One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Hello folks! You’ll have to forgive the late upload today, I thought I had one in the tin for this morning already only to wake up and realize I did not. Hence; this one coming to you a bit late. (Don’t worry, I’m going to be penning a couple this afternoon, so this shouldn’t happen again. At least not for a while.)
Something I like about One Piece, and I’m not sure if I’ve outright said this, is the amount of weight it gives its battles. In modern shonen, even the very best fight scenes can sometimes feel over too quickly owing to the rather brisk pace of most modern TV anime and the manga they’re adapted from. (A particularly bad offender here, because I never miss a chance to take a shot at it, is the anime version of God of High School.) This isn’t to say the opposite is inherently a good thing, as someone who grew up watching a lot of Dragonball Z with my stepfather I am well aware that a single fight being doled out across weeks or potentially even months can be on the draining side, but still, I think so far, One Piece strikes a nice balance. (How this goes in the show I couldn’t tell you, given that I’m not watching said show.)
Not a ton actually happens in this chapter from a “narrative perspective.” Basically it boils down to “Luffy and Zolo cover for Usopp’s little ‘crew’ of kids as he orders them to flee the battlefield with Kaya.” But everything has a nice sense of solid urgency. That it manages to convey that in the still rather economical space of just 20 or so pages is pretty impressive. (Get used to that observation, I don’t think it’s the first time I’ve made it here and it will almost certainly not be the last.)
Take for example, the mostly-comical Butchie getting a chance to slam into the ground with enough force to do that “rocks and terrain explode everywhere” thing that people (including myself) are so fond of.
“What happened to the ground?!” “My parents took it down because I’m grounded :/”
Or even this on-its-face silly scene where the pirate kids wail on a still-laid-flat Captain Kuro with sticks. Sure, it’s funny, but he could straight-up disembowel those children if he wanted to. That’s a scary notion!
Especially since Kuro is only wounded to the extent of feeling the need to remark that Luffy slugging him in the face “smarted.” (What is he, a British schoolboy?)
Usopp certainly knows the score, as he spends several pages trying to get the kids (and Kaya) to run away.
Eventually, he convinces them to by framing it as an order from their ‘captain,’ which is pretty clever. I don’t know if I’ve properly conveyed this but I really have come around on Usopp since his introduction, it’s clear he cares a lot for these people and (spoiler alert here) I know from prior knowledge that he joins the main cast eventually, so I’m interested to see what he adds to their dynamic when he does. (He also gets an amusing and very literal cheap shot at Django, here, which is mostly worth noting because it literally makes the big bad hypno-pirate say “owie.”)
None of this is to say our other heroes don’t get a minute to shine here, though, because they do. Specifically, Luffy and Zolo pull off a pretty badass “you shall not pass” sort of moment when intercepting Django, who’s been ordered to pursue Kaya and the kids.
And the chapter ends there, leaving what will become of the heiress and Usopp’s little buddies a question for tomorrow. See you then, pirates.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
Sometimes I open these reviews by calling something unusual, weird, or peculiar. This is not one of those times; Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, a romcom from this already romcom-saturated year, is pretty normal. It’s about a pretty normal pair of high school sweethearts, who attend a pretty normal (by anime standards) high school, and have a relationship that is, all around, pretty normal. This is neither a strength nor a weakness, on its own, but it’s worth keeping in mind what we’re actually looking at here.
Even compared to, say, the also fairly conventional My Dress-Up Darling from just a season prior, much about Shikimori is very much standard for its genre. There are really only two axes along which it will catch any interest; for one, the couple are actually dating even from the very start of the story, admittedly a bit of a rarity for the genre. For two; Shikimori herself (Saori Oonishi) is….well, cool. Princely, as more than one character puts it. The series goes out of its way to suggest that, between her and her boyfriend, the easily-flustered shortstop Izumi (Shuichirou Umeda), she’s actually the more masculine of the two. (This despite being shorter and having pastel pink hair. It’s mostly a vibe thing, and it’s usually sold pretty well.)
An important thing to note is that Shikimori began life as a series of Twitter comics. In their original form, Shikimori’s “coolness” was essentially the punchline to a joke. A very simple subversion of expectations that works well in that format.
As such, while Shikimori and Izumi, as well as their supporting cast, are definitely decently-written, both they individually and the anime on the whole feel underdeveloped. The main pair are cute together and I buy that they’re in love—I get why she likes him and why he likes her, which is important—but there is just a little something missing. And over the course of the anime adaption, that absence becomes more and more pronounced, even in the show’s best episodes.
But, let’s focus on the positives first. As mentioned, while most of the characters fall into broad archetypes they are at least competent executions on them. Shikimori genuinely does come across as pretty cool, and maybe even a little intimidating. Izumi seems nice, and is a total softie in an endearing way. Their main group of three friends includes a chummy hothead (Shuu Inuzuka; played by Nobuhiko Okamoto), a feisty wildcat who’s good at sports and also herself seems to have something of a thing for Shikimori (Kyou Nekozaki; Misato Matsuoka), and a stoic, somewhat snarky lovable weirdo (Yui Hachimitsu; Rina Hidaka). All are solid, and it’s fun to watch them interact.
