Tag: recap

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [5/22/22]

Anime Orbit Weekly 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.

Hi friends, I’ll be brief. This AOW marks the start of what’s going to be a fairly spotty period for my writing for a while. Starting tomorrow I’m not sure how much of my regular weekly writing I’m going to be able to get done, I have some stuff going on at home, and unfortunately that takes priority over writing Takes about cartoons. (Trust me, I wish it didn’t.)

It won’t be a full-on hiatus because I will still try to put at least some of my usual articles up, if only intermittently and sometimes late. But do just expect turbulence in the weeks ahead. (Regrettably this also means that some fun bonus articles I wanted to write probably aren’t happening for a while. To say nothing of the commission I’ve been slowly working on for the past month.)

But for now, here’s some talk about the season’s two weirdest anime.

Birdie Wing

This week: Eve faces off against Rose Aleone.

Things start out in the pretty standard “shonen protagonist duking it out with their first true challenge” mold, and it’s pretty great. Eve breaks out her Rainbow Bullets. Rose using a “Bullet” shot of her own is given the same reaction that Cell got when he used the Kamehameha Wave. It’s ludicrous and wonderful, and that’s really only the start of the episode’s silliness. See; this is the first time Eve’s had a lengthy match with an opponent who’s actually on her caliber, and Birdie Wing absolutely milks that for all its worth. On a writing level, Eve and Rose have similar styles, so the two have a lot of great psychological interplay. A good sign of how in the weeds (in a good way) we are here is that Viper is the one that points all this out, via internal monologue. Witness her reaction to Eve being shaken after Rose pulls off a particularly impressive shot, for example.

Always a good sign when the chick named “Viper the Reaper” thinks you’re being a bit dramatic.

The underground transforming golf course returns here, repurposing the twisting and turning henshin sequence as stock footage in true anime fashion. Eve and Rose go shot-for-shot to the point that they end up tying eight holes in a row. Even Eve’s new trick—a proper slice shot taught to her by Aoi, who she has of course named it after—can’t break the tie.

Eve pulling out what is, to my knowledge, a pretty basic pro golfing technique, and it being treated as a huge reveal is amusing. But given everything else about Birdie Wing, it only barely registers as strange.

Indeed, we don’t actually see the match end here, as the episode ends on a cliffhanger after both Eve and Rose manage incredibly long drives down an extremely long course. Eve, of course, thinks of her family, which is nice but mostly reminds me that they seem to be pretty firmly relegated to a supporting role at this point. (If I have a single serious criticism of Birdie Wing, it’s that a show that cares about class this much—and this series, campy as it is, does care about class—really cannot excuse having its POC cast in such minor roles. I doubt anyone needs me to explain that class issues and race issues are inextricably connected.) It is worth noting that Eve’s old mentor, Leo Millafoden (Shuuichi Ikeda, yes, Char Aznable himself) does show up at Klein’s bar, which at least gives the family some screentime. His reasons for doing so are cryptic at this point, and he makes no direct contact with Eve over the course of the episode.

So, things seem like they’re about to close on a solid, exciting note with Eve and Rose neck in neck….and then in the post credits, this happens.

Yes, Rose golfs so fucking hard that her prosthetic arm flies off. And she screams in agony, because, you know, yeah.

I don’t know if that means Eve wins the match by default. You’d think it would, right? Her opponent’s sustained a serious injury. But Birdie Wing is so goddamn bonkers that it’s really hard to say.

Estab Life

In episode 10 of Estab Life, Equa, who’s been basically perfect at her job for the last nine episodes, is off her game. The girls’ normally bright, poppy designs are marred with grime, dust, and cuts. Their cafe, an island of stability in Estab Life‘s world gone mad, is shredded to mulch and rubble in only a few minutes. All of this is unsettling, given that even the darkest of Estab Life‘s previous episodes have ultimately left a lot of room for jokes, and it’s never felt like The Extractors were in serious danger. What happened? Estab Life‘s tenth episode swerves the series into tenser and more serious territory than any previous episode, and the Extractors are firmly on the back foot throughout.

The source of all this is that Equa’s precognitive powers—which the show nicknames ‘Fatal Luck’—have abruptly stopped working. At the same time, their home cluster undergoes an “update”, a process that normally involves fairly mundane things like fixing sewer lines or power grid issues. Here, it seems to mean that a target’s been painted on the Extractors’ backs. A few minutes into the episode, a comparatively sedate little anecdote where our heroines fail to acquire donuts from a donut shop is immediately pulverized to splinters as their home is invaded by the machine gun-equipped security drones that have been quite literally floating around for the entire series so far.

Their run through the underground of their home cluster is tense, and it’s seriously destabilizing to see Equa so unsure of herself and what to do. She even faces the challenge of performing her usual role in the team—wire cutting—without her abilities, and only gets it right by, presumably, sheer chance.

It’s not like the Extractors can exactly hide, either. The “update” that somehow disabled Equa’s powers has also led to the cluster hunting for the Extractors with what are pretty strongly implied to be shoot-on-sight orders. Equa has no real explanation for any of this; we learn here that the mysterious Manager who acts as an overall administrator for all of the clusters and the equally mysterious Mr. M who’s served as the girls’ anonymous benefactor are, in fact, one in the same. A piece of foreshadowing so obvious that I’m smacking myself on the forehead for having missed it. This leads to some tension after the girls escape to Akihabara, as Feles asks Equa point-blank if they’ve just been doing the Manager’s dirty work instead of helping people of their own free will. Equa denies anything of the sort, and Feles believes her, but at this stage in the game it has gotten hard to know what, really, to believe.

The episode ends on one hell of a cliffhanger, as the girls’ temporary hideout on an Akiba rooftop is discovered and then swarmed by security drones. The best thing about Estab Life has always been that it’s like very little else, and that continues to be true as it enters its final episodes, but more than ever I am a little worried for our girls. Who knows where this is all going?

Elsewhere on MPA

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 7 – A Culture Festival Full of Surprises

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 7

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 7 – The Target’s Second Son

And that about covers it for this week. I’ll be seeing you when and where I see you, anime fans. Take care.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 7

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Today we hit perhaps the densest episode so far of Kaguya-sama: Love is War!‘s third season. -Ultra Romantic- has not been shy about plot thickets before this point, so that’s saying something, but we’re introduced to three new characters and two new plotlines here. That’s a lot to take in all at once; enough so that this episode actually has four segments instead of the usual three. (If you wanted to split hairs, you could say the last two are more like two parts of the same segment.)

