I have lost any semblance of consistency when it comes to labelling these columns. I promise I’ll go back and fix them all eventually. Eventually.
This past Tuesday, Chainsaw Man ended. The wildly popular shonen manga had been going on in its second part for quite a long time, and I think to some extent no ending could’ve really satisfied the fanbase at large. Nonetheless, the ending we actually got seems to have really pissed a lot of people off. You can find reams of posts complaining about it of all shapes and sizes, and your standard suite of video essays and the like as well.
Someone who did not hate the Chainsaw Man ending was yours truly. I want to re-read the whole series before making any big proclamations, but I think it wrapped up the emotional arc of the story in a way that felt both hard-fought and worthwhile. It stung, but it meant something.
Now, will I still think that after having re-read the series? I don’t know. But! It did get me thinking about the array of popular anime and manga widely considered to have “a bad ending” and the various things they may have in common.
Oshi no Ko, anyone who is even tangentially aware of manga discourse at large already knows, is widely put in that category. (I myself have been exposed, just yesterday, to a Youtube thumbnail that loudly proclaims CSM’s finale “worse than Oshi no Ko, THE END!” Such dramatic proclamations not even a week out from the last chapter, my goodness!) And the reception to CSM honestly made me want to reevaluate my own opinion on this series, despite their otherwise lacking really anything in common, because I never want to be the sort of person who just declares that something is ruined forever because it didn’t head in the exact direction I wanted it to.
This in mind, and being honest with myself, I actually think the final episode of Oshi no Ko‘s third season is mostly pretty good.
A lot of the episode’s forehalf is devoted to Ruby trying to come to terms with the absence of both her former mother from her previous life, Tendouji Marina [the legendary Inoue Kikuko], who made a somewhat unexpected return to the narrative last week, as well as that of her current later mother, Ai. And honestly? It mostly works. We get to see Ruby repeatedly stumble over a bit in the 15 Year Lie script where it dictates that her character let her mother, who, in the fiction of the film never loved her, go. Predictably this absolutely tears Ruby apart, and she can’t get through the read, despite Kana’s attempts to coach her.
Name a time a friend gave you advice that made you look at them like this.
In a general sense, we probably should’ve gotten to this earlier—maybe toward the start of this season, rather than the cosplay episodes? Just a thought—but it does matter that it’s here at all. I was beginning to worry we’d never get to see Ruby’s side of things at all. By consequence, if there’s a standout star of the third season it is unquestionably Igoma Yurie, Ruby’s voice actress, who delivers some of the best work of her entire career here. Most of her dialogue, especially the strained rants about how her former mother must have loved her (until of course she finds out that that wasn’t really the case), is delivered in a pained, strangled yelp that really sells the character’s sheer despair at her situation. And once the episode hits its first big bombshell, where Aqua reveals himself as the former Dr. Amemiya Gorou, she starts full-on blubbering/ugly-crying in the best way possible. (You can literally hear her sniffling through the line-reads. That’s called commitment where I’m from.) Igoma doesn’t have a ton of other credits to her name, so if nothing else, I hope her performance here opens some doors for her even more than being Ruby in the first place likely already has. I would love to hear her in things more often.
As for Aqua finally revealing himself as the former Dr. What’s-his-name? I think around now makes sense, if he was going to hold onto it this long in the first place. (Narratively, that is. From a What Would You Do? sort of viewpoint he should’ve done this ages ago, but that’s not a terribly insightful statement.) So does the way their relationship entirely turns on a dime when he drops that piece of info, as she immediately lets go of her hatred of the brother that she thought had selfishly sold their mother out. Arguably, this stuff is way more manipulative of him than any of the more overt cases with Kana or Akane. (And the series knows this, too, because it makes sure to have the death goddess crow girl character who’s been present up and down this season wink and nudge at us about it. Keep her in mind, in fact, we’ll be coming back to her.) Still, it’s a solid beat, and while the flashback montage about time that Aqua and Ruby spent together as Gorou and Sarina is definitely pretty cloying, it’s still sweet enough to mostly work.
(There’s also this brilliant piece of comedy buried in the montage. I’m not a medical professional, so maybe I’m missing something here but you’re not supposed to do that, right? You’re definitely not.)
Now does all of this make this whole bit, this whole sequence, automatically a good piece of storytelling? No, an emotional beat working on a craftsmanship level is different from it being the right choice for the story. And honestly, I think the episode’s structure works against it here. A cut after the scene where Aqua reveals his past identity, and us being left to sit with Ruby’s bounceback for a week, would’ve done wonders. Especially when she drops this little line after reminiscing about Gorou’s “promise” to marry her when she came of age:
A black screen blinking the words “THEY FUCKED” in all capital letters would be more subtle.
It is absolutely hysterical, and probably inevitable, that we’ve ended up at incest. If the show simply ended here, the movie in production and Aqua and Ruby abandoning their revenge quest to be left to their presumably torrid reincarnation incestuous love affair, I would have nothing but respect for it. Sadly, we don’t live in a world where anime are allowed to end—or even end episodes—on heavy implications of incest. It does also very much feel rather rushed, like we’re getting this all out of the way so we can say that Ruby had a full character arc—something perhaps true but only on a technicality—so we can rush headlong to the show’s conclusion. Oshi no Ko has of course been announced for a fourth season, probably its last, so I will need to wait until then to evaluate how right I am about this. (I could of course also read the manga, but if I’ve held off for this long, what’s the sense in doing that now?) But I suspect I am. Akasaka has just never seemed terribly interested in Ruby as compared to Aqua, and while this episode has some of the best material the character’s ever been given, it really does seem like it’s supposed to put the bow on her development. Granted! There is still the unresolved business with her former mother, so maybe that will complicate things in some worthwhile way. I’d love to see more unhinged Ruby, it feels like we barely got to know her. I nonetheless remain skeptical.
That said, I can complain all day, but for what it sets out to do, I think the first half of the episode more works than doesn’t. The only real contention is how worthwhile what it’s trying to do actually is, and I remain undecided on that front. (As I’ve said, I really do just keep going back and forth on this show.) The second half of the episode is also good, and unlike the first, is so in pretty straightforward ways. In large part, it’s a character study of Miyako, the boss of Strawberry Productions, a constant background presence throughout most of the series but who never really got an episode of her own up to this point.