Magic Planet Anime understands the glory of Hachimitsu.
Visually, the series is excellent, directed by a team that includes many staff who will eventually be making the Oshi No Ko anime. They breathe a sense of vibrancy into the school life setting that really does make it feel like a real, present place, and the set design in particular contributes a lot to that. Watching it, you can practically feel the Sun illuminating your face as you walk through the school courtyard. It takes talent to do that, and that talent is worth pointing out and respecting. And at times, it does manage to be genuinely romantic, with relative mundanities like theater and theme park dates blown up big enough that you can really immerse yourself in the emotions they convey. In these moments, when Shikimori is essentially at its peak, it does a good job of that.
And I really wish I could say those moments defined the whole show, that Shikimori lived up to such strong visual work, but mostly they don’t and it doesn’t. It’s pleasant, it’s decent fun, but it is rarely anything more than that, despite these highlights.
Fundamentally, it’s unfair to say any of Shikimori‘s strengths are in some way insufficient because it fails to measure up to some imagined version of whatit could be. Things like that are pat and they’re rarely particularly substantial. Yes, Shikimori would be a bit more interesting if, say, Izumi was a girl (he wouldn’t need much of a design change to pass), but a criticism that basic misses the fact that Shikimori is routinely unwilling to commit to even its fairly tame level of gender non-conformance. The entire premise of the anime is that Shikimori is a cool, princely type, but just as often, it’s Izumi who is the assertive one in their relationship’s key moments. A trend that continues up until the last episode, where it’s Izumi who plants the couple’s first kiss on….Shikimori’s cheek.
And this would itself be fine if the show had a bit more fire to it. Comparing almost anything to Kaguya-sama: Love is War! is going to make that thing look bad, but it and Shikimori aired in the same season, and (spoilers here) they both have a kiss in the finale. It is telling thatKaguya‘s finale is a heart-pounding hurricane of grand romantic gestures that defy all common sense and reason, and the kiss that caps that episode is a full-on makeout. Shikimori just can’t compete with that kind of thing, even with all the visual panache in the world. It can’t even really compete with the aforementioned Dress-Up Darling, a series that is in many respects much less consistent, but by simply having the running plot of two crazy kids who aren’t dating yet but clearly eventually will be, it feels much more urgent. And, frankly, that show’s unabashed horniness—tasteless as it could often get—feels more reflective of a lived-in teenage experience than Shikimori is. (So does Kaguya, despite its absurd premise and in-theory unrelatable rich kid cast, for that matter.)
As it is, Shikimori is clearly is aiming for a laid-back, iyashikei-esque easy pace. It achieves that, so it’s perhaps even more unfair to complain that that’s “all” it does. But at the same time, this absence of any more substantial emotional weight is highlighted by the show itself, because when it can find a piece of the original story that it can make something truly wild out of, it does so with gusto.
Take, for example, the side character Kamiya (Ayaka Fukuhara).
Kamiya once fell hard for Izumi, too, but no longer pursues him because she knows he’s taken, and she has no chance. Over the course of the episode-ish’s worth of material that focuses on her, she imagines herself as a counterfeit Cinderella, her glass slippers and Prince Charming alike missing.
The series itself bends around her, bringing a rainy overcast to the serene high school rooftop, threatening a Biblical flood. Hers is a deep, dramatic, and messy love. And it demands a story louder, wilder, and more complicated than Shikimori, one that could accommodate the drama that inherently comes along with this kind of thing. But Shikimori is not that story, and her feelings prove too much of a challenge for it to wholly untangle. It’s not coincidental that when her short arc reaches its conclusion, she essentially disappears from the show entirely.
It still feels wrong to judge a series based on what it isn’t, rather than what it is. But the pieces of the show that focus on Kamiya—and other, smaller shards of something that is simply bigger than the rest of the series, always out of shot or between the frames—almost demand you to imagine a world beyond Shikimori‘s fairly limited notion of teenage romance. There is a lot else out there, and on some level, Shikimori knows this. In a few places, it almost seems frustrated with itself, that it cannot truly cut loose from the bounds of its own genre. The most obvious of these is perhaps the OP animation, which depicts a dimension- and genre-hopping pair of micro-vignettes for our lead couple, far removed from the series itself. Including even, perhaps most tellingly, one where there is a token acknowledgement of that same basic criticism I mentioned earlier; a version of the series in which Izumi and Shikimori are both girls.1
These two shots are literally all of Fem!Izumi we ever see, but they raise the question of why she looks so sad and troubled. In this tiny bit of non-verbal characterization, the OP animation establishes that she and Shikimori must have a rather different relationship than that between regular Izumi and Shikimori. The fact that I’m able to write this much about it is ample evidence both that this team is quite talented and that there’s a lack of stuff like this to chew on in the main series.