We open with a pair of familiar faces, though. Mito Iino and Yuu Ishigami are, once again, the characters we’re riding along with for the opening segment. They’ve been assigned to the planning committee for Shuchiin Academy’s cultural festival, making this the second anime episode I’ve covered in a row about that topic. (Although the one in Healer Girl wasn’t a pre-Winter Break festival like this one is.)

But this is Shuchiin Academy, home of the sons and daughters of Japan’s wealthiest and most important families, must of course have a suitably grandiose cultural festival. The planning involved here must be an absurd undertaking, and one does get that sense even though we only see a little bit of it here.

Both leads for this segment have an ulterior motive; Miko, for reasons we haven’t really had explained in full yet, really wants the festival to cap with a roaring bonfire. Ishigami, meanwhile, is trying to impress Tsubame, who is also on the planning committee. Ishigami has dealt with some of these people before, during the sports festival from last season, but Miko very much hasn’t, so she feels rather out of place.

And arguments break out over what the slogan for the festival should be, starting with several….creative suggestions from Ishigami’s ostensible romantic rivals, other boys on the committee.

This is probably also the worst the series has ever suffered from the official release’s subpar typesetting.

I believe this is also our formal introduction to Rei Onodera (Yuuki Takada), yet another member of the committee and one who initially clashes with Miko.

Miko’s able to stand up for herself though—including getting everyone on board for her bonfire idea—which is a nice way of showcasing some character development on her part. Ishigami offering to help is much the same.

The second segment deals with another pair of new characters, Karen Kino (Madoka Asahina) Erika Kose (Ayaka Asai). Well, they’re not new characters exactly. Karen and Erika, in addition to being the stars of the spinoff manga We Want to Talk about Kaguya!, have actually had several small appearances dating back to the beginning of the show. And I do mean the beginning. Karen was actually the very first character to get a voiced line in the entire series, other than the narrator.

Here they mostly go about and interview various folks about the upcoming festival. This includes Tsubame, who gets a little sequence showing off her gymnastic skills, and also mentions that there’s actually a legend associated with the cultural festival.

And later, when they interview Shirogane, he alludes to another tradition associated with the festival. A “prank” usually played by the student council that involves installing a giant papier-mache orb on the school roof.

They also interview Kaguya herself, who they promptly lose their entire minds over.

As the title of the spinoff focused on them implies, the two are both down absolutely horrible for Kags. It’d be enough to make me feel a little bad for them if they both didn’t also spend time swooning over, respectively, Tsubame and Shirogane. They’re fun, and they get a lot of entertainingly wrong ideas about what Kaguya is like.

(The fact that Kaguya is an absurdly prodigal archer and has been chosen to light the bonfire that the cultural festival committee worked so hard to get approved by firing an arrow at it makes their total misfires about her personality a bit easier to understand. Still, knowing what we do about her, they’re pretty funny.)

They also interview the game club, which is mostly an excuse for Love is War to once again show off how weird Chika and her (mostly offscreen) other group of friends are. One of them goes full chuuni while explaining their grand plans for the festival, which is animated like something out of Kill la Kill for presumably no real reason other than because it’s funny.

(This joke is also a nod to the origins of Love is War! itself. It’s a commonly known bit of fan trivia that the ancestral pitch for what eventually became Kaguya-sama was a death game manga.)

And lastly, what would an episode of Love is War be without Shirogane being comically inept at something? This time it’s balloon tying.

I don’t need to tell you that his inability to make funny balloon animals leads to him wallowing miserably on the floor, which nearly guilts Chika into helping him. (A decent chunk of the scene is also shot like a moody drama for, again, no real reason but amusing stylistic clash.)

It is notable that this time, though, he actually leaves before Chika can do her whole demon trainer / mom shtick on him. Instead he keeps practicing on his own, this time in the student council room. Kaguya, who is also there, has a hard time because of this, given all the balloons popping.

Here, Love is War pulls of a neat trick of flipping this usually comedic template—which it’s used several times at this point, including once before in this very season—into Shirogane genuinely reflecting on what he sees as his own shortcomings.

But, of course, Kaguya doesn’t see it that way. To her, this is Shirogane’s charm; a dedication in the face of challenge regardless of what that challenge is, be it large or, as in this case, small. The warm, full smile she gives him (and us, given that the scene briefly switches to his POV), is probably the most sincere we’ve seen in the whole show so far. This alone would justify the entire segment even if it weren’t already pretty good.

Things swing back to the comedic for the episode’s final few minutes, in its final scene.

Initially, it seems like Shirogane’s apparent incompetence here can be explained away by the fact that he was using old balloons. But then he tries the same method with brand-new ones, and they promptly pop as well.

Hang in there, Fujiwara.

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

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

Posted on in anime

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 7 – A Culture Festival Full of Surprises

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

And we’re back. Let’s celebrate with Cat Maid Kana.

Lovely.

This week’s episode of Healer Girl is a straightforward one. The high school festival episode is a classic format for anime like this, and it’s no real surprise that Healer Girl can knock one out of the park with minimal effort. We open with the class cafe` that prompts Cat Maid Kana up there, and some cute little gags about how the class spent so much time on the costumes that they had to go with pre-bought stuff for the food and drinks. But hey, no one goes to these things expecting 5-star dining. (If you do, you’re a monster, just FYI.)

The real focus point of the episode picks up about halfway through, where the student council president informs our leads—all of whom are accompanying an overfed Sonia to the nurse’s office—that there’s a gap in the festival schedule. You see, usually the school calls in a surprise performance by a band or something of the like. This year, the band actually got in a car accident, and while the band themselves are fine, their equipment is busted. The student council president is in a tizzy about this, but gets the bright idea that since the girls are all healer apprentices, they should perform as a rock band instead. Sonia, ever self-aggrandizing, agrees to it even in her hobbled, ate-too-much state. (Despite having to cede lead vocals to Kana because of this, which to be fair, she does willingly and of her own accord.)

The “high school rock band performance” is an old anime trope. To me, nothing will ever top the way it was done in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, with J-Rock band ZONE knocking out otaku classic “God Knows” in the process. (And in 2010, Angel Beats! seemed to have doused that particular fire for good with its showstopping third episode, “My Song,” where such a performance marks the first major emotional moment of the series.) Healer Girl‘s take doesn’t match either of those, but those are all-time great anime episodes, so that’s not really a serious knock. Frankly, I’m just happy to see one again.