It is probably the only focus she’ll ever get, but the series makes the most of it, walking us through Miyako’s arrival in Tokyo, and her early career as a model. It’s very broad-stroke, but it’s solid stuff. Made all the stranger by how she chooses to express some of this.
Miyako latches onto an extended video game metaphor while explaining her life. Bluntly, in-context, this is one of the weirdest rambles of its kind I’ve ever heard a character go on. Aside from the central simile of “fame is like a video game” seeming like something a Republican-era Nicki Minaj would come up with, it’s kind of a stretch in the first place? For whatever reason, this whole rant gets the full visual metaphor treatment and we get to see Miyako fight the men she seduced in her youth as an RPG encounters and the like. This makes it no less bizarre, but it’s an admirable amount of committing to the bit.
This all concludes with her reuniting with Saitou Ichigo, Strawberry Productions’ former owner and her own ex, when “randomly” running into him at a bar. (This was, of course, orchestrated by Aqua, actually.) And leads to Miyako herself recommitting to her obligations to Aqua and Ruby. There’s a broad motherhood theme that runs through all this, an idea that Miyako is more of a mother to the twins, perhaps especially to Ruby, than either of her own mothers ever were. (And she outright calls herself their mom more than once.) There’s something there, but for a show whose premise is so entwined with family, Oshi no Ko‘s ideas about it have always been its weakest thematic expressions. Still, it’s a worthwhile thought and I hope the show does something with it in the long term. That Kana line from the rehearsal scene does feel an awful lot like foreshadowing.
Beyond these two main plots, this episode just also has a genuine sense of fun that’s been missing (or at least not as present as I’d like) in the show for a good while, now. The show’s main issues have always been its hypocrisy and the inescapable sense that it’s kind of didactic, the comedic leanings help take the edge off of both of those things. Aside from the usual bevy of Good Kana Faces, we also have, for example, Pirate Yuri??? Why not, right? That’s a good thing, even if it does still make me wish the show just leaned into its strengths more.
In-universe, this is a commercial for body wipes. Yes, really.
Aside from a brief post-credits scene, the very last thing to happen in this episode is actually, deliberately, quite funny! Gotanda, the film’s director, laments that the casting has been squared away with the exception of the child actors, to play a young Ruby and Aqua. This is where the character officially known as just Crow Girl [Kino Hina], who I’ve been calling the death goddess in my columns—since, you know, that’s what I thought she was—re-enters the picture. Crow Girl shows up in the closing minutes of this episode to do what she does best, be vague and portentous and deliberately needle Aqua. Aqua, in the rare bit of scheming from him this season to actually have an impact beyond being eyeroll-inducing, gets an idea. He asks her if she’s, you know, physically at least, a normal human with parents and a government ID and all that good stuff. She smugly responds yes, that her “vessel,” just like his, is on the surface a normal human. Aqua then drops his funniest line of the entire season by asking her a simple question.
The anime adaptation of hit narou-kei series Reborn As a Portentous Death God in Another World That’s Actually Just Modern Japan Again, I’m Forced to Become A Child Actress by The Teenage Boy I’ve Been Tormenting?! is coming to a TV station near you sooner than you think!
And from there we cut to credits! That’s literally how the season end! This is a good thing, of course. It’s entirely the kind of bold audacity that made me interested in this series in the first place. Does this episode alone being pretty good mean that all is forgiven and we are guaranteed a satisfying conclusion? Of course not, but it’s a good sign from a show that’s been short on those for a while.
In any case, any final judgment of Oshi no Ko as an anime will have to wait until after it’s complete. So I leave you with this: I’ll see you when I see you, B*Komachi fans. Because I’m me, it’ll probably be back under the Let’s Watch banner, too.
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This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
“We could even catch the moon in our tiny hands.”
I’ve missed this.
I refer here to two things. One is the very act of writing about an anime itself. It has been, at this point, more than a year since my last actual anime review—of Noir back in late 2024, you may remember—everything since then has been much more thrown together. If you’re not a regular reader of this site, that probably means exceptionally little to you, but I promise that to me it is important (and wonderful), to be properly writing a review again. If you don’t care about that, though, you might have some affection for the other thing that I’ve missed. I refer, of course, to the sprawling woodland of Hakumei and Mikochi, today’s object of appreciation.
I grew up in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. I don’t miss much about PA, but one thing I do is its beautiful green mountains, wooded and teeming with life. The Poconos may seem like small potatoes to some, but they are where I lived and walked in my youth, and they remain in my heart. A distinction little else in the state can really claim.
When I made that nebulous transition from “person who sometimes watches anime” to “anime enthusiast”, one of the first genres I gravitated toward was iyashikei. Sometimes nicknamed “healing TV”, iyashikei is a kind of wading, immersive visual experience focused less on plot and strong conflict than characterization and immaculate worldbuilding, with a strong emphasis on lived-in environmental design. It’s all in the service of that vibe: immaculately pastoral in its best examples. Done right, you can practically feel the wind blowing through your hair and see the shimmer of the sparkling sunlight on the lake. One such iyashikei, Kamichu!, was among my first favorite anime, and when they pop up today (increasingly a rare occurrence, although last year’s mono is an example, if you want one that’s recent) I tend to at least check them out. The mountain greenery of such shows reminds me of that of my first home, and I love them for that.
Hakumei & Mikochi is maybe not quite recent enough to be called a product of “today.” It dates back from the tail end of the last decade, 2018. I was broadly aware of its pastoral reputation at the time, but my head was in a different place back then, and I was occupied with other things. I was perhaps too busy writing some of my first anime articles, singing the praises of the likes of SSSS.GRIDMAN, for example, to notice something this slow and cozy. I had perhaps fallen out of touch with this sort of thing.
And it wasn’t and isn’t just me! “Cozy”, “slow”, and “pastoral” are words that have fallen out of fashion as positive descriptors of art in recent years, at least in my circles. This is for good reason, as a lot of this aesthetic has been laid claim to by unpleasant sorts who seek to parley these ideas of pastoral peace into significantly less savory ones. But in our rush to push these people out—necessary work, make no mistake—we have perhaps been too quick to hand them this space wholesale. This I take issue with. An injection of the rustic life can, in fact, be a good remedy for the stresses of the soul. And I refuse to concede this genre to the bigoted. They do not deserve it.