What you get, then, is a series that is a warm, personable elevation of what is ultimately very thin material. This isn’t to say that the Shikimori is a bad show—if I thought that I’d say so outright—but its origins as a gimmick strip on Twitter never really stop casting a long shadow over it. And in the end, it comes across as an elaborate expression of a very basic thought; “wouldn’t it be great if I had a tall, cool girlfriend?” Sure, it would be. Lots of people would love that. But you need something beyond that to push it past the realm of the merely cute, and Shikimori can only manage that in frustratingly short bursts. I find it almost impossible to imagine actively disliking Shikimori, but at the end of the day, you are basically watching six hours of fluffy Pixiv fanart.
The ongoing new romcom boom will do weird things to this particular period of anime in the long view of history. It’s hard to say if this show—or My Dress-Up Darling, Komi Can’t Communicate, etc. etc.—will persist particularly long in the public memory. In the case of Shikimori specifically, I rather doubt it. If it picks up a long-term fanbase, it will be a cult one, made up of people for whom the show offered some measure of comfort during difficult situations or simply helped them get through a day. To those people, Shikimori will be a cup of tea during an illness or a cool breeze on a summer day. To everyone else, it will be a pleasant, but half-remembered memory that pops up like a firework into the sky; brilliant for a fleeting moment, and then gone.
1: A correction: A commenter pointed out that this is actually Kamiya, which comparing the screenshots is obvious and I feel a little silly for thinking otherwise. Still, given its juxtaposition with all the alternate universe stuff I think my confusion is a bit more understandable, and my larger point still stands.
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.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Today’s chapter is a terrific little tornado of tough-talk, tussling, and takedowns. First of all; if you were worried about Nami yesterday, well, don’t be. Luffy happens to (quite accidentally) get between Django’s chakram and Nami’s very vulnerable body. Unlike Nami, Luffy can take a blade to the head just fine.
Average Abdullah the Butcher match aftermath.
Not that he won’t complain. In fact, the speech bubble for his yell is so loud that it’s larger than the panel!
The real development of this chapter though is Kaya arriving on the scene. She calls out to her former butler to stop all this, but, predictably, it does not help.
She even just tries to buy Captain Kuro and his crew off, but because Kuro is a villain in a shonen manga, that doesn’t work either.
Kaya pulls out a gun in response to that little comment, but Kuro successfully rattles her by listeing off all the things he’s done for her, and making it clear that he hated every minute of it. Then he goes on the defensive, and Usopp tries to cut in to prevent him from hurting Kaya, despite his being rather unsuited to the task.
But then, well, someone else gets the drop on him.
He’s gonna feel that in the morning.
The chapter ends with that explosive pop from Luffy. I imagine Kuro will have something to say about that tomorrow.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
I know on some level that I can’t just spend every one of these columns gushing about how goddamn entertaining Lycoris Recoil is, but I really, really want to. If anyone had any lingering doubts, “The More The Merrier” proves that Lycoris Recoil’s spy movie chops are no fluke. It’s stylish and intriguing with a fun little left turn at the end. Basically, the perfect second episode for something like this.
We open on a delightfully Lain-y scene of two hackers meeting in the confines of cyberspace. One is Walnut, who we met last week, and the other is a new face (or mask, anyway), Roboto.
The two’s relationship can perhaps best be described as tense, and we learn early on here that it was Roboto who told the mysterious billionaire Allen Adams where Walnut’s apartment was. You may remember said apartment getting blown up via car touchpad toward the end of the premiere. Walnut, perhaps out of options, hires the LycoReco cafe girls to get him out of the country. This seems like a fairly straightforward premise, and it mostly is, but many small details shade the entire journey.
To start with, before the mission even begins, we learn Takina and Chisato have been paired up for about a month now. And we learn that Adams, under the alias “Mr. Yoshi,” has become an occasional customer of the cafe. (He tries very hard to play the role of the nice, well-intentioned wealthy customer. Maybe a little too hard, even bringing Chisato a souvenir from a trip abroad to Russia in the form of a small toy.)
The mission itself is a study in contrasts. Chisato and Takina have very different personalities that happen to work pretty excellently together, and almost every single facet of the job they pull off here sees the two’s approaches deliberately juxtaposed. Chisato evidently spaces out during much of the briefing and doesn’t note down most of the minute transit details about where she’s going or how to get there, Takina has them memorized. Takina drinks a “jelly drink”—Soylent or something?—to quickly and utilitarianly get a boost of energy before anything actually dangerous happens, Chisato on the other hand chows down on a bento box.
The actual spy work part of the mission consists of escorting Walnut while a group of mercenaries in the employ of Roboto—who we eventually learn is himself working for Allen—pursue him. There’s some fun stuff in here, too. When the two meet up with Walnut (who spends the entire episode dressed in a squirrel suit, in a truly inspired bit of costume design), for example, Chisato is disappointed that the flashy Lambo-like supercar she’d spotted in the parking lot isn’t their ride for the mission.
When things inevitably get hairy, culminating in an office building shootout with Robot’s mercs, Chisato’s still using her rubber bullets while Takina has made only the minor compromise of aiming for shoulders instead of heads. Even here, the two are very different. Chisato’s approach, tellingly, seems to be the more effective of the two. In an impossibly cool moment that I really hope has some eventual sci-fi hokum explanation, Chisato is able to calmly sidestep her way out of point-blank rifle fire, literally waltzing between shots like it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
Minutes later, in what’s becoming a recurring pattern, she tend the wounds of one of their enemies so he doesn’t bleed out.