The lead-up here is a pretty hilarious scene where Kana just conks out after practicing the song for the first time. Exhaustion is no joke, but her bandmates letting her sleep until nearly the very moment they have to go on stage very much is, and it provides an amusing lead-in to the episode’s emotional climax.

The girls’ performance, even all I’ve said aside, gives us another of the series’ trademark free-flowing image-spaces. I will never be unhappy to get one of these, and they are almost always the high points of the show’s episodes. The music here is a lot slower and dreamier than “God Knows”, but it accordingly fits with the Healer Girls’ style in a way that a more uptempo track might not. It’s heavier than their normal material but not in a way that seems out of their ability, and the vocal trade-offs here are pretty astounding.

(This is the first episode since the one where somebody almost died that we’ve gotten to hear the girls sing all at once, I believe. And it’s definitely the first time Sonia has joined them.) There’s also a cute trick at the end where they perform an “encore,” the opening percussion of which immediately smash cuts into the ED.

“A Culture Festival Full of Surprises” may stand as one of Healer Girl‘s less essential episodes. Certainly it’s not as much so as episode 4 or episode 5. But if that’s so, it’s certainly not a bad thing. Sometimes it’s just nice to see the band play.

Song Count: Just one, but as in episode 4, quality makes up for lack of quantity.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [5/15/22]

Anime Orbit Weekly 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’ll be frank with you all, anime fans. This week’s AOW is heavy on discussing the actual shows I watched and light on intro’s and outro’s. Hopefully that’s how you like it! Enjoy.

Birdie Wing

Is it completely wack to say that Birdie Wing clearly cares a lot about class? I was hesitant in making that claim strongly when the series started, but as it’s gone on, it’s become very clear that that coding is intentional. God bless it, Birdie Wing thinks it has things to say. Even wilder; it actually might?

Consider this; this episode features absolutely zero golf at all. Instead, it’s about the fact that the shop Eve and her, basically, family are living out of is getting bulldozed. The slum—the show’s word, not mine—is being forcibly redeveloped by a construction company with mob ties. Our protagonists can’t simply move, either, because the three orphans they’re looking after are illegal immigrants. They’d get deported.

There’s also the implication that Klein (the woman who owns said shop, if you’ve forgotten) and Lily might have to resort to prostitution to get by, something the episode also later implies that they’ve done before. It is an ugly, ugly thing for a show as high camp as Birdie Wing to get into, and by all rights the series should absolutely fall flat on its face here. Maybe if it had brought this up earlier, it would have, but Birdie Wing so clearly believes its own hype that it somehow works. Because of course, the only hope they have of getting out of this awful, awful situation is for Eve to golf them out of it.

This involves pitting Eve against Rose, the lesbian golf mob boss who served as her employer a scant two episodes back. What wasn’t obvious at the time is that the casino deed on-bet there included the land that Klein’s shop is built on. Effectively, this entire mess is Eve’s own fault, even if she couldn’t have known that at the time. She confronts Rose about this and the latter simply blows her off, I suspect this will prove to be a mistake for the golf capo, but time will tell.

Eve spends the rest of the episode training, with the help of none other than Viper, who also lost all her money on that same match two episodes back.

I have to admit, I didn’t really expect to see Viper again at all, but being demoted to comedy relief serves her well. (And even then, she’s able to seduce a rival mobster’s henchman into putting a good word in for Eve.) And somewhere in here we also learn that Eve has amnesia and doesn’t remember anything from before about four years ago. Also that her name is short for “Evangeline”, which, knowing this show, will be relevant somehow.

The whole casino situation will, of course, be eventually settled with ball chess, the sport of queens, with insanely high stakes. How else does anyone solve anything in the world of Birdie Wing?

I wonder how Aoi will eventually factor in here. She has plenty of time to show up, as we are, somehow, only six episodes into Birdie Wing. There is an entire second side of the mountain we haven’t seen here yet, and I cannot wait to take a tour of it.

Estab-Life

By their ninth episode, most single-cour anime are setting up their finale. That might be true of Estab-Life, but as always, the show is so deadpan that it’s a bit hard to tell. Nonetheless, this episode does give us probably the most information we’ve ever directly gotten about how the show’s weird world actually works.

The gist here is simple; the Extractors have to bust out the inmates of a cluster that serves as a massive super-prison. (In fact, it seems to be where all the criminals from all the clusters go, which is curious.)

The main obstacle their goal? The prison’s vastly unpleasant warden, a hulking cyborg-woman who is obsessed with using her inmates to build up power to confront “The Manager,” allegedly the name of the being who controls the Moderators and, thus, indirectly, all of the clusters themselves. She’s no match for the Extractors, though. Equa and co. undo her systemic oppression in the span of what seems like a single afternoon, in a scheme that involves Equa entering the horse race(?!) the cluster hosts and Martes swiping the warden’s key. When they finally break all the inmates out, the warden seemingly outright dies, a very literal case of an oppressor not outliving the system they’ve made.

In lieu of much closure, we get the notion that the Extractors are going to be “busy” from now on—fair, given the sheer amount of inmates our girls now have to escort to new clusters—and also this.

Your guess is as good as mine. I cannot wait to see where this goes.

The Executioner & Her Way of Life

It’s been a while since we last checked in on Executioner, and in that time the show has gotten very weird. Here’s the very short Cliff’s Notes version: Akari has, as we’ve long suspected, used her time travel powers to rewind time to the start of her and Menou’s journey at least a few times, possibly quite a few. A side effect of this is that there are now, essentially, two Akaris. There’s our Akari, who we’ve been following for the bulk of the show so far, and there’s Future Akari, a distant version of herself with immense accumulated knowledge from the repeated time loops and all sorts of traps and contingencies set up in case things go pear-shaped for her “normal” self (who we’ll here call Present Akari for simplicity’s sake.) She is entirely on board for having Menou kill her, but it has to be Menou specifically, and it has to be done properly. In however many loops she’s been through, that hasn’t happened.

Last week, Menou took down Archbishop Orwell, whose corrupt machinations form an entire subplot that the series has since largely left behind. What’s important to know is that she’s dead, and will (presumably) not be coming back.

In the two in-show weeks since then, Menou and Akari have set out on a pilgrimage to somewhere called The Sanctuary. Akari is under the impression that this place will take her in. It’s probably more likely that they’ll try to kill her in some inventive fashion, given that Menou is the one taking her there.