In any case, Hakumei & Mikochi, while perhaps not entirely immune to such appropriation, is at least less likely to be a victim of it owing to part of its premise. Our leads here are a pair of tiny forestfolk who live and work among the trees, one of which is their home, forming a small part of a woodland society that absolutely oozes folksy charm. This place is called Makinata, and is the primary setting for our tale. These women, the titular Hakumei [Matsuda Risae] and Mikochi [Shimoji Shino], have a decidedly wife-and-wife dynamic. It’s beyond adorable, and makes Hakumei & Mikochi nicely amenable to a queer audience.
(Note however, before we get ahead of ourselves, that this does not extend quite so far as being an explicitly queer work. Somewhat frustratingly, our leads are only ever defined as “roommates” despite the obvious married-life framing. When Hakumei’s boss refers to Mikochi as her wife, the former is actually quite puzzled! Even odder is that a later episode sees someone make a similar joke to Mikochi, who accepts the framing without any protest. This kind of playing coy is not uncommon in this genre, but this is a fairly surprising place to find it. At least the “—and they were roommates!” jokes write themselves. And none of this will, in any case, stop me or anyone else from referring to Hakumei & Mikochi in shorthand as “that show about the tiny lesbians.”)
This is, perhaps, what’s found on the other end of the spectrum from that toxic yuri I’m always crowing about liking. I’ve always maintained you really want a little of both, anyway. Bitter flavors enhance sweet ones, after all. This desire, for something sweet, is what led to me deciding to watching Hakumei & Mikochi in the long term after stumbling on it during an anime roulette with some friends. (A fun activity, I recommend it.) Often, once I was committed to watching it on my own, I’d put an episode on before bed each night. On some occasions, pleasantly nuzzled between waking consciousness and the intoxicating pull of the dreamworld, I had to lazily slap the pause button on my computer, halting an episode in its tracks. Too soothed, in these moments, by the lullaby of the series to continue, and needing respite in the form of proper sleep. Asked what I think of Hakumei & Mikochi on the whole, “it put me to sleep, in a good way! :)” wouldn’t be a bad answer.
It would be an overly simple one, however.
From the beginning, Hakumei & Mikochi makes no secret of the fact that life in the woodland is not strictly snacks of giant peanuts* and drinks of beer. The series is in fact best understood as not being solely about the title characters, but rather the entire society of Makinata. We explore this in a few ways, but primarily through the show’s decently large cast. In addition to the liliputian forestfolk like Hakumei and Mikochi themselves, there are a number of talking animal characters as well. Everything from the weasel Iwashi [Matsukaze Masaya], who serves as Hakumei’s mentor and immediate superior at her job, to various one-off characters like a tiny beetle aesthete who longs for the glamorous life, a rabbit cameraman, a helpful baboon who operates a gondola, and so on, the forest of Makinata and its surrounding environs are stuffed to the gills with animal characters. This is a contributing factor to one of the show’s greatest strengths: its sheer sense of whimsy. Even outside its animal cast, this folksy anything-goes energy is quite prevalent. In episode six we meet a hairdresser, Jada [Shintani Mayumi!], one of H&M’s fellow forest-people. She lives, and runs her business out of, a giant egg. It’s absolutely delightful! And why not, right? If you’re going to establish something as inherently fairy tale-esque as tiny people who live in the woods, there’s no reason to not go all the way with it.
You will get your hair cut at Big Egg and you will get a mohawk and you will say “thank you Jada for my mohawk” when she’s done giving it to you.
This is just one part of what serves to make the show extremely watchable. Its visual styling is a big factor as well. While discussions of anime visuals these days often boil down to talk of sakuga, Hakumei & Mikochi has a fairly restrained animation style. It more than makes up for that (if indeed we can call it a shortcoming at all) with its other visual elements, such as its color choices—uniformly vibrant—and overall mood-setting. One trick it leans on fairly heavily in the directorial department is the use of cordoned-off panels of animation to emphasize particular moments. In a lesser anime this would come off as tacky, and I’m sure it’s drawing from Kashiki Takuto‘s original manga quite heavily, but given Hakumei & Mikochi‘s general energy, it works quite nicely, contributing something of a pop-up storybook feel. Beyond the visual realm, the voice acting and music are uniformly excellent. The former collecting a strong pool of talent, largely veterans, and the latter consistently setting a rustic and homemade feel. This applies as well to the vocal music. Such as that contributed by the character Konju [Yuuki Aoi], an initially rather arrogant singer who Hakumei and Mikochi befriend over the course of a few episodes, and also to the ending theme, an absolutely excellent piece of music that I looked forward to every time, even when I was sad to see a great episode end.
(A same-day edit from me here. A commenter rightly pointed out that I probably should have made mention that the music is the work of Evan Call, who has a number of credits to his name in anime, virtually all of which that I’ve personally seen have a very strong sonic identity. That’s a good point! So consider that omission fixed. While we’re at belated accreditation, I’ll point out that the director is Andou Masaomi, who I really should have thought to shout out directly, since I’ve been very positive on his work previously on this very site.)
These of course are evaluations of the show’s (excellent across the board) craft. We should also pay attention however to what Hakumei & Mikochi is trying to say, or at least what aspects of it are part of the slow-life fantasy it offers and why they might be so. A consistent theme, perhaps surprisingly so, is the nature of labor! Something the series is actually supremely concerned with. No simple utopia, the world of Hakumei & Mikochi is one where work is exchanged for money just as in our own. And in fact, it demonstrates that this is no mere show economy, either. It’s shown to us via a few flashbacks that, at one point, Hakumei was even a homeless wanderer. This is a depiction of genuine poverty that’s quite rare in this sort of thing. One such flashback even sees her preyed upon by thieves and nearly left for dead! Of course, in the show’s present, she is very much fine, but it’s still quite a departure, even as the sad story that must have led to that condition in the first place is left merely implied instead of told to us in full. That she lives with Mikochi now and is gainfully employed as a carpenter, mason, and general handyman is treated as unequivocally a good thing, and from Hakumei’s own perspective it’s easy to see how that’d be so. (Mikochi, for her part, is a prepared foods wholesaler, which does strike me as a very specific profession for an anime character to have.)
About Hakumei’s many job titles, a uniting thread here is that Hakumei & Mikochi treats all types of labor similarly. This firstly means that, thankfully, there’s none of the odd job chauvinism you sometimes see in this sort of thing. But more interestingly it also means that, whether that work is what we’d consider mundane; catching fish, grinding coffee, bartending, construction, singing, etc., or what we’d consider fantastical, the series treats it with equal respect. Take for example Sen [Anzai Chika], the necromancer-of-sorts the lead pair meet in episode two. Her day to day life is defined by her research into her art. This involves tying magic lamps to cleaned skeletons, which reanimates them with a semblance of life by replicating the heartbeat of a living thing.