This seems like a mistake; as she’s doing that, Takina and Walnut leave the building, only for the squirrel-suited hacker to be riddled with bullets from across the rooftop. The ensuing bloody mess is the first time we’ve seen Chisato even remotely rattled at all in the entire first two episodes, and she and Takina grimly escort his dead body in the back of an ambulance.
But then, just as the episode seems like it’s going to end on a down note, Walnut rises from the ambulance bed, and takes off his helmet, revealing himself to be….
Mizuki??
Yes, it turns out that the entire time, it was Mizuki in the suit, and this entire episode’s plot was a blind op. The Lycorii handled the hard part while, simultaneously, Mizuki and Mika handled the fakeout, which included the stupid squirrel costume; itself both bulletproof and stuffed with exploding blood packs.
This kind of borderline-corny twist is the sort of thing you can only get away with if you’re completely un-selfconscious about your genre. And thankfully, Lycoris Recoil seems to be. The episode ends with the real Walnut, a young girl who promptly switches to the also-fake name Kurumi (Misaki Kuno, thankfully operating in her lower, more naturalistic register rather than what she used for Chisato recently over in Prima Doll), moving into the cafe as payment for helping them out with future missions.
Spot the squirrel.
And we close on Mr. Adams once again patronizing the cafe, before asking Mika point-blank what sort of work he and Chisato actually do. Perhaps a lead-in for next week’s episode?
I realize I’ve leaned really heavily on the “recap” aspect of this column for this one. To be honest, so far almost all of Lycoris Recoil‘s strengths are in intangibles like style, tight pacing, and just generally being fun as hell to watch. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing thematic here; it really is worth noting how hard that contrast button between Takina and Chisato is being slammed, and who knows what the addition of Kurumi to the cast is going to do to that. This is to say nothing with the further hints at some larger overarching web of conspiracy, here, including the DA still hunting for the man in the blurry background of that photo from last episode and, of course, Allan Adams’ recurring appearances.
Until the answers make themselves known, 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 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!
Oh god.
Do we really have to?
If you had told me a year ago, when we didn’t know anything about this, that this was how I’d be reacting to its first episode, I’d have never believed you.
The thing that sucks most is that I am not this person. I am not the person who goes into every anime season looking more for what I can drop and complain about than what I can watch and enjoy. I have met people like that, and they’re annoying. I certainly have never wanted to give that impression from my website, which by and large I try to devote mostly to positive anime criticism. The series I’ve disliked enough to review them negatively are few and far between. Enough so that it’s a tag on my review archive, specifically so people can avoid it if they want to.
But sometimes, unfortunately, for many of the same reasons that art can be an essential balm to the soul, art can be bad. The anime adaption of Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer is bad.
Guys. It is so bad.
How did this happen? Why did so many of you vote for it in the poll? Did I do something wrong?
Okay, no, to be fair. To be so fair that it is physically painful, this is not the worst-produced anime I’ve ever seen. Barely. I’ve seen a couple that look worse. Magical Girl Spec Ops. Asuka was down there. Pride of Orange was down there (how the fuck have I had to reach for that thing as a comparison point twice in one day?). Modern Magic Made Simple, a tragic conflux of rancid taste and animated-at-gunpoint production values that I have blessedly only ever seen one episode of, is worse.
But this is bad. Make no mistake. Not mediocre, not so-so. Bad. The kind of bad that really makes you say to yourself “holy fuck there is too much anime being made right now.” I invite you to look at any random 5-minute slice of this episode and then do the same for any other anime I’ve covered so far this season. Hell, any anime I’ve ever covered on this site. Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer‘s anime looks worse than the vast majority of them. This is unacceptable on a basic level.
I really want to know what happened. Studio NAZ are not really a known quality, they assisted on Sabikui Bisco two seasons ago, and that show certainly did look pretty rough in spots, but the Sabikui Bisco anime was also not adapting one of the best manga ever written. (Even so, I don’t remember it being this bad.)
Maybe it’s a difference in expectations. In this sense, I am That Person. Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer is one of my favorite manga of all time, a masterful pastiche of action shonen from the pen of the endlessly talented Satoshi Mizukami, one of his medium’s true modern auteurs alongside the likes of Dowman Sayman, Imitation Crystal, and in a more mainstream sphere, perhaps Tatsuki Fujimoto (I’ll get back to you on that last one once I finish Chainsaw Man). The man’s work is sprawling and spans a number of genres and almost 25 years of history. If you’re here for recommendations, go read—read, do you understand? Not watch—Biscuit Hammer. Then read Spirit Circle. Then watch Planet With. Even his minor stories are homeruns, but those are the big ones, the ones that truly are essential and some of the best manga penned in the last 20 years. (Or anime, in the case of Planet With.)
Biscuit Hammer, in its original form, is fun, riveting, full of interesting little twists and turns, and has a profound thematic core that cuts to the heart of the genre it so clearly admires and, more broadly, resonates emotionally with many, many readers. We will get into some of the specifics of that over the course of these twelve weeks—god, twelve fucking weeks of this—but that’s the short version. The Cliff’s Notes.
