s worth noting, is wonderfully voice-acted.
Between Euphie’s feelings, Anis’ situation, and Algard’s arc that led up to that situation, the show also does a pretty good job of exploring how the systems that create the upper classes tend to strip even those people they’re intended to privilege of genuine happiness. Every single one of these characters is a landed and titled noble, wealthy in ways that you or I cannot really imagine, and they are all absolutely fucking miserable. It takes a deft hand to make that kind of thing actually sympathetic.
All in all, MagiRevo has become dark, fascinating, and surprisingly heady for something that really seemed like it wasn’t going to ever amount to much more than a power fantasy. (A gay power fantasy, which is a thing worth having, but a power fantasy nonetheless.) Episode 10 leaves us with the introduction of a new character—the mysterious Lumi, whose spirit contracts may offer a way out of Anis’ situation, but there are clearly some strings attached we’re not totally privy to yet—and a lot of unanswered questions. And, hey, on top of all that, there’s also a pretty spectacular bit in episode 9 where the maid Ilia (Ai Kakuma) saves Lainie’s life by making out with her. That’s pretty great too.
Absolutely bitchin’.
There is still a very promising year ahead of us, as far as anime goes, so I don’t know how many people—myself included!—will really remember MagiRevo’s surprisingly strong turn here come December. (Honestly, even if it totally flames out in its final two episodes, having a strong middle section is noteworthy enough, given how many single cour anime manage to have a noticeably weak one.) And fans of the original light novels, or even just those who’ve kept up with the manga, won’t be as shocked, of course, but the raising-of-stakes here is pretty great all around, and it’s taken MagiRevo from a show that’s decidedly okay to one that’s absolutely worth keeping an eye on. In a season this quiet, things like this have a chance to stand out that they might not otherwise get, but even in a stronger season, something like this would be worth taking note of. Mark MagiRevo down for “most improved since its premiere.”
A Note: I have COVID-19 at the moment. I think I’m through the worst of the infection, but that’s why content has been so scarceon the site lately, and it will probably continue to be irregular at best for a while longer. Hoping to be fully recovered by the end of the season so I can get on top of next season’s premieres! But, I don’t want to promise anything. If you’d like to help, now more than ever, I would appreciate donations at the links below.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
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.
Somewhere in Nagasaki, many years ago, a samurai is tricked into killing his father-in-law. He doesn’t know what to do with himself now, as he’s pursued by both his father-in-law’s men and his own guilty conscience. It is on this note, and with a flurry of katana slashes, that Revenger, the latest from the pen of Gen Urobuchi, opens. You know, just in case you were laboring under the misunderstanding that something called Revenger was going to be a happy story.
The samurai, we eventually learn, is Kurima Raizo (Jun Kasama), a retainer of the Satsuma daimyo. His father-in-law was, or at least, Kurima thought he was, involved in illegal opium trade with English merchants. In fact, the daimyo was innocent, and it was Satsuma’s chief financial officer, a man named Matsumine, who’s orchestrated the whole thing. The man who brings all this trickery to light for Kurima? A mysterious fellow with a dashing hair style and a Virgin Mary back tattoo (Usui Yuen, not directly named here, voiced by Yuuichirou Umehara) who claims to handle “odd jobs.” One of those very ‘odd jobs’ is—wouldn’t you know it?—killing Matsumine.
Thus begins a sudden, deep, and dark plunge into the Nagasaki underworld. Don’t mistake Revenger‘s grittiness for realism, per se; there’s a guy here who’s basically Gambit from the X-Men (Souji, Shouta Hayama) and another (Nio, Hisako Kanemoto) who garrots people with razor wire kite strings.
Instead, Revenger‘s first episode is, true to title, a classic revenge tale. Kurima does eventually corner and kill Matsumine, but he certainly doesn’t feel any relief from doing so. His fiancé, Yui, has already killed herself by the time Kurima and the rest of the misfits intent on avenging the original Satsuma daimyo’s death arrive. Kurmia’s foolish attempt to repent for wrongly killing a man by killing another was doomed from the start. No life springs from death, and all that.