Science.
This is all treated as unusual, for certain, but not remotely sinister, being just another occupation that powers the woodland that Hakumei and Mikochi call home. When Sen reappears later in the series, she is again treated the same way as any other character. For another example, there is Ayune [Nabatame Hitomi], the last character of note introduced in the series proper. Mikochi’s elder sister, she’s a playwright in town due to a slump, and melancholic that she hasn’t seen Mikochi in so long. (Although she denies this at first.) A lesser series would come off as moralizing in writing a character like this, a writer with a fairly inconsiderate personality and no real life skills to speak of beyond her pen—a combination of traits that thankfully describes no one your reviewer here has ever met—but Hakumei & Mikochi is pretty amenable to her, warts and all. She’s a layabout, and when she does try to help Mikochi (with chopping an enormous daikon that she herself bought), she messes it up, but ultimately this is all played as eccentric as opposed to downright harmful. Maybe that’s cheating in its own way, but it makes the character endearing, and when we get to see a snippet of her work in the ending credits of that episode, it’s lovely. Hakumei & Mikochi respects the arts—mundane and fantastical—and physical labor equally.
In fact, I would say the main “fantasy” element of Hakumei & Mikochi in this regard is not an absence of work itself, as it is in some similar media, but the lack of alienation from that work. Hakumei, Mikochi, and their friends are able to make a living doing what they love, and there is a more or less direct correlation between the effort they put in and the rewards they reap. The fantasy here is not one of not having to work at all, it is one of working well out of passion rather than strict necessity, and of that passion being rewarded. This is not to say that Hakumei & Mikochi is remotely some sort of socialist parable, merely that it is able to imagine a world in which one’s aptitudes and passions are rewarded, rather than downplayed or deliberately worked out of them. It’s a nice idea, and it’s to the show’s immense credit that when we get a few episodes focusing on Hakumei’s work as a member of the Borestone Guild, a group of masons. In what is probably its most important articulation of this theme, it makes the whole process look about as rewarding as it must feel to Hakumei herself when all is said and done. A lovely thing to do for a character who is often defined by her desire to feel useful. Her formerly-dismissive boss, another forest-person named Narai [Tsuda Kenjirou], is even proud of her. Imagine that!
This fascination with labor extends into what work can be done for each other, as well, extending this idea into that of intra-community support. Sen, for instance, helps Hakumei and Mikochi when a lens fire destroys part of their house in episode three. Hakumei’s work with the Guild falls under this umbrella too, as the main project we see Hakumei help them with is restoring a causeway. While most such examples that dot the show are well-done, this community theme is also, unfortunately, where the show makes some of its relatively few missteps.
Despite this genre’s reputation for being laid-back, many iyashikei have a handful of zanier, more frantic episodes. Hakumei & Mikochi is no exception here, with episode eight in particular of interest to us here. In it, our girls have to help the denizens of a part of the nearby city called Honey House—a block inhabited by outcasts where “anything goes”—deal with a group of troublemakers. This is a more serious conflict than most Hakumei & Mikochi takes a look at, and in attempting to edge into this territory it does end up hitting a weird note. I think the disputes that arise between the old and new populations of a city and the like are a bit beyond H&M’s pay grade. Although the rather goofy tone keep it from feeling like too serious of a mistake. (Most notably, Konju is part of this storyline and serves as a damsel in distress when the troublemakers make off with her. Her extremely blasé attitude about being kidnapped does a lot to save the episode. She treats it more like a guided tour of the city, than anything.) The central idea of disputes rising in this sort of loose, almost anarchist space is neat, but the resolution feels off and just a bit too simplistic. Higaki [Takeuchi Ryouta]—Honey House’s nominal leader—makes up with the head of the troublemakers over a drink, and they bond over the memory of a departed friend. It’s a nice idea, but it also feels a bit like a hasty way to put the cork back on the bottle, so to speak.
In the series proper’s final episode, we touch on these ideas again. There we learn more about Hakumei’s backstory, how she once traveled with a caravan led by a great wolf named Emerald Tail [Sakakibara Yoshiko]. Hakumei herself describes Emerald’s caravan as both a trading group and a mutual protection force (the sub track in fact actually calls them “police”). Hakumei is quite open about thinking of them in positive terms. But interestingly, Emerald Tail herself doesn’t seem to entirely agree. It’s her who urges Hakumei to stay in Makinata, when the caravan arrives there. Stopped at the gate by—introduced to us suddenly here for the first time—the fact that Makinata actually excludes those over a certain size. When the caravan and Hakumei reunite, it’s extremely brief, limited to an exchange of greetings across a ravine. Hakumei, whomever she may have spent time with in the past, has found her home, and it’s with Mikochi. As with the Honey House story, this feels like a warm but perhaps rushed conclusion to a story that opens a lot of questions about the world of the series that it isn’t really equipped to answer.
For better or worse, Hakumei and Mikochi isn’t actually interested in these questions at all. These toe-dips into the wider geographical situation around Makinata are not a primary concern of the series, which is a bit bothersome to me! Since this definitely brushes closest to all of that hay I alluded to toward the beginning of this article. I would like to dismiss it out of hand, but cannot really do that. So while it doesn’t ruin the series for me, or even anything really at all close, it does remain as a qualm. I hate qualms, but to not acknowledge them is to render any praise of a series meaningless (and I hope I’ve made clear that I have quite a lot of praise to give), so acknowledged they must be. I have no simple explanation for these aspects of the show, but if I can offer one theory, it is perhaps an acknowledgement that, like our own, the world of Hakumei & Mikochi is vast and complex. That Hakumei has found her place within it does not necessarily make it less so.
It is, in any case, better at exploring the feeling of belonging so central to its characterization of Hakumei. This is typified by the show’s third and final major thematic concern, a uniting artistic impulse behind iyashikei in general; the wonder of the natural world. This is where Hakumei and Mikochi not only shines but sparkles. Every single episode breathes a wonderful, picture-book landscape naturality, and it is absolutely lovely stuff. Everything from the lake that Sen sets out to venture into in her submarine to the mountains outside Makinata itself, to the bamboo forests near Hakumei and Mikochi’s own home. Even when, in a late episode, Hakumei and Mikochi are caught in a rainstorm on a fishing trip, even something as mundane as a downpour is treated as a little miracle.