Adapting this thing to anime was probably always going to be really hard. But I must ask; would it have been too much to ask to at least try?
The main problem actually isn’t even the piss-dull production values, although they certainly don’t help. It’s the pacing. In the manga, main character Yuuhi Amamiya (Junya Enoki, completely phoning it in) comes across as a tedious, self-absorbed, petulant dick. He is those things, and that characterization is on purpose. But the first half or so of this first episode is an instructive exercise in the difference between manga pacing and anime pacing. Yuuhi being a jerk on the page is easy to breeze through because, in a comic book, you can read at your own pace. In an anime you are simply stuck there for however many minutes a scene lasts.
Over the course of the first half of this episode, Yuuhi gets roped into being a chosen one by a magic lizard (Noi Crescent, played here by Kenjirou Tsuda) and blows that off. Understandable, but we have to sit through his annoying dialogue about why he doesn’t want to be part of it. Less understandable, you could cut that down. Later, when he starts to develop the powers granted to him in service of this world-saving quest, namely a form of limited telekinesis, he uses it to get a peek at his teacher’s panties. At some point, choosing to preserve this—one of several such scenes from the early portion of the manga before it really found its footing—instead of cutting it in lieu of almost anything else feels like active taunting.
Yuuhi gets some much more granular characterization later on that helps me, as someone with prior knowledge, deal with all this. For a total outsider? I would blame no one for dropping the anime right then and there. Which would be tragic only because they’d be unlikely to give the much better manga a shot.
Eventually, through a combination of a laughably middling action scene and some exposition, Yuuhi gets the gist; the world is being threatened by a, we’ll say sorcerer for now, who summons monsters called golems, and who threatens to crack the world asunder with the giant invisible-to-normals mallet that gives the series its English title. (It’s called Hoshi no Samidare domestically, if you were curious.)
It’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm to go into any of the specifics here. The fight scene is very short and scored by a wildly inappropriate EDM soundtrack that reminds me a lot of that of The God of High School. The golem here retains its charmingly doofy look from the original series, so that is a minor positive.
Indeed, I will say this much, buried under all this mediocrity is one single real bright spot. Something that the otherwise well below par anime adaption cannot smother. If you’re familiar with the manga, you can already probably guess what I mean.
For some people the term “tomboy” really just doesn’t cut it.
Samidare Asahina. Princess Samidare. Samidare of the Stars. Lucifer. Played here by Naomi Oozora, who, full credit, really seems to be trying, unlike almost the entire rest of the voice cast.
Samidare is the true focal character of Biscuit Hammer, and she is a fascinating individual, for reasons the show hints at here but won’t properly get to until later. (Assuming the pacing doesn’t also fall to shambles there, that is.)
I actually find describing Samidare’s character a little difficult, because there isn’t really much else like her. She’s a willfully authoritarian little brat who, for reasons as yet undisclosed to us, mostly wants to stop the Biscuit Hammer from falling so she can destroy the planet instead. Near the end of the episode, she jumps off of her own balcony to test both Yuuhi’s power and his loyalty. In its last minute, she demands he swear loyalty to him, and in an action that completely defies every single thing we’ve seen of the young man so far, he feels like he has to.
I would compare Samidare, specifically the anime’s Samidare, to Siesta from The Detective is Already Dead or Aika from Blast of Tempest. A young, strong-willed girl whose sheer force of personality and just sum competence are so much greater than everyone else’s that she warps the story around her. Unlike them and other “removed woman” characters, Samidare is very much alive and present, still able to actively wield that influence.
In the original manga, this had the fascinating effect of making it almost seem like Samidare was actively stealing the series’ protagonist spot from Yuuhi, only sharing it on her own terms. Here, because the adaption is simply not nearly as good as the original, it captures only a fraction of that essence. Still, no amount of incompetence can completely defang her. She’s a nugget of gold panned from muddy water. When she folds her arms, her back to the sky, with the Biscuit Hammer hanging ominously, obscured by the clouds behind her, you can see the spirit of the original Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer in there, if you squint. Perhaps that sheer power of personality is why the manga is named after her in its original Japanese.
But those few feint echoes of the original manga are not enough to save this as an adaption, and trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who’d watch this knowing nothing about the original? Puh. I cannot imagine that this episode would make them at all interested in Lucifer. It does almost the exact opposite of what a good adaption is supposed to do, in that it magnifies every weakness of the original material and creates new ones while pruning off the areas where it excelled. Even purely as an ad for the manga, this first episode is an almost complete failure. Considered as its own standalone piece of work, it is perhaps even worse.
I will say, I am going to try to cover the remainder of the anime in the best faith possible. (What you are reading is the kindest version of this column that I can manage, and I mean that in total seriousness.) So whatever lies ahead, we will face it together. You all wanted me to cover this, for whatever reason, so I am going to cover it. If that means twelve weeks of scrounging for bright spots, then so be it.
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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.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Today’s chapter continues basically directly on from yesterday’s, forming a clean continuation of the battle between Zolo and the Meowban Brothers, one of whom, Siam, has stolen two of Zolo’s three swords, as Nami so helpfully recaps for us with a zippy one-liner.