Along the way to this place, they stop at the Mediterranean-esque town of Libelle, which rests on the coast of a massive ocean dominated by one of the frequently-alluded-to Human Errors, a huge magical fogbank called The Pandemonium. The Pandemonium, we’re told, is a place you can easily enter but only leave with immense difficulty. If you’re here thinking that there must be something pretty deadly in there, and that this would be an ideal place for Menou to try killing Akari, you’re more on the ball than Menou herself is, as the idea doesn’t occur to her until Momo explicitly points it out. In general, this episode circles back several times to the idea that Menou isn’t as focused on killing Akari as she “should” be, and she herself starts to question if she’s hesitating or not.

But hold that thought, we’ll come back to it momentarily.

It is also worth explaining that Libelle is the home of a resistance movement of sorts called the Fourth, who at some point a few years ago openly rebelled against the three-caste system that defines much of Executioner’s world. They were beaten (by none other than Flare, of course), but the town remains a hotbed of these particular folks. Their acting leader, Manon (Manaka Iwami), is the daughter of the Count who originally led this movement in the first place, but its current leaders don’t really think of her as much but a naive child. She’s only about Akari and Menou’s own age, after all.

At the end of the episode, she’s shown luring a mute girl into an iron maiden and closing it. I frankly have no idea what that’s about, and it’s more than a little tasteless, but it does at least serve as a pretty stark demonstration that, yeah, this girl is scary in her own way.

As for Menou and Akari? Well, Menou does try ditching her in the Pandemonium—not before a fairly long, relaxed sequence where they go about town and take a bath together, but, you know, eventually. Perhaps predictably, it doesn’t work, and despite Future Akari’s cryptic comments during our brief time following her as she’s within the Pandemonium, something kills her (we don’t see what) and she immediately resurrects next to Menou like nothing ever happened.

I think it is fair to ask where exactly Executioner is going from here, and whether the show’s remaining 6 episodes are enough space to make the journey it wants to. But, Executioner has already changed quite a lot from its showstopping debut, so who’s really to say. The series itself seems dissatisfied with the natural conclusion of its storyline—Menou somehow successfully killing Akari—and I have the feeling that things are only going to get thornier from here on out.

Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club – Season 2

This will already be officially “last week’s episode” by the time you’re reading this, but I wanted to talk about the brilliant little conclusion to Setsuna’s arc in episode six of this season. One of the things I really like about what I’ve seen of Love Live—and especially Nijigasaki—is that it imagines a world where ordinary high schoolers are actually rewarded for pursuing their interests. (I’ve made this observation in pithy tweet form before.) Real high school clubs are mostly things of dry obligation. There are people who enjoy them, but that’s not really the point of them. They’re extensions of a school system that is designed to create good workers, not reward students for the things they love that are not “practical.” In the utopian Love Live universe, they’re the result of pure creative drive and passion. It is very much a fantasy, but it’s one that exists for a reason, and it’s not hard to figure out why it has such broad appeal. (Love Live of course is also popular for a plethora of other reasons, but we’re not talking about those here today.)

Setsuna has always been interesting to me within this context, because her central character conflict is that she feels caught between her love for the school idol club and her responsibility to the student council. Both of these are very important to her, and there have been several times throughout the series where the stress of having a full-on secret identity wears on her. Setsuna, the idol, has never been anything less than a magnetic presence. Nana Nakagawa, her “civilian” identity, is a different story. Nana the straightlaced student council president and Setsuna the school idol come into conflict here, as part of the ongoing storyline about setting up Nijigasaki’s cultural festival.

The short version is that scheduling conflicts lead to the possibility of having to push back the idol club’s activities, and this obviously causes her no small amount of distress. She blames herself, even when no one else does, and is fully willing to just cancel the whole thing. It takes some encouragement from the rest of the Idol Club for her to reconsider. (A solution is eventually found, and it involves teaming up with the school idol clubs of several other nearby schools, but no one said any of this would be simple.)

All this leads to the episode’s linchpin moment; Setsuna’s abandonment of her dual identity entirely. On-screen, in front of the whole school, she ditches her glasses and puts her hair up, a full Clark Kent-to-Superman transformation taking place in front of their very eyes. The shockwave of astonishment that reverberates throughout the school is palpable, and contagious. I have to give a special nod to Nana’s vice president here, who I like to think has a gay awakening in between her reaction to the reveal of Setsuna’s identity….

….and the end of the episode’s insert song a few minutes later, where the camera cuts to her again and she’s crying happy tears.

This week’s episode, on the other hand, centers around Shioriko Mifune. You probably know her as “the one with the little fang.”

Shioriko’s story is simpler than Setsuna’s but also a lot more grounded. Her older sister—Kaoruko Mifune, the very same ‘Mifune-sensei’ who’s now a student teacher in Yu’s music program—was part of her own school’s idol club. But, when the time came to aim for the Love Live that gives the franchise its name, her group couldn’t cut it. This has given Shioriko a pretty limited view of her own capabilities. The broad implication here is that Shioriko wants to be an idol, but doesn’t think she’d be any good at it, and thus limits herself to supporting roles.

To be honest, as someone who maintains a blog where I write about anime as an, oh, third or fourth passion in life following giving up on music and several other things, this actually cuts a little too close to home. So, I certainly sympathize with her, including her mild annoyance when the members of the idol club continue to push the issue.

Scroll down to find out how long this particular statement holds true.

But the fact remains that, throughout the episode, they do eventually manage to convince her to give this whole idol thing an earnest try. It would come across as a little hollow were it not for the fact that one of the people pushing her is her own older sister. Failing at something, she explains, is not the same as regretting it. Kaoruko was sad, certainly, to not be able to make it to the Love Live itself, but she doesn’t regret her time with the idol club. To be honest, and at the risk of embarrassing myself, it is the kind of thing that always hits me right in the heart. Simple, shining emotional messages like that are why Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is good in the first place.

More importantly for our heroines, it seems to be that revelation that gets Shioriko to swing the proverbial bat. The episode climaxes with her stepping alone onto a quiet stage and singing for an audience of no more than a dozen of her fellow idols. Nijigasaki, as always, takes the opportunity to bring her performance to life, her insert song “EMOTION” is a shining pop jewel of whirligig synth-flutes and reverbed finger snaps, the video a hushed collection of library rooms and clock motifs. (The latter may recall, for some viewers, Moeka Koizumi‘s other most famous role; Revue Starlight‘s Daiba Nana.)