These too will be important memories, whether you like it or not!
This translates to to how the show treats even the most distant and fantastical aspect of the natural world, the night sky itself. When, in episode four, Hakumei and Mikochi’s house is damaged by a freak lens fire, the time they spend camping while it’s repaired is largely comedic, with Mikochi suffering a bit due to her indoorsy nature meshing poorly with the open wild. Crucially though, the segment is capped with Hakumei showing her the beauty of the stars at night. “This—” Hakumei says, “—is our roof. All of it.” Hakumei & Mikochi understands an old maxim very well: home is where the heart is, and if the heart is under the sky, well, so be it.
Not that nature is inherently kind, of course! In that same episode, our heroines are respectively rattled and injured by a great horned owl by the name of Oroshi. Hakumei is only able to get it to leave by offering it a bounty of dried meats. There’s an implicit respect for the natural here, one that contrasts with the claiming it as domain elsewhere. There are still wild things in the world, and not all of them play nicely with the tiny folk of the wood. Of course, at the end of the episode Oroshi reveals that it, too, is more or less benevolent. Still, the uncertainty is striking, and it remains as strong an image as the reached-for Moon.
That duality, I think, is a good synecdoche for the heart of this series. Outdoors or indoors, working hard or the lazy life, it’s the little things that Hakumei & Mikochi truly excels at, the subtle warmth of home. That has been enough for the anime to amass something of a cult following in the years since its release—as I mention near the top of this piece, it’s still well-liked in yuri fan circles—and it’s clearly appealed to enough people such that the manga has continued on to this very day. I haven’t actually read the manga, myself! But having enjoyed my time with the anime so thoroughly, I may very well do so. Not right away though, I don’t think. Hakumei & Mikochi is best saved for when you’re missing the slow life. There is truly no rush, it’ll wait for you, as familiar as your own front door.
*: Strictly speaking, they are regular-sized peanuts, and it is our protagonists who are small. Still, the effect is the same.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The problem with finally formally introducing our main villain last week is that it makes all the showbiz stuff feel deeply trivial. If that was on purpose, I’d respect it. Unfortunately, it is still portrayed with the same monumental importance it’s always had in this show. Now more than ever, even, now that the movie about Ai is getting off the ground.
Speaking of which, hoo boy.
At what point does something cross the line from tragedy into comedy? How ridiculous does it have to get? How contrived must the situation be? Aqua has some kind of Epic Revenge Plan we are not presently privy to the details of that relies on this movie being a big success. Hence his acting in it as one of the leads—this is probably also a weird pyschosexual thing but the show is weirdly shy about actually saying that—and hence caring so much about how well it does. This much makes sense, but the arc it is trying to set up is short on anything actually worth watching so far.
What this setup means instead is that we get to do the stage play arc from season two warmed over, but with a movie this time and with less visual panache despite the higher stakes. (This might be the first episode of Oshi no Ko that I would say kind of looks so-so overall, in fact. It’s not horrible or anything, but there’s a noticeable lack of dazzle compared to most of its episodes.) You’d be forgiven for forgetting this, but there was a time not that long ago when Hoshino Aqua did in fact care about acting as something other than a means to an end. The fact that he doesn’t anymore isn’t inherently a problem, but as with everything else in this season the real issue is in the execution. There’s something to be said for the pure, granite cynicism of essentially having your lead seem like he’s going to walk into an open grave, but it’s absolutely no fun to watch at all, and it isn’t really that compelling as drama, either. The Aqua I cared about is already dead, so I don’t much care if this guy lives or dies. He says it himself in this episode, he’s given up on living a happy life. Why should I care if he lives one or not?
God bless MEM-cho. She is one of Oshi no Ko‘s vanishingly few characters who might be called “a normal person,” and as such she is totally unequipped to handle Aqua’s whole mess, but at least she’s trying.
Then there’s the whole blind acting contest thing that closes out the episode. Essentially, Frill—yes, more on that in a second—challenging Ruby and Akane to a pseudo-audition where they will vote among themselves for the best actress between them. In principle this is actually interesting, but in practice, it’s the same thing I’ve been saying about every problem I have with this season. It’s not that it’s bad on paper, it just isn’t handled well. Also, I don’t care how true to life it is, contriving the situation such that neither Akane nor Ruby have any idea what they’re actually auditioning for just makes the entire thing less interesting. I want to see Ruby torn the fuck apart by grappling with what she’s going to have to portray if she lands this role, and I want her to do it anyway. I’m sure we’ll get to that eventually but what point does holding off on it serve? Other than being yet another example of the show handling Ruby with kid gloves? (Because god forbid a girl be a tragic heroine while her brother is doing exactly the same thing.)
Right, it serves to reintroduce everyone’s favorite character, Shiranui Frill.
Yeah, you know, Frill. The living piece of trivia who was initially created solely to bridge this series and Love is War!, since she’s related to a character from that manga. That Frill. Are there a lot of Frill stans in the audience? Are the Frillnatics (presently my headcanon for what Frill’s stan army is called in-universe) popping for this? If you are out there and you are reading this, please reply to this post telling me why you like Frill. I’m genuinely curious. Before this episode she was barely a character at all, and hey, to her credit, she makes a solid showing here (it is never a bad idea to add more weirdos to the cast). But it all just seems like such cruft. The anime is apparently cutting quite a lot, and it still feels like it’s paced glacially and is just generally way too decompressed. I want some fucking urgency, man! There’s a killer on the loose! And frankly the contrivance just makes her look like a terrible person! Frill knows that Ruby is Ai’s daughter, surely? The idea that she’d not tip her off just for the sake of being professional strains credulity. Actors break the industry’s unspoken rules for much less in both real life and fiction all the fucking time. (It would be an entirely other matter if she was doing this on purpose in order to give herself an edge in the contest or to mess with Ruby for some other reason, but there’s no real indication that that’s the case.) All told it’s a surprisingly sloggish episode, despite there being, theoretically, quite a few things that happen here.
Also, the heavy-handed Ruby/Ai parallels are a bit much. But honestly if that was my only problem with this season we’d be doing alright. One thing they do genuinely have in common—a much bigger similarity than the contrived “they’re both liars” thing that the show keeps trying to set up—is that they’re dumbass goofballs. For example, we learn about a pair of video letters Ai had Gotanda hold on to (another contrived element), and when he asks her why have him do this, her response is this.