It’s not really a surprise that no one gets out for the better here. But it is a slight surprise that Revenger manages to take something this straightforward and classic—few tales have been iterated as often as that of a samurai gone rogue—and twist it up into such interesting shapes without even really trying. This is setting aside even the more basic, visceral thrills that Revenger offers; the plot to infiltrate Matsumine’s estate and kill him is very tactical and immediate, and everyone seems to have their own little offensive gimmick for taking down the estate’s guards. (In addition to those already mentioned, Usui has a bizarre, glittering cloth that seems to freeze on a man’s face, suffocating him instantly. Nasty stuff, really!)
The show’s larger mysteries loom in the background throughout all of this, just establishing themselves to give you a reason to tune in next week. Usui’s group seem to be Christian, or at least, something Christian-adjacent, given the Virgin Mary tattoo and a few other clues (one mentions ringing a bell in a chapel to indicate that their work is done), and it’s anyone’s guess why all of Usui’s assassins have a theme loosely based around some craft (for Usui himself, it’s maki-e, a kind of gold lacquering). It’s very hard to say, so early on, where any of this might go, but that it’s so easy to get invested speaks to the show’s obvious quality. If you’re into any of this kind of thing, you’ve got no good reason to not check this out.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Twelve weeks of blood on chainsaws, and here we are.
A lot has been said—and a lot more will be said, both here and elsewhere—about Chainsaw Man, inarguably the year’s finest action anime, and among its best character pieces as well. But for one last time, at least until season two, let’s dial in and focus on this week’s episode specifically.
For the most part, this is our climactic fight. If we place Chainsaw Man in the grand anime tradition, it’s the end of this arc. Here, Denji and Katana Man—aka Samurai Sword—square off. It will not shock you to learn that Denji is of course the one who triumphs, his first major rival defeated soundly. With bells on, even.
But, this is Chainsaw Man. There is a lot more going on here than just a huge, flashy fight. Even if the huge flashy fight is a big part of the appeal and is a core component of what makes this episode so good.
For one thing, we open back with Aki, strangled into unconsciousness by the apparently turncoat Ghost Devil. He has, yet again, more flashbacks of Himeno, soundtracked to a quiet, lo-fi piano and drum piece as Himeno offers the then-a-minor Aki a cigarette, manages to talk him into taking it despite his initial reluctance, and then backtracks when he reminds her that he’s underage. (Say what you will about Himeno, she certainly had….some kind of moral fiber.) But when he comes to, things are different. The Ghost Devil looms over him, unmoving, and before Sawatari can really even process what’s happening, the Ghost Devil hands Aki a cigarette. On it is written perhaps the most iconic thing to be penciled on a cig in an anime since “Never Knows Best.”
Aki releases the Ghost Devil from its pseudo-contract with Sawatari, and the woman herself doesn’t last much longer.
This entire opening scene—and really, the whole episode—also drives home a point I’ve been trying to articulate about the Chainsaw Man anime in general. Visuals like these put the lie to there being any merit to all of those “anime vs. the manga” comparisons. An anime is designed to look best in motion, it will always lose that particular contest, because it’s not trying to look good in stills. One of the things that consistently makes the Chainsaw Man anime so great is that it is in no way redundant with the manga. You can read that, and watch this, and get two experiences that are, visually, very distinct!
Which brings me to the next major sequence, and, really, the climax of the entire first season. Chainsaw Man vs. Katana Man. Following a dryly amusing bit where Katana Man tries to get Denji to just kill himself over the immense guilt he’s sure that Denji feels for killing a bunch of yakuza who’d turned into zombies, the battle proper begins, and it is a sight. Normally, I try to be at least broadly poetic when describing this kind of all-feel fight scene, but to be honest, what do you want me to say here? The idea that someone could watch this and not think it’s the coolest shit ever is completely foreign to me. And hey, Denji and Katana’s banter is pretty good throughout, too.
And of course there’s the highest note of all. When the battle moves from office to mid-sky to train, Katana Man briefly seems to have the upper hand when he’s literally disarmed Denji by cutting his arms off. That doesn’t actually matter, of course. Denji is smart enough to use his head to finish the job.