The episode ends with her confirmation that after the festival, she’ll join the school idol club. But that feels almost like a formality, more than anything. For the few minutes she fills that empty stage with light, she’s as much an idol as anyone’s ever been.

The final shots of the episode are the rest of the idol club giving her a massive group hug as they welcome her aboard…while a certain someone looks on with what looks an awful lot to me like envy.

But I suppose that is a topic to be discussed next week.

Until then, that’s all for this one. This article is already running well late, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I just drop the embeds in the Elsewhere on MPA section below with no real elaboration.

Elsewhere on MPA

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 6 – Become My Servant! Russian Food and Sweet Dreams

5 Underrated Magical Girls I Think Would Be Fun Hangouts, Based on Nothing but Their Vibes

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 6

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 6 – The Friendship Scheme

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

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

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 6 – The Friendship Scheme

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

“Heh.”

Today, Spy x Family moves into the second phase of its first major arc. Anya’s gotten into Eden Academy, and the first portion of Loid’s mission is complete. We meet his handler Sylvia Sherwood (Yuuko Kaida) for the first time properly here, as she rags on him for blowing a bunch of the agency’s money. (For more on that particular misadventure, you’ll have to see last week’s episode, which I didn’t cover here due to being ill.) The main thing to take away from Sylvia’s speech though is not budgetary concerns, but her explanation of how Eden’s merit and demerit system works.

You see, Loid’s target, Donovan Desmond, only attends certain functions with the families of certain, particularly prestigious students. The students who make up this inner circle are Eden’s Imperial Scholars (an admittedly curious name given that “The East” seems to run under some kind of Communist government, but whatever). One becomes an Imperial Scholar by earning eight Stella stars, awarded to Eden students who get particularly good grades or perform feats that somehow benefit the prestige of the school.

Conversely, there are Tonitrus Bolts, which are “awarded” instead as a disciplinary measure. Eight of those and little Johnny is expelled on the spot, no further questions asked, or opportunities presented. Keep all that in mind, it becomes relevant over the course of this episode.

We begin, though, with the relatively innocuous outing of Anya being measured for her uniform. The tailor promptly scares the hell out of her by casually mentioning to the attending Yor and Loid that kidnapping and ransoms of Eden students have been on the rise lately. Even so, this can’t dull Anya’s enthusiasm for her new uniform for long, and she spends a good few minutes of the episode showing it off. To her credit; it does look very cute on her, although black and gold is ostentatious even for rich kid school uniforms.

Anya actually does get kidnapped, though. Thankfully only very briefly, and she’s saved by Yor before anything can happen to her. (In a scene that is both really cool and genuinely moving. A recurring pattern in the Yor-focused bits of the series. There is something very satisfying about how righteously pissed off she gets when Anya’s kidnappers mistake her for a mere maid.)

Still, the experience rattles her a bit—understandably so—and after heaping praise on her “cool mama”, Anya basically asks her surrogate mother for self-defense lessons. Yor obliges.

The episode then skips ahead to the following day, where Anya properly enrolls in Eden and—as much as any young child does—partakes in the entrance ceremony. There, Loid carefully considers the facts of things; Anya could earn eight Stella stars and become an Imperial Scholar, or she could befriend Donovan Desmond’s young son Damian (Natsumi Fujiwara) and simply be invited over.

Unfortunately, Damian is a little shit, and Anya’s mind-reading makes her immediately privy to that fact. They don’t get on, despite Anya’s valiant (if wildly misguided) attempts to immediately get an invite to his house. Instead, Damian taunts her, calls her an “uggo”, and is generally unpleasant to both Anya and Anya’s actual fast-friend, Becky Blackbell (Emiri Katou). Anya tries to keep her cool, applying Yor’s advice to smile through tough situations. But her attempts come across as….well, just take a look at the header image. (This gag actually works even better in the anime than it did in the manga, that expression just being plastered on her face over the course of a good minute makes the scene hit that much harder.) Eventually, things escalate to the point where Anya can’t take it anymore, and she promptly slugs Damian right in the fucking face.

To the displeasure of her school housemaster, initially. But Anya is able to spin a convincing lie about how she only punched Damian directly in his smug face because he was insulting Becky. Which isn’t really remotely true, but our elegance-obsessed Mr. Herriman humansona here buys it.

You all see it, don’t lie to me.

She manages to get off with just one of the demerit bolts.

All in all, a very entertaining episode, but a rocky start to Anya’s school career. Only one way to find out where it goes from here, anime fans. Until next time.

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

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

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Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 6

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

“The countdown to farewell has already begun.”

It has been three years since I started covering Kaguya-sama: Love is War! In that time, I’ve read much of the original manga, so I knew this day was coming eventually. But hindsight has a way of snapping together things that seemed unrelated at first glance. Call it reading too much into pure coincidence, call it serendipity, call it the norns at work.

In its sixth episode, the show’s third season finally rounds the bend and gets serious. These more dramatic parts of Love is War! are what the series’ reputation is truly built on. I think it would still be beloved without them, but they help the story to feel larger than its constituent characters. Even for someone far removed from the rich kids’ club of Shuchiin Academy, it can reach out and touch a point in one’s own personal timeline, creating resonances both close and far. That is what this episode, and eventually, this entire arc, is all about. Which isn’t to say it’s a drag, (most of this episode is just as funny as the ones before it) but if there are any clocks ticking in your own life, expect to hear them ever louder as you watch it.

The catalyst here is fairly simple; a parent-teacher conference. A minor rite of passage / perfect-storm anxiety machine that every high schooler goes through a few times over the course of their education. Kaguya’s dad, notably, doesn’t show up to hers.

This is perhaps to be expected from her total piece of shit of a father. A man who is a walking bundle of rotten wood held together by petty spite and pure greed, a nearly elemental incarnation of the phrase “Rich Old Bastard.” A figure who, in the scant handful of lines he’s gotten in the series so far, manages to ooze a crochety, warped old-money unpleasantness that is sadly probably the single most realistic thing about this series. I really quite strongly dislike Mr. Shinomiya, if that’s not obvious.

In any case, the person who does show up is Hayasaka’s mother, Nao Hayasaka (Toa Yukinari), who pulls double duty by both attending her own daughter’s conference and Kaguya’s. We learn here that Hayasaka is a total mama’s girl, which is pretty cute. (If also a bit sad, since their exchange here implies that they spend very little time together.)

There’s also some great work from Shirogane’s dad (Takehito Koyasu), who makes a drop-in appearance for the first time in the season, back to his usual antics of being a total weirdo but genuinely good dude.