And back in the present, Ruby’s best guess as to what the audition will entail is…this whiteboard doodle.
(This is also something both of them have in common with Frill, who goes on a bizarre rant about her taxes and submits a comedy skit about the actual like from-the-fairytale Boy Who Cried Wolf as her audition, which includes her howling like a wolf. It’s one of the episode’s highlights.)
I’ve said this many times, but it’s so ridiculous to me that Akasaka Aka clearly wants to write Dark And Serious material, because he is so much better at simple comedy and relationship stuff. Kana is a bright spot in this episode when she shows up in its first third. She has a nice little exchange with Aqua and another with Ruby, and exits the episode early on with this line. I would not be surprised if she is the only major character who makes it out of Oshi no Ko with something resembling a happy ending. (Not inherently a better thing, but something Akasaka is far better at writing than whatever the fuck else he’s trying to do here.)
And honestly, that’s the main thing right? I didn’t hate this episode. It has its bright spots! But overall? In aggregate? It’s just a mess and a bore. I don’t respect what Oshi no Ko is doing anymore. Not because it shouldn’t try to have tragic elements or be serious, but because it is simply bad at both of those things.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Magic Planet Arcade is a once-in-a-great-while column where I take a break from writing about cartoons to write about video games instead.
The flashing text of a bootup sequence gives way to a run-and-jump through an ominous, empty structure. Thoughts flash on-screen, whether they’re ours or someone else’s is not immediately clear.
As the portentous omens come to a climax, we are reunited with our right hand, the [?handheld_assistant/;bestfriend/;gun] JOYEUSE, the first of many allcaps nouns we’re going to meet here. An AI named AEGIS, in a friendly, feminine voice, informs us that due to circumstances in our previous life, we have been drafted as a “Cicada”, broadly outlined as a sort of immortal robotic (or perhaps cyborg?) supersoldier. Our name is FAWN-A2, callsign The White Rabbit. Without more than a moment to get our bearings, AEGIS informs us that we are to be dropped into environs called SPHERES, somewhere in the CASCADE—the very nature of what the CASCADE even is is not explained to us—where we will retrieve sets of objects labeled CORES. Standing in our way is a variety of THREATS, named in broad terms that gesture at their form or function; SHOOTER, BOUNCER, CRAB, ESPER, etc., and rendered in a Superhot-esque red. Our instructions are very simple; get the CORES, get out, and if anything gets in our way, rip and tear.
If you’d think this sounds like the noun-heavy setup for a pretty simple FPS game, you’re half-right. Mechanically speaking, Cicadamata is part of the “go fast and beat ass” lineage of ‘movement shooters’ typified by something like Ultrakill. It’s an imperfect comparison, as Cicadamata‘s level layouts are generally a bit less enemy-focused and the visual aesthetic is very different (a future-retro “vectorheart” art style vs. Ultrakill‘s neo-Playstationy look), but they’re in the same ballpark. Cicadamata‘s weapon selection is very stripped-down compared to most FPSes. There is no “selection” at all, in fact. You have just one gun, Joyeuse itself, who functions as a cross between a shotgun, and, when the aim button is held, a sniper rifle. Joyeuse at your side, you can jump up to three consecutive times and dash once (thus really earning the “rabbit” part of your name) to hop about the levels, obliterate THREATS, and get to the exit. You also have a “stomp”, a diving downward drop that lets you step on enemies Mushroom Kingdom-style, should that be your preference.
Describing it in text does not really do justice to the kinetic feeling of actually playing Cicadamata. I’ve played a number of other games in this genre, and, to reveal my hand a bit, I tend to only get so much out of them. I’m simply not a competitive, top-of-the-leaderboards kind of player, it’s not in my nature. But Cicadamata‘s relatively stripped-down visual style—not a lot of complex textures here, for instance—lets it throw a lot of individual elements at you at once, which, combined with the twitchy movement and disassembled, surreal level geometry, makes the whole thing feel overstimulating in a good way. It’s properly buzzy, in fact, and AEGIS’ robotically gentle voice telling you that she’s proud of you when clear a level gives the entire thing a decidedly praise kink-y undertone. (Not the lone example of horniness. More overt, for instance, is the fact that one sees White Rabbit’s ass on the level results screen. But if you are expecting me to list that as a negative, I have bad news for you.) I am not normally the sort of person who’s inclined to try for S-rank clear times or the like, but Cicadamata tracks that, and I found myself aiming for Diamond (its highest rank) more than once, playing levels over and over despite the Demo Disc only having five of them. “Addicting” as an adjective in a video game context is beaten to death, and has a bit of a sinister cast to it. So I’ll just say I really, really enjoyed the 3 1/2 hours I managed to squeeze out of the demo, and plan to pick the game up when it releases.
Even more compelling to me than the gameplay however is the impressive amount of intrigue Cicadamata manages to build about its world in the demo’s short runtime (my first complete playthrough took perhaps 30 minutes) and lack of anything akin to cutscenes, normal dialogue, etc. If you linger around the dropship that starts each level, you’ll sometimes hear AEGIS deliver a bit of exposition about the SPHERE you’re in. (She’ll also encourage you to use the affirmation phrase “I am okay, the air is just heavy today” if you get scared or nervous. There is absolutely no sinister undertone to this whatsoever, I am assured.) There are also text terminals one can find in a few levels, something that greatly excited me in general.
Earlier, I compared this game to Ultrakill, perhaps the most successful of the movement-shooters that Cicadamata positions itself alongside. I love Ultrakill, don’t get me wrong—I’m transgender, it’s in the signup forms—but Ultrakill‘s religious saga about blood-fueled robots in an eschatological post-armageddon is a fairly different vibe than what’s going on here. To me, the text terminals seal the less immediately obvious, but perhaps more instructive, comparison. Despite having less in common with Cicadamata on a gamefeel level, the spectre of the original Marathon trilogy looms large over this game. (And the art direction brings to mind some trace of the Marathon reboot, as well.) Not just the first game, Marathon itself, but also Durandal, and Infinity. Cicadamta‘s story, if the Demo Disc is any indication, will be told in sputtering, half-remembered fragments, sometimes from the text terminals, and sometimes from stranger sources, be they hidden or randomly triggered. This very appropriate for themes of trauma, transformation, and the inherent fallibility of perception, all of which are present in the five terminals scattered across the demo. Each of these is brief, but they’re incredibly evocative, making use of cryptic phrasing, unknowable imaginary technical jargon crammed into crucial reports we have only some of the context for, diary-esque framing, and a [?bracketed word/synonym/evocative_third_word] writing trick that I’ve seen in a few places before but which never fails to delight me.