And that, friends, is how Katana Man goes from giving Denji a fair fight to being bisected from scalp to backside. The man is turned into a one-color impressionist painting, it’s really quite impressive.
But of course, he’s not actually dead. We get explicit confirmation that Katana Man is, indeed, the same sort of Devil-Human hybrid as Denji, and the Katana Devil’s replaced his heart. This leads us to a scene that would absolutely not work in most other fiction; Denji deciding to torture the tied-up Katana Man by repeatedly kicking him in the nuts. Moreover, doing so with Aki’s help, as the two compete to see who can make him scream the loudest. Somehow, this works as a genuine moment of bonding; Denji’s goofy personality rubbing off just the tiniest bit on Aki, who is serious enough that even right up until he joins in, he tries to convince himself (and Denji) that Himeno wouldn’t want them to do this. (To which my only response is, come on, man.)
So yes. That is how the first season of Chainsaw Man ends, with an act of joint petty revenge, with a metallic ding every time they kick him, and with a slow motion effect that turns the entire scene from mild amusement into genuine hilarity.
Except, of course, it doesn’t really end there. There is more going on. A lot more! There’s Makima reporting to her shadowy superiors, where we get the bombshell that Public Safety has gotten enough Gun Devil flesh from the raid on the building that it’s started to move toward the main body. There’s the credits scene, wholly original to the anime, that consists mostly of Denji, Power, and Aki having a fairly quiet evening at home. There’s Aki finally smoking the “Easy revenge!” cigarette, and, in the closing minutes of the episode, there is a brief, fleeting cameo from a character we haven’t met yet.
But we’ll get to all of that, because I really, really doubt that Chainsaw Man as an anime ends here. It’s just getting started.
Bonus Power Screencap: Here’s a picture of Power drinking out of a water fountain, because I know some of you are thirsty like that.
A brief programming note: This is my last weekly recap of the season, of course. But it might also be my last for a while in general. I don’t currently plan to do a Let’s Watch column for the upcoming anime season, I simply have too much else to work on, both in terms of material for this site and in terms of real-life stuff that needs doing.
If things change, I will let you all know. Until then, anime fans.
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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Spy x Family is, first and foremost, a slice of life series. Its focus is on comedy and on character interactions. Anything more serious is a secondary concern, at the end of the day. But! The fact that it does have a plot at all still puts it in a rather different space narratively than, say, something like Do It Yourself!! or BOCCHI THE ROCK!, to provide two examples from this very season. Things eventually circle back around to that narrative core. That’s where episodes like “First Contact” come from; they are quiet, slow, and subtle affairs, but they’re not boring. Indeed, the entire second half of this episode is ridiculously tense. Moreso than any scene since the bit with the bomb dogs back in the earlier parts of this cour. Through it all, Spy x Family makes things look effortless, not unlike Loid himself.
Speaking of Loid, he’s mostly the main character in this episode, which we get a demonstration of right off the bat in a scene where he’s snooping around Eden Academy’s school grounds just prior to a staff-and-parents meetup and creates a mental map of them in his head (complete with a cool wireframe effect.) But the first half actually focuses on Anya, who we should take note of as well.
It feels safe to say that Anya, with her bottomless well of silly reaction faces, general adorability, and strong design, is Spy x Family‘s most popular character by a decent margin. There’s also her charming dynamic with Damian, whose ongoing inner struggles to win the approval of his father have remained one of this cour’s more compelling subplots. It’s brought to the forefront here, and Anya, perhaps surprisingly, helps with that, scheming as she does to help her father by “meeting the evil boss” (recall that this’d be Damian’s father Donovan, Loid’s target). This launches a miniature web of half-misunderstandings and concealments, a spin on the classic “stupid people keeping obvious secrets from each other” school of comedic setups.
To wit; Anya’s great ploy to give Damian the confidence to confront his father directly is to proudly proclaim that she trusts her papa, which she demonstrates by saying she even shows him her “bad tests” and such. Anya’s conversational through-line here is shaky enough that she even confuses herself, ending this little pep talk with a flat “what we were talking about, again?” I have to admit, it got a genuine out-loud laugh out of me.