But the real important development here is what we hear from Shirogane himself, during his parent-teacher conference.

Yes, that Stanford.

Immediately, everything else that happens for the rest of the series has this particular Sword of Damocles hanging over it. Shirogane and Kaguya’s time together in actual close proximity is ending. Not just ending but ending fairly soon. The deadline is in sight.

Kaguya-sama is notable in that its central dynamic, the “geniuses’ war of love and brains” that gives it both its tagline and original Japanese title, has faded the farther we’ve gotten from the premiere of season one. It has always felt—I think as much to its own characters as to us—that Miyuki and Kaguya have had all the time in the world to muster up the strength to finally shoot straight with each other. So their occasional throwbacks to that early period have been charming, but not felt urgent. That is no longer the case. This isn’t a slice of life series; the everyday here is not endless, and time is running out.

Give him some credit, our man knows it’s do or die time.

As I’ve gotten older, it’s felt like I should probably be able to relate to these sorts of stories—high school tales of romance and all—less. But the sense of urgency that Love is War! begins to carry from this point forward is universal. I’m 28, many people who read this column are older or younger than I, but who doesn’t feel Father Time breathing down their neck, at least occasionally?

But as we wish Miyuki good fortune and godspeed, we transition into talking about the rest of the episode. Which is, I must note, still very good, but it’s also a lot more conventional for Love is War!, so there’s simply less to discuss. In the second segment, the urgency is alleviated by one of the aforementioned throwbacks to the show’s early days. Kaguya and Shirogane both manage to galaxy brain their way out of inviting the other to a different school’s cultural festival, happening nearby. Even so, you feel for them.

In the third, Shirogane asks for the girls of the student council to help him evaluate himself “objectively.” This is mostly an excuse for wacky misunderstandings, such as here where Miko thinks he’s asking her out.

And also, for Miko and Chika to say mean but admittedly funny things about him.

But Kaguya, who can’t find a single bad word to say, is who ultimately leaves the day’s biggest impact.

Reinvigorated, Shirogane recommits himself to his plan, and it is for us and time to see if it will work out or not. Godspeed, Miyuki, and good luck.

Bonus Hayasaka Screencap: Dare I say, I think this was also how probably at least some of you reacted when Nao Hayasaka made her on-screen appearance, here.

That’s right, readers. I know your bones.

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

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

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Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 5

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

I knew this day would come eventually.

He wants to express his feelings in rap. Miyuki Shirogane, student council president of Shuchiin Academy, wants to express his feelings through song. No, through performance art, in what is probably the absolute worst medium he could’ve chosen to do so short of perhaps mime. Ask anyone who’s ever been subjected to Lil Dicky; rap and comedy do not mix. Rap and anime have a very uneven track record and historically mix even worse.

A conflux of the three should signal a truly epic crash where Kaguya-sama: Love is War! burns out and never recovers. Improbably, it does not, but that may be because this is A-1’s most impressive production on the season yet, a true cartwheeling display of visual panache put in service of a bizarre pseudo-music video. The music is still very much at its worst the closer it is to actual hip-hop, but at least it’s never unwatchable. The combined first two segments of the episode are basically this Tumblr post, I don’t know what else to say.

Anyone familiar with the “Chika teaches Miyuki to do something” skits of prior seasons will understand immediately what’s going on here. The twist this time around is that Chika is also completely clueless about hip-hop and has to teach herself before she can teach Shirogane anything. This is admittedly pretty funny, but it does drift into the notion that rap is just funny as a concept, which definitely isn’t true and is usually the domain of a specific kind of bad American cartoons. Although Shirogane’s profound badness remains hilarious. His first try at “rapping” here sounds more like a walrus dying slowly. It physically propels Chika into the air.

The “actual” rap as it eventually develops here is, I don’t know, fine. It’s not the kind of skin-peeling cringiness that I usually associate with rap music showing up in cartoons, which is a positive. Shirogane’s actual song is notably old school, having something broadly in common with the retro pop rap stylings of chelmico. and similar acts.

What is he rapping about? Well, initially this is just followup on that karaoke episode. He wants to convince Hayasaka to be more honest with herself and others and such. We also get a flashback to the karaoke place, where Hayasaka mentions that her job is to “keep tabs on” Shinomiya. Hmm.

In any case, the “musical” segment that follows this is pretty damn impressive, just from a production standpoint. For my money though it’s actually Kaguya herself who has the best song, despite it being probably the farthest-removed from hip-hop music. It also has the best visuals, including a truly inexplicable nod to Queen‘s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” (Maybe it’s a pun? “Rap”sody? I don’t know.)

In the largely-unrelated final segment of the episode, we link back up with Maki.

She seems to be doing well.

In what seems to be a recurring pattern, this section of the episode is a lot simpler and less ambitious than what precedes it. It’s mostly Maki venting to the boys again. Ishigami correctly points out that it’s usually best to be quick on the draw in games of love. The fact that all three people in the room have crushes they can’t own up to having, some more involved than others, casts a palpable irony over the whole thing, something the series itself is very much aware of. Maki’s own regret boils hot enough to burn away the tea Ishigami prepares for her, and Yu and Miyuki nearly give themselves a stroke just imagining the other person stealing their crushes.

All in all it’s a pretty simple segment that serves mostly to close out the episode. And it is nice to see Maki making friends, of a sort, it helps all the comedy at her expense feel less mean.

There’s also a new ED this week, presumably a one-off. Once again done in a totally different stlye from the rest of the show, and also featuring a hip-hop soundtrack. (One that I’d go so far to say is a fair bit better than Shirogane’s rap in the actual episode.) It’s cool, but I’ll welcome the return of the usual ED next week.

Until then, Kaguya fans.

Bonus Hayasaka Screencap: Why have one Hayasaka when you could have five?

I should here note that Hayasaka’s song is probably also the one that comes closest to having any real bite to it. It conveys her increasingly fed-up attitude with Kaguya pretty well. She even has something that might actually qualify as a Bar™ if you’re generous, rhyming that she has so many faces that she feels like “a hydra.”

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

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

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 4 – The Prestigious School’s Interview

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Ask any parent, even completely mundane admissions interviews are stressful. School admissions interviews are nowadays mostly the domain of college applicants and the ultrawealthy, but they used to be more common. And as with anything involving both parents and teachers, they are nerve-wracking for all involved. The Forgers, though, aren’t just any parents. We don’t actually explicitly learn if they pass the interview for Anya to get in to the prestigious Eden Academy or not in this episode, but let’s say the forecast is positive. With one…minor exception.