That you have to actually keep an eye out for the terminals might seem to scuttle the Marathon comparison a bit. After all, those games had plenty of hidden terminals, but most were right out in the open. But it brings most to mind a specific stretch of the series in particular, the so-called “Dream” levels in Marathon Infinity; the transitional “Electric Sheep” levels, “Where Are Monsters in Dreams“, “Eat The Path“, some of the most striking and surreal spaces in the entire trilogy, where the games’ otherwise linear storytelling begins to break down and it is made obvious to us, via heaps of surreal textual scenes, that our own player character is not necessarily an objective witness to events. Cicadamata even seems to be cognizant of this similarity, the first hidden terminal you can find makes mention of “Onaeire”, a name used vaguely but seemingly in reference to the location of the SPHERES or perhaps the entire setting in general. “Onaeire” is a fictional place-name, whatever its significance, but it seems to deliberately call to mind the adjective oneiric. Dream-like.
The Marathon comparison exists on an even more obvious level as well. Our [?shotgun/;handheld_assistant/;bestfriend] Joyeuse is named after one of Charlamagne’s swords. This is a naming convention directly borrowed from Bungie, who named the main AI companion in their first sci fi FPS trilogy Durandal and the same in the second Cortana. (Now, the one actually talking to us in our mission briefings and such is AEGIS, but given the tutorial, and some other factors, such as the talk that Joyeuse gives you little one-liner pep talks any time you zoom in with it, I do think the homage is intentional.) So this is clearly a reference Cicadamata is deliberately invoking, something being reached for.
Note Joyeuse talking to us in the bottom right. They have dozens of these quotes, some of which are just cute references and some of which seem to actively develop the relationship between Joyeuse and FAWN-A2. It’s very easy to completely gloss over this if you’re not looking for it, but I hope it remains and is expanded upon in the full game.
This would be meaningless if it weren’t a great game in its own right, of course. I do hope I made the fact that I think it very much is clear farther up this page. In addition to all that can be said about how the game looks and feels, what themes its story might eventually unpack, the main thing that impresses me is just how fresh it feels. The familiar toolbox of the movement shooter is there, to be certain, but gameplay, art, story, even audio intersecting in such a specifically compelling package makes for a game that is just absolute catnip to me and people like me. Not for nothing has the demo alone attracted a fair bit of attention (I’m not the first person to write about it, and I certainly won’t be the last). If I can peg all of its success on one thing, it is that sense of newness. Aspects of Cicadamata may be familiar, but it’s hard to name anything that’s put them together in this way before. There’s something new brewing here, and that’s genuinely exciting.
The only bad thing about all this is that, as of the time of this writing, you can’t actually play the demo anymore! I’m not really a games journalist, as the existence of just two other articles on this site about video games attests to. And by the time I’d heard about Cicadamata, played the demo, and had the thought to write about it, the timelocked demo was already just a half-day out from expiring, and by the time you read this, it will have run out entirely. (If I can levy any real criticism here it’s that I find that entire practice frustrating, though even there, I’m not sure if it’s a choice of the developers’ or some kind of requirement for being involved in Steam NextFest.) So if any of this sounds interesting to you, you will have to wait until the release of the game proper. Waiting can be frustrating, for sure, especially for something that doesn’t have a concrete release date yet. But you won’t wait alone; something else also waits in the heavens, and that, precisely, is why Cicadamata is so interesting.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
There are a variety of ways to interpret any story. This is something that’s obviously true, but I think is more often deployed as a cliché than really understood. For example, I have spoken a few different ways about Oshi no Ko over the past few years, I’ve praised it for its strong cast and bold storytelling, and I’ve criticized it for its relatively shallow understanding of the systems it seeks to critique and its reliance on elbow-jabbing shock value. Those aren’t contradictory opinions, my frustrations with the story stem from thinking it’s otherwise very good.
Out of habit, I’ve kept a lot of my more negative opinions on the series off-site to my tumblr or the like (with a few exceptions), while posting the more positive ones here. This has served to perhaps obscure that I think so far that season three is a pretty noticeable downgrade from season two. Not in terms of visuals—Hiramaki Daisuke’s team at Doga Kobo know what the fuck they’re doing if nothing else—but in terms of its actual story. I like this show best when it succeeds, but just as often, it lapses into Akasaka Aka bothsidesing some issue he clearly doesn’t understand very well, or gets caught in the muck of his addiction to wallowing in drama. (Often both at once.) Not to say “called it”, but I essentially knew this would happen, purely from Oshi no Ko‘s reputation as a manga that has a strong beginning and middle but a weak ending. Nothing gets a reputation that specific and that widespread without there being some kernel of truth to it. “No higher to climb” is specifically how I put it.
But, if I’m honest with myself, there are two things that make me want to be wrong about that assessment. One is simple contrarianism—you did remember that I’m the Wonder Egg Priority Defender, right? I love liking things that other people don’t. I never assume the role without a reason, but it’s one I like playing. Two is that when Oshi no Ko is good, it’s still very good. I think this episode is probably Oshi no Ko at its very best. It’s mostly about its best character, and it allows the show to actually explore its central ideas in an interesting way.
Last week’s episode saw Kana trying to schmooze with a director, Masanori Shima [Seiichiro Yamashita], to potentially be cast in one of his films. Shima, a young upstart who’s apparently responsible for some really good flicks, seemed nice enough at first, but once arriving at Shima’s home office, Kana found all of his staff gone for the evening. What followed was an awkward and uncomfortable scene of her being pretty ruthlessly hit on. Nothing Shima did crossed a clear line into violating consent, but this was one of those sickly situations where it’s clear that the power dynamics at play were influencing things in a way they really shouldn’t be. In finding a way out of this, Kana thought of Aqua, and tearfully explained that she has someone she already has feelings for.