I kind of love this line, and to be honest there’s quite a bit of fun dialogue scattered (cattered?) throughout the chapter. I’m not sure how much of it is a faithful conveyance of Oda’s original dialogue and how much of it is the translator having a spot of fun. I suspect it’s a bit of both.
A “pirate-flavored pancake.” That’s poetry, right there.
Siam continues to make me slightly uncomfortable, but Butchie is a decently fun character, “cat-a-pault” shouts and all. Zolo gets some good moments here too, including one where he deliberately takes one of Usopp’s slingshot bullets to the back so that way the cat brothers don’t turn their attention on him and Nami.
Of course, there’s really only so much the guy can do. Django steps in when Nami tries to return Zolo’s swords to him, injuring her what looks to be rather badly.
And not long after that, Captain Kuro arrives, and he’s more than a little angry that the Black Cats have been dragging their feet.
The chapter ends there. Tomorrow, we learn what becomes of Luffy and friends.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
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.
Ko Yamori (Gen Satou) is having girl problems. Quite the opposite of the many heartbroken protagonists who litter his genre, Ko has recently turned someone else down, on the grounds that he doesn’t really understand what “love” or wanting to date someone actually are yet. Through a combination of resultant bullying and just plain ol’ feeling bad, this has made him want to stop going to school. So, he does. He skips class by day and walks about town late at night. The city is neon-on-black and blown out around him as he absorbs the relative tranquility of a small playground and rambles to himself.
Scrolling post-sundown social media (never a great idea), he gets it in his head to try drinking, despite being only 14. He finds an alcohol vending machine—did you know those were a thing? I certainly didn’t—and, more than a little paranoid as he does so, slips a few coins in. The machine emits a yellow-amber glow all the while, almost sickly in its illumination of the scenery.
He is then promptly jumpscared.
That is Nazuna Nanakusa (Sora Amamiya), nighttime socialite, owner of a pretty cool cloak, and vampire. The specifics are less important than the broadstroke; Nazuna turns Ko’s life on its head over the course of their single night together, which takes up the entire first episode, with not a single second of concession to the morning after. She chats up drunk salarymen, she teases and prods Ko, she says she likes to help people who can’t sleep at night solve their problems.
She takes him to her apartment.
Sadly, she does not climb up the side of her apartment in lizard fashion.
An aside; Call of the Night is somewhat new territory for this site. Despite being the holder of the seasonal romcom slot like previous Let’s Watch subjects My Dress-Up Darling and Kaguya-sama: Love is War!, Call of the Night is not particularly similar to either, and it would be a mistake to lump them together simply because they’re part of the same genre. Call of the Night‘s pedigree is older, and puts the series itself in a more sensible context. After all, people being attracted to vampires instead of (or in addition to) being afraid of them stretches back to the very dawn of popular vampire fiction. They’re nothing new in anime, either, with more or less popular titles that are about or prominently feature a vampire love interest including, just off the top of my own head, Rosario+Vampire, Vampire Knight, Actually, I Am…. / My Monster Secret, Seifuku no Vampiress Lord, Vampeerz, etc.
These span several different genres, but what all have in common is that the vampire is portrayed, at least initially, and in line with their origins as a creature of the horror genre, as something dangerous. Something that warrants caution. This is true of Call of the Night as well, even as Ko himself throws that caution to the wind not long after discovering Nazuna’s true nature and he decides he wants in on the whole “vampire” thing, the framing never lets her seem too innocent for too long. For every cut that depicts Nazuna like this, where she says something goofy or outright dumb.
There’s another that portrays her like this; a predatorial-in-the-animal-sense midnight stalker. She’s a vampire. Let her bite you.
Now, while danger can certainly be scary, it can also be salacious, and unsurprisingly that’s the angle that most of Call of the Night‘s more intense scenes take. Even less surprisingly, the attempts to play up Nazuna’s conventional sex appeal don’t work nearly as well as those that focus her vampiric features. The former are simply too clean. There’s a shot in here where the camera rotates around her body in an attempt to show off her midriff and it just looks absurd. (What is she, a sports car?) This is without mentioning what looks a lot like airbrushing on parts of her body, it just all looks too silly to take seriously.
The latter though? Well, there’s an old joke in some circles about how you can tell when they get someone who’s “into feet” (or into whatever) to animate a given scene. I think Call of the Night‘s team has someone who’s into teeth.
If they could only nail one, though, it’s actually better for it to be the latter. Ko, after all, is not so much attracted to Nazuna yet as he’s attracted to the idea of becoming a vampire, as is established not long after Nazuna reveals that she is one. We need to see this stuff through his eyes for that desire to make sense on a literal level (and on a less literal one, depicting some kind of temptation only works in any context if you can successfully convey said tempting). Fill in your own vice or vices here; is “vampirism” code for sex? Drugs? Booze? Just the general nightlife experience? There’s no reason it can’t be all of the above, and by keeping the metaphor fairly broad and open to finer interpretation, Call of the Night‘s first episode mostly succeeds in its aims of making Ko’s attraction to Nazuna—or perhaps more, what Nazuna offers—understandable, in spite of some minor flaws.