Before the interview itself, the Forgers—along with dozens of other hopeful families—must make a first impression on their way through the academy’s courtyard and to the halls where the interviews are being held. Even this early on, the academy has eyes on them. Recurring character Henry Hendersson (Kazuhiro Yamaji) makes his debut here as one of the school’s housemasters. Hendersson observes the Forgers, along with the other families, from a tower overlooking the courtyard, and we instantly get a pretty good idea of his character. He’s an odd man, obsessed with his personal ideal of “elegance”, but despite what may be easy to assume, he is not the antagonist of this episode. It only gains one of those in its second half.

First, though? Cattle stampede.

Yes, in what I am convinced simply must be a Revolutionary Girl Utena reference, a stampede of random livestock breaks out in the courtyard. Why does Eden Academy have a farmhouse? How did the animals break out of it? Who knows! Stop asking such silly questions. What’s really important that Yor takes out the leader of the herd with, ahem, “yoga techniques.”

Golfing! Wait, wrong series.

Also, the Forger family changes outfits twice over the course of this first half of the episode, once when helping a little boy who’s fallen into an open storm runoff(!) and then again after the cattle attack. Mr. Hendersson is first impressed, and then slightly terrified by all this.

The interview itself is of course the episode’s real focal point. For the most part, it goes well. Hendersson is joined by two other interviewers; the mild-mannered Walter Evans, and this episode’s true antagonist, a vindictive, recently divorced, woman-hating jackass named Murdoch Swan.

The interview mostly goes according to plan. Anya professes to hobbies such as “going to moozeums” and “eating the opera,” and calls her father “a spy-cialist in mental health.” Loid and Yor convincingly recite their canned backstories about meeting at a tailor shop (which is, to both’s benefit, mostly true). Anya even adorably says that she’d give both of her parents “a perfect 100 points,” and that she wants to be with them forever. All seems to be going very well.

And then Swan asks this.

And Anya starts crying. Which makes perfect sense when you remember that she’s a small child being bullied by bitter, snide snake in the grass who takes out his frustrations with his own personal failings on other people. The situation, shall we say, escalates. Loid barely restrains himself from clocking Swan directly in the face—and smashes a nearby mosquito hard enough to crack a hardwood table in two in the process—to say nothing of Yor, who genuinely looks ready to kill the man.

Yor Forger in the process of figuring out, in real time, how to murder a man with a vase and flowers.

About the only thing that stays her hand is Loid taking his “fake” family and simply leaving. His parting remark, something to the effect of not being interested in a school that bullies children as part of its educational system, would be cutting if Swan was the sort to be hurt by such things. But perhaps predictably, he doesn’t really care. (Original mangaka Tatsuya Endou deserves a lot of credit here, Swan is exquisitely hateable.) But this stain on the academy’s honor is enough to piss off Hendersson, who, after the Forgers depart, finally gives Swan what’s coming to him.

Elegantly done.

The episode basically ends here, with a tearful Anya apologizing that she couldn’t do better at the interview. All three Forgers are now worried about the future of their family, and it’s only the knowledge that Hendersson was on their side during this whole mess that prevents this from being an out and out downer of an ending. I called the forecast positive in the opening paragraph because I am quite sure that the Forgers will be fine, but they don’t know that yet. Their concern for each other is sweet. (Frankly, it trumps what I’ve seen from many “real” families in my day, but that’s another conversation altogether.)

We will find out next week, of course, if Anya’s chances of getting into Eden Academy are really as dashed as they all think. 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 Directory to browse by category.

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

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Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 4

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Yuu Ishigami has a conundrum. He, with all of his nerdy insecurities, is harboring a crush on one of Shuchiin Academy’s Popular Girls ™. Our boy is distraught by this in a manner not rare for internet natives of his age. He sees the object of his affection, cheer vice-captain Tsubame Koyasu (Haruka Fukuhara) as untouchable and perfect; somebody who lives in a different world than him and is forever beyond his reach.

He has plain black hair. She has quirky anime hair complete with a two-color gradient. It could never work between them!

Ishigami’s situation would be unenviable even in a normal school. Obviously, he’s not entitled to Tsubame, and what she thinks of him we don’t currently know. But the unspoken, yet, obvious, underline here is that Ishigami’s biggest obstacle to getting Tsubame to consider him as a romantic option is actually himself. Namely his own lack of self-confidence, not any inherent difference between them. Were he in any other high school on Earth, he might get advice that actually reflects that reality. But, he is a member of Shuchiin Academy’s student council. And the person who first pries the knowledge of this crush out of him is none other than our title lead, Kaguya Shinomiya.

Kaguya, I genuinely believe, has nothing but the best of intentions when she tells Ishigami that women are attracted to power, so his first step should be to gain “clout” of some kind. (She suggests gunning for a Top-50 placement in the upcoming exams.) Now, Kaguya may not entirely be wrong in suggesting this course of action—it certainly will attract peoples’ notice if one of the school’s worst students is suddenly out-scoring most of his grade on exams—but anything she says should be taken with a grain of salt. We know, but Ishigami unfortunately does not, that Kaguya comes from a deeply broken home. The Shinomiya Family has drilled into her the importance of regarding others only as tools for self-advancement. And while it’s true that she’s shed much of that programming by this point in the series, the roots of such a dog-eat-dog hypercompetitive mentality are hard to pull out. She’s still approaching this from the wrong point of view by encouraging Ishigami to change himself rather than simply be honest. (Of course, as the series itself humorously points out, that’s as much a reflection as her own unwillingness to be honest as anything else.) Regardless of what happens next, we should keep Kaguya’s upbringing, and how it informs this advice of hers, in mind. Although it is worth noting that she does realize that he needs to do something, or else….well.

At least she’s self-aware.

She does, at least, wisely shoot down Ishigami’s ideas for “ultra romantic” confession gestures, including such bizarre notions as leaving themed flowers on Tsubame’s desk every day for a week and presenting her with a half-empty photo album and expressing a desire to “fill it up with pictures of us together.” That much is probably the right call.

Now, let’s be clear here. Regardless of any romantic intentions, Ishigami improving his grades would hardly be a bad thing. He spends the second third of the episode studying, and it’s explicitly pointed out to us that it’s not the thought of wooing Tsubame so much as simply the fact that Kaguya actually believes he can improve that motivates him to try his hardest. Recall that not many people have ever expressed even that much faith in Ishigami before.