Loid’s plan, meanwhile, is to engineer a situation where he can talk to Donovan directly, using Anya punching Damian dead in his face way back in episode six as a pretext. It’s just one part of a fairly complicated scheme where Loid plants a fake sheep keychain, banks on Damian’s better nature to pick it up and hang onto it, “happens” to stumble over to Damian and his friends while “looking” for it, takes it back, and then attempts to build a rapport with Donovan by apologizing to him for Anya’s behavior. (Damian is only even meeting up with his father because he called his older brother Demetrius to ask him about it. And Loid only knows that because Anya read Damian’s mind and then happened to blab about it while he overheard. Quite a web being weaved here.) Loid is on the ball throughout, and while it’s no great feat to pull the wool over a group of kids’ eyes, Donovan himself is a very different story.
In general, Donovan Desmond (Takaya Hashi) is a grimly charismatic character, around whom the show actively warps. The background music shifts into an upright, militaristic march (and later, lead-heavy piano work). The man himself has eyes as big as headlights and is surrounded by a clutch of black-suited bodyguards, and the show’s art noticeably sharpens slightly in his presence. Every cue is crystal clear; Donovan Desmond is not a man to be fucked with.
Yet, fuck with him is exactly what Loid Forger does. In particular, I love the visual that pops up when Loid slides into the conversation, knowingly interrupting Damian’s rare meeting with his father. A literal idea web pops up, a giving us a very visual peek into Loid’s mind as he actively calculates the best way to get a foothold—any kind of foothold—with Donovan.
He does succeed, but the entire conversation is tense as hell. Again, probably the tensest moment in the series in nearly an entire cour. It’s cut by only a tiny bit of levity when Damian, in the midst of Loid’s prodding, confesses that he’d like to be friends with Anya. Cute!
Don’t feel bad for Damain about his meeting with his dad being interrupted, either. After Loid departs, both his and Anya’s earlier encouragement actually inspire Damian to tell his dad about what he’s been up to. In response, all he really gets is a “well done,” but for a boy who clearly almost never sees his father, that much is enough, a rare genuine moment of human connection brought out by advice from two people who are part of a family that is, in a lot of ways, much more real and genuine than Damian’s. Maybe he will find his own way to true connection—with his father, or with someone else—in due time. I hope so, the poor kid deserves better.
On that note, Spy x Family‘s wildly successful first season ends. I’d make some kind of grand denouement here, but the year-end list is only a few days away from starting up, so I’m sure you can wait until then. I will just say this much for now; through Spy x Family’s ups and downs, I’ve never stopped caring about the Forger family and their friends, and I am excited to see what else is in store for them in the future.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
To some, it will seem a little surprising that we’re already near the end of the first season of Chainsaw Man. But quite a lot has happened over the past eleven weeks, and the foot is not taken off the gas pedal for a single second of episode 11.
We lead by catching up with Aki. As mentioned, he’s pushed to contract with a new Devil, one who is apparently known for taking quite hefty prices—the examples we’re given are “both eyes” and “half of the contractor’s lifespan”—and we meet that devil here. Don’t let the reputation fool you, though. He’s a surprisingly jovial sort. Meet the Devil of The Future.
He offers to contract with Aki for nothing more than the small price of living unobtrusively in his right eyeball. Why does he want that? Well, he says it best himself.
Aki says that he doesn’t care how he dies as long as he can get his revenge on the Gun Devil. But, notably, at no point does he think to ask the Future Devil (who would presumably know) if he eventually succeeds in doing so. Intentional foreshadowing? Just Aki drawing a mental blank that has no deeper significance? Neither? Both? I leave that question up to you.
A solid amount of the episode focuses on Makima having meetings; first with Kishibe and then with a Yakuza boss. If that sounds dry, rest assured that it very much is not. These are possibly the most substantiative character moments that Makima’s gotten so far. Plus, she is wonderfully stone cold throughout both. The character has a real ice-and-iron magnetism, and even if these scenes were about nothing much, she’d be a joy to watch.