Call of the Night does also zero in on one particular thing. Nazuna, at one point, asks Ko why he thinks people stay up late in the first place. It’s a rhetorical question, and she provides her own answer.
This is an interesting notion, and certainly one that maps to why a lot of say, millennials like myself stay up too late, but the way Nazuna plays it is even more interesting. Later in the episode, Ko expresses that he knows he shouldn’t be doing “something like this”—that is to say, this whole skipping school and staying out at night bit—in the first place. Nazuna, who seems to have taken an interest in him despite herself, responds to that thought by hovering above the ground, and asking him this.
The question pierces the thematic heart of Call of the Night in general. How does Ko feel about all this? He says to himself, remembering back to the incident at school, that he tried to do the right thing. Nazuna cuts in—literally invading the flashback—to ask why he even cares.
It’s clear that Nazuna, for whatever reason or reasons, wants to bring him over to the very literal dark side. He can be a creature of the night too, if he wants to be. And that is, abstractly, what the show says for anyone; the only requirement for being an outcast, after all, is that you are cast out. Ko, at least in his own mind, already has been. The freaks come out at night, the question for Ko—and more broadly for anyone—is simply whether they feel they fit in more with them, or with the normal folks who thrive while the Sun’s up.
On another level; the extent to which Nazuna is a shamelessly bad influence adds further knots to the already twisty question of how “okay” any of this is. But personally, I’m less interested in the question of if Nazuna’s actions are in some way moral and more in the question of if this resonates both with its intended audience and more generally.
That’s a question that it will take the rest of Call of the Night’s thirteen episodes to answer, so for now, it’s an open one. But! I think this first showing is promising. Toward the end of “Night Flight”, the episode earns its title, as Nazuna gives Ko the thrill of his life whether he wants it or not.
She kicks him off of a roof, and lets him panic mid-freefall for a moment. Of course, she swoops down to save him, picking him up and carrying him away as ED theme kicks in.1 In that moment, Call of the Night is pure black magic. If it keeps figuring out how to do that, it has nothing to worry about; the night is still young.
1: Also called “Call of the Night”, and after which the manga was originally named. I did not know this when I wrote the article and have updated the phrasing here and added this footnote to reflect the reality of the situation.
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.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Right at the top of today’s chapter, Kaya awakes from a nightmare, only to discover another in her living room; her butler, the sheep-man Merry, lying half-dead on the floor. That he’s still alive at all is a bit of a surprise to me, when we saw Kuro fuck him up I really thought he was done done, but I guess the guy’s a survivor.
A man of character—and of being beaten within an inch of his life by a traitorous jerk—he sets Kaya straight pretty quick, informing her of “Klahadore”‘s betrayal and of the impending pirate invasion.
With Merry wounded and the rest of her staff on holiday, Kaya, in spite of her grave (but vague) illness, sets off into town to try warn the townsfolk of the pirate attack that must surely, if Usopp was telling the truth after all, be coming. Who should she run into along the way but Usopp’s “crew”?
Back at the beach, Django calls in the Black Cat Pirates’ ringer; a pair of the most absolutely vile-lookin’, ragged, fucked up catboys you’ve ever seen.
the catboys i signed for my all-catboy pirate crew dont know what piracy is and theyre actively loudly sobbing whenever they miss a swing of their cutlass and whenever they try to load a cannonball they drop it and it bonks them on the head and they go “uweh” and our first mate closes his eyes whenever he fires his flintlock because hes scared and we’re beating every other crew on the Blue Line
The two initially seem to really live up to that horrible caption I just put under the above image, flailing about and crying as they confront Zolo. Only for them to reveal that—gasp!—it’s all a ruse! In the confusion, Siam there is able to jack two of Zolo’s swords.
That’s where the chapter ends, so how Zolo gets his swords back, what happens to Kaya and Usopp’s little buddies, etc., are all tomorrow’s questions.
To raise a question though; do the designs of these two cat-men make anyone else vaguely uncomfortable? Mostly Siam’s? He looks like a grandmother cosplaying Cure Black. There’s something vaguely not-quite-transphobic-but-definitely-in-that-same-general-area about it, to me. Maybe I’m reaching, feel free to tell me if you think so in the comments.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
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.
As we stand in the blistering spring wind, we are resolute, humble, and decorous. We are Pentagrams, and with the pride of flowers, we learn and study hard.
I really must, before saying anything at all about this series, direct even site regulars to the warning in the header. Arsnotoria is the sort of thing I’d recommend going into as blind as possible. (Even saying that much is a bit of a giveaway, but there’s a certain amount of that which can’t be helped.)
But let’s get into it, shall we?
You get them a few times per year; anime whose premieres just make you go “huh?”