But, in a recurring theme for Love is War!—and honestly, Aka Akasaka‘s work in general—simply wanting something is not enough. Despite his best efforts, Ishigami places only around the 150 mark. An improvement, to be sure, but a far cry from his attempted coup of the grade rankings. He is absolutely devastated. (“So bitter that blood might as well shoot out of his eyes”, in the words of the Narrator (Yutaka Aoyama).)

But, of course, failure is not the end. Kaguya confronts Ishigami, getting him to admit that he is torn up about this, and he will try his damnedest to do better next time. Kaguya approves, although (jokingly?) warns him that the “kid gloves” of her study help are coming off.

It is interesting to me, in a series that is very firmly in the romance genre, how well Kaguya and Ishagami’s relationship is written. They’re certainly not romantic partners—and many romance anime neglect to depict friendship as much more than a steppingstone to love at all—and honestly, they don’t seem terribly close as friends in the typical way one imagines such a relationship. But they clearly care for each other; Kaguya would not spend as much time trying to push him as she does if she didn’t. Ishigami, in turn, would not care about those attempts if he didn’t on some level like and respect Kaguya. It’s an interesting, tangly relationship, which makes it feel very real. The two have come along way from Ishigami frequently suspecting that Kaguya was trying to kill him back in season one to a true kouhai / senpai pair.

I do fear I’ve perhaps made this entire part of the episode sound overly serious or even dour. In truth it’s not much more so than any episode of the season so far, but I think the character work here is interesting enough to devote the bulk of the column to. The gags are great throughout, here, of course, but that’s par for the course with Love is War! I particularly like this little nod to a fact we know about Shirogane; his tendency to shadowbox when psyched. Showcased here when he again scores the #1 spot on the exam rankings.

In any case, the final third of the episode is about Chika and Kaguya FaceTiming with Shirogane while sleep deprived.

There’s nothing particularly complicated about this segment, which brings the episode to a fun close that avoids being a trifle. Chika stays over at Kaguya’s place for a sleepover. She meets “Mr. Herthaka”, yet another of Hayasaka’s alter egos. This one has….quite the backstory, as we soon learn.

But really, the highlight of the evening comes when, through a series of convoluted misunderstandings, Chika gets the idea that Shirogane and “Mr. Herthaka” are romantically involved. In doing so, she resurrects a proud, ancient tradition perfected by her ancestors.

A completely unironic nosebleed gag in an anime in 2022? Nature really is healing.

The episode ends on a sweet note, though. Kaguya, very much past her usual bedtime and barely able to think straight, nearly tells Shirogane that she’s into him, only to pass out mid-sentence. A little frustrating? Maybe, but I can’t help but find it adorable. Will these two colossal nerds ever truly have the courage to own up to their feelings? Perhaps we’ll find out next time, Kaguya fans.

Oh, and before I forget, the Bonus Hayasaka Screencap. How about the chart of the many faces of our favorite blonde maid that we get at the episode’s end?

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

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

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Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 4 – First Steps, Horror, and a First Job!

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Today on Healer Girl: someone almost dies on an operating table!

Yes, really!

I can’t pretend this is an entirely unexpected turn for the show. It’s been fairly clear from the jump that the practices of “vocal medicine” and, you know, normal medicine are well entwined. On its own, then, it’s not strange that Healer Girl would eventually involve someone doing Actual Serious Surgery in an Actual Hospital Setting. But I am surprised that the show went there this early. The girls have just acquired their assistant’s licenses, as they remind us at the top of this episode with Kana’s amusing bragging.

Putting them in a medical setting this dire seems like skipping a step. Especially, since, as the first part of the episode hilariously demonstrates, none of them are even really used to seeing blood. (They end up “training” by watching a bunch of splatter horror flicks, an idea that strains credulity. It’s very funny to watch them freak out, though, so I’ll let the show have this one.)

Plus, on the other hand, the girls are not doing the surgery. (Thankfully.) Instead, our heroes’ assignment here is to provide live music during a surgery, with the idea being that it calms down the surgeon and assistants and helps them focus. Healer Girl has mostly been pretty good about not pitting its own fantastical branch of medicine against the mundane thing so far, so this arrangement is smart on that front, as well.

Not that everyone feels that way. Ria is fine with it. Shouko, her assistant, is fine with it. And of course, our protagonists Kana, Reimi, and Hibiki are all (eventually) fine with it. But one person who isn’t is the actual operating surgeon. Not because of any “this isn’t real medicine” ideological conflict—something I have to admit I became worried about when the character was introduced—but simply because this is his first surgery, too, and he thinks his skills are being belittled.

Despite his distaste, he goes along with it. (The person in charge of his department favors experimenting with live music in a surgical setting and is an old college classmate of Ria and Shouko’s, so really, he’s outnumbered and outranked.) And for a while, it seems like everything is basically fine. The girls sing in shifts, with each of them ducking out and letting the other carry the tune for a while to rest their voices and get some water at set intervals.

Then, just as he’s about to finish up, the surgeon notices that the issue with the patient is far more widespread than initially realized, and they need to do more than they initially planned. This goes badly. As in, “shots of the heart rate monitor going down and one of the nurses yelling ‘he’s critical!'” badly. In keeping with how we’ve seen this work before, the girls’ song-environment promptly falls to pieces under the stress, all three of them are shaken. But crucially they don’t actually panic. Instead, Reimi pulls Kana back in to the song with what might be my favorite two-line exchange of the whole season so far.

Healer Girl really loves imagery of ground and earth being knit back together after a cataclysm, this is the second of these “song spaces” to invoke that particular visual trope, and it looks even better here than it did two episodes ago when Ria comforted a pregnant woman. Angels fly from the skies and return everything to a serene—and slightly surreal—calm.

In terms of the actual surgery, a more experienced doctor intervenes and fixes the patient up. Crisis averted; everything is fine.

The girls take the well-earned time to bask in a job well done, and Ria is relieved that she didn’t actually have to intervene, praising the girls for their good judgment and level heads. The grumpy doctor, if you were wondering, does eventually thank the girls for their services, though only in a rather brusque and abrupt way. (You ever stepped in front of someone’s car while they’re pulling out of a parking lot? Not the best idea, usually.)

More importantly, back home, the girls text each other in the episode’s epilogue. Kana thanks Reimi for encouraging her. It’s a cute, warm end to another casually dazzling episode. How does Healer Girl make it look so easy?

Song Count: Just one, technically, this time around, but what a song it is.

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