Kishibe calls her out to try to discern her true intentions. Evidently, it’s clear even to him that she’s up to something. (Direct quote: He doesn’t care “what fucked shit [she] has cooking” as long as she’s serving mankind’s general interests. Kind of a wild thing to say!) He also accuses her of knowing about the train attack beforehand and doing nothing to stop it. When she reminds him that she was attacked too, and uses this fact to imply that there’s no way she could’ve known anything. Plus, a decidedly creepy grin, and the reassurance that her main goal is to “save as many people as possible from devils.” Oddly exact wording, maybe. Perhaps picking up on this, Kishibe flat-out calls her a liar, and the scene cuts away.
After another Aki scene (pretty good in its own right, but minor compared to everything else that happens here), we again join in on Makima meeting up with someone. This time, it’s the aforementioned Yakuza boss. Her goal here is simple enough; she wants his cooperation, a list of names of everyone both in his own family and in all the others who’ve contracted with the Gun Devil. (These “contracts” apparently consist of little more than giving the Gun Devil money and getting guns and ammo in return. The thing being a glorified firearm dealer is certainly something to chew on.) He refuses, arguing that this’d spark a gang war. Then, he doubles down, and tries to intimidate her while simultaneously justifying his own actions. If the Yakuza didn’t do what it did, he claims, then foreign mafias would elbow their way in to Japan. It’s a necessary evil, really.
This kind of self-justification evidently does not sit particularly well with Makima, whose own counterargument (it’s only a “necessary evil” if the state controls it) is pretty dubious on its own, but its effectiveness as a rhetorical point is rendered pretty irrelevant by what she does next; plops down a brown paper bag filled with eyes. Those of the various yakuza members’ girlfriends, parents, grandparents, etc.
With the frightening reassurance that, yes, Public Safety does have somebody who can put them back in, somehow or another, she gets her list. What exactly she does with it is not textually spelled out, but when the Yakuza goons start getting spontaneous nosebleeds and passing out cold later in the episode, it’s not difficult to draw a connection.
Which brings us to the episode’s final act; Special Division 4’s assault on the building where Katana Man and Sawatari are holed up (said building is infested not just with the Yakuza but also with a zombie army, a remnant of the Zombie Devil’s power). Kishibe leads the operation, and as he explains to the decidedly less-badass rabble that Div. 4 is operating alongside, they should be more worried about the mostly-non-human operatives of Division 4 itself than they should the terrorists. In practice, this is an excuse to give us a stylish introduction to several new characters. Enter Division 4’s ringers. In no particular order, we have:
Beam, the Shark Fiend (Natsuki Hanae), who can swim through any surface and briefly turn back into his proper Devil form to chomp basically anything in half.
The Violence Fiend (Yuuya Uchida), on the extreme rational end for a fiend, and strong enough that Public Safety straps him with a poison gas-emitting mask even in situations like, well, what happens during this episode.
The Spider Devil (Saori Gotou); who has a human woman’s torso with a zipper running up the center and, appropriately, eight legs that she can use to kick the ever-loving fuck out of things.
And finally, the Angel Devil (Maaya Uchida), who despite his waifish appearance can drain the life force from anything with a touch.
The entire final ten or so minutes of the episode look absolutely fantastic, and should once again quell any doubt about the Chainsaw Man anime’s worthiness as an adaptation from a style point of view. The real interesting fight, though, doesn’t involve any of these new characters. Instead, it involves Aki, who gets the chance to confront Sawatari head-on, and—this is unspoken, but fairly obvious—avenge Himeno’s death.
There is only one problem; Sawatari’s Snake Devil can somehow “spit back up” the other devils it’s eaten. Which means that as the episode ends, Aki is face to face with this; the Ghost Devil, returning to strangle the life out of him under Sawatari’s orders.
Will he survive? This hardly seems like the death that “fucking rules” that the Future Devil promised Aki, but maybe he just has a sick sense of humor. Who can say?
Bonus Power Screencap: Despite everything else it’s packed with, this episode doesn’t actually feature a ton of Power. Thankfully, she puts in a stylish monochrome appearance in the ED. Here’s that.
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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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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