Often, they start out as one genre and then take a left turn into another. Or their tone does a total headstand somewhere in the first episode or two. Something like that. By me even mentioning this, you can guess that Smile of The Arsnotoria: The Animation—clunky title and all—is an example of this, but it’s worth explaining why even bringing that up is noteworthy. These days, these kinds of swerves don’t have much impact anymore. Somewhere after Gakkou Gurashi people started to almost expect them, and most modern examples don’t even bother waiting until the premiere to tip their hand, with, for example, one of Arsnotoria‘s contemporaries Lycoris Recoil not even keeping up the facade for all of its preview trailers. So, if nothing else, if the entire rest of the series is a total, out-and-out bomb that drops off the face of the Earth after it finishes airing, it should at least be noted for its restraint.
There are 22 minutes in Arsnotoria‘s first episode. About 20 of them are extremely pleasant, almost iyashikei-esque slice of life coziness. Let’s talk about those minutes first, since they form the bulk of the episode.
Right from the top, we’re dropped to the goings-on in a magical academy of some sort, and into the lives of five schoolgirls. These are Arsnotoria herself (Misaki Kuno), Mell (Miharu Hanai), Ko Alberta (Miyu Tomita), Picatrix (Eri Yukimura), and Abramelin (Eriko Matsui). No, I don’t know why Ko is the only one with a last name either (although there is brief mention of a Grand Alberta, also. Maybe they’re related).
They fall into familiar and broad character archetypes; Arsnotoria is the cutesy and naive one, Mell is rambunctious and michievious, Ko is a sleepyhead who’s more aware than she lets on, Picatrix is an ojou complete with ending most of her sentences with “desu wa”, and Abramelin is the serious, responsible one. These aren’t the most compelling or deep characters, but they work in the sort of easygoing, slice of life mold that most of the episode traffics in.
“Easygoing” might be underselling it, really. Much of the episode is positively languid, and it’s telling that a solid 10 minutes are taken up by the characters discussing tea. This admittedly gets a little boring toward the end, but it’s to Arsnotoria‘s credit that it manages to actually keep this fairly engaging for most of that time. Discussions of what side one butters their scones on recall the (in?)famous chocolate coronet scene in Lucky Star. And at one point, Ko tries to bash a sealed jam jar open with some lavishly-animated and quite powerful looking magic wherein she summons a huge, bandaged hand to punch it.
Aside from this, there are a few setting details. The school this all takes place at, the “academy city” of Ashlam, seems to basically be a furnishing school for young arcanists, which is perfectly fine as a setting and it’s one plenty of other things have done (in anime alone you have everything from Tweeny Witches to Little Witch Academia to Mahou Girls Precure to, perhaps most relevant for this part of the episode, Mysteria Friends). A fair bit of proper terminology gets lobbed at us here. Not quite enough to be a Proper Noun Machine Gun, but maybe a Proper Noun Slingshot.
And mixed in with all this are some interesting bits about London being on “the surface”, which seems to both imply (somewhat surprisingly) that this takes place in a version of our world, and that Ashlam is actually physically above the ground.
All of this may seem irrelevant, given the total tonal 180 that you’re all aware, if you’ve gotten this far in the article, is coming, but there is one other detail that seems significant; the opening of the episode sees our characters return from a “watch” shift. A watch for what is not a question I thought to ask while first viewing the scene, but it’s certainly on my mind at this point.
Because, yes, in its final two minutes or so, Arsnotoria completely tips its hand, in perhaps the most dope slap-blunt way possible. A cut to black, the word “WARNING” inexplicably written across the screen in bright red, and then this.
A scene of total, apocalyptic ruin. (Complete with some very nice billowing fire animation.) Inquisitors patrol streets and slaughter citizens for being “Negatives,” explaining nothing with their cryptic comments as they do so. It does not even look like it’s from the same universe as the entire preceding 20 minutes, and with just that little bit of footage, Arsnotoria goes from being enjoyable if predictable to a total fucking wildcard.
None of this necessarily means that Arsnotoria will be good. It is entirely possible to have an interesting structure but fail on any number of other counts (or even all other counts), but it’s at least a good sign.
The Takeaway: Really, this one is pretty simple. If you enjoy throwing caution to the wind and gambling on something that no one has any real idea as to where it’s going, you want in on this. If not, you can probably skip it.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!
Today, One Piece returns to its usual forte. Basically, a whole chapter that’s a long action sequence. (In fact, this and the next chapter seem to form a contiguous single action sequence. That in mind, it’s really more like half of one.)
We open on an unenviable situation; Usopp and Nami, easily the least combat-capable of our protagonists, are forced to stand alone against the Black Cat Pirates, who, after some banter, promptly charge.
Surprisingly though, they manage to fend the pirates off, at least for a little while, with a combination of caltrops(!) and Usopp’s slingshot(?!?!). Also, hijinks continue to occur.
“My work here is done.” “But you didn’t do anything!”
And I’d be remiss to not at least briefly touch on Luffy being lost for about half the chapter.
The real centerpiece of the chapter though comes when Usopp gets his head knocked in. He’s clearly hurt pretty bad, but he still doesn’t just let Captain Kuro’s crew walk all over him. It’s a bit of the old burning justice that keeps him hanging on, and it’s nice to see him trying an honest stab at being genuinely heroic.
But, of course, the real capable hands arrive just as Django’s lot push their way past Usopp and Nami. Meaning that the conclusion of this particular fight is a concern for tomorrow.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
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