This whole scene was, in of itself, a display of one of the obvious downsides of being an actress. The whole “casting couch” thing is a supremely gross mindset. Seeing someone in a position of power over an actress actually act on it is even more so. To his very limited credit, Shima backs off after Kana explicitly rejects his advances. But it’s still just all-around slimy, and despite the two parting on relatively okay terms, given everything, one can’t help but feel that Kana dodged a bullet. And however Kana herself may feel about it doesn’t end up mattering, because she happens to be spotted by a tabloid photographer while leaving Shima’s house. He snaps a few burst-shots of the two of them together and knows he has a scandal story in the making.
To be a little critical here, it feels like the show goes out of its way to exonerate Shima himself from any direct blame. A worse show would do this explicitly. Instead, he simply largely goes unmentioned while the episode places the blame on Mako Azami [Haruka Shiraishi], the girl who introduced Kana and Shima in the first place.
Now, it is true to life that scandals are often leaked from within a celebrity’s inner circle—this is even explicitly mentioned in this episode itself, albeit in a different context, because Oshi no Ko cares not for your subtlety—but a better show would just cut this entirely. It feels like a symptom of Akasaka Aka’s general tendency to try to complicate things for the sake of it, even when doing so doesn’t actually serve the narrative. It hardens into an overly-eager “no, you guys aren’t getting it, it’s not just the systems that are the problem! It’s the people in them!” that feels at times downright defensive. This trait is probably Oshi no Ko‘s biggest flaw in general, the kink in the armor that keeps holding it back. In its first season, Oshi no Ko really seemed like it wanted to turn the entertainment industry over and examine it rather than simply condemning it. That this tendency is present here—albeit only just so—in the show’s best episode in a season is thus a bit worrying. (And of course, if we circle back around to examining Shima’s role in all this at a later date, I’ll happily eat my words here, but I don’t think I’ll have to.)
Nonetheless, while this is all worth talking about, what I loved about this episode, and what makes it so great in spite of this flaw, was its study of Kana herself. Kana’s reaction to the specter of a probable scandal is one of profound panic. Confronted by the tabloid reporter, she freezes up in the face of his questions and eventually dashes off into the night in a fearful blur. Because episode director Uchinomiya Koki is a fucking pro, the show’s entire color palette changes moods along with her, trading in its usual bright and bold colors for a frozen world of grays, dark reds, and coffee-stain sepia browns.
When Kana’s panic is at its worst, she imagines the people she passes in the city crowd saying terrible things about her, the imagined slander clawing its way into her field of vision, like a blown-up, massive version of the tweet that ruined one of Ai’s days back in the very first episode of this series. It’s one of the best visual moments in a season that has hardly been short on those, and for that alone, this would be a great episode.
What’s really interesting, though, is how she eventually breaks herself out of this panic. Huddling by herself in the dark, Kana thinks that she should just quit. She thinks she wasn’t built to handle all this pressure. She cries about the mask she’s had to put on for the public her entire life, and somewhere in here she says something pretty heartbreaking: “Nobody wants the real Arima Kana.” Alone and frustrated, she cries for Aqua, who just so happens to be searching for her nearby. As a soft insert song kicks in, it briefly looks like Aqua might go to comfort her, which, just to lay it on the table, would’ve been super lame. The tension between Kana’s ambitions as an artist and her feelings for Aqua has been a central part of the character since the beginning, but it only works as a tension because Kana is so strong-willed. Having Aqua swoop in like an angel here would’ve robbed her of some of her agency and made her look weak.
Thankfully, this does not happen.
Crying out for Aqua causes her to pause, she’s shocked at her own neediness for someone who, at least from her point of view, isn’t actually interested in her like that. (Remember, Kana is not privy to Aqua’s inner thoughts like we are.) She chastises herself for playing the damsel in distress, and abruptly screams to the fucking sky that she’s not going to back down. She’s going to take the scandal, no matter how it breaks, on the chin, and she’s going to survive in the industry as she is. She—rightly!—reassures herself that she’s put up with this kind of thing since she was a preschooler. Something like this is not enough to stop her.
It’s absolutely fascinating that Kana seems to realize in real time that these things she’s always thought of as flaws about herself, her bitchy personality, her competitive streak, her lack of tolerance for the facades and handshaking of showbiz, her distance from the classical “pure and sweet-hearted” idol archetype, are actually why people like her. That’s definitely true out of universe, and in spite of her being a total professional, it’s hard to imagine that all this isn’t at least a little visible to her in-universe fans as well. You can’t really completely hide who you are, not wholly and not forever. It’s that old self-explaining magic trick maneuver Oshi no Ko really perfected last season, telling you exactly why you like this character right as it’s using that fondness to tug at your heartstrings. It’s brilliant stuff.
So, for the first time in a long time, Kana chooses herself. She’s will not bend or break, not for this. If I can be real here, I think this was also something I needed to hear as someone who’s long connected with the character. It’s really easy at times to dissociate from your own role in your life, to turn yourself into a damsel in distress or a completely helpless victim of circumstance. Sometimes people are victims, of course, but just as often, you really do have to rely on your own grit to get back out there, no matter what stands in your way. This is the kind of situation where Akasaka’s penchant for old school “just build up your confidence and do the damn thing”-type writing really shines. It helps that she handles things with a sense of humor, dryly realizing that this is going to lead to throngs of angry Twitter comments accusing her of being a slut who sleeps her way to the top and maybe worse. That’d be a hard thing for anyone to deal with, but Kana? Well, she puts it best.
The Doja Cat approach.
Taking the broader view, it’s interesting to contrast this development, how Kana frames it as something she’s doing to be true to herself, with the fate of Suzuhiro Mana. We briefly met her for the first and only time way, way back when Oshi no Ko was still a relatively new phenomenon, before it even had an anime. Back then, it seemed like Oshi no Ko would treat leaving the business, one way or another, as the only real possible “happy ending” for a life in the entertainment industry. That’s what Mana did, and that is what that little aside, buried next to the debut of the new B*Komachi, seemed to imply. This episode raises the possibility that just maybe, that isn’t the case. Maybe for a lucky and strong-willed few, the white hot light of fame doesn’t have to actually burn you to cinders. Of course, fire still hurts whether it kills you or not, but that’s just the cost of playing with it.
Then again, maybe even that much is just wishful thinking. Oshi no Ko is hardly the sort of story that would shy away from setting all this up only to pull it out from under the audience. It is totally possible that despite her confidence here, this scandal will destroy Kana’s career. I certainly hope it doesn’t, but it’s not off the table! If that happens, we’ll talk about it when the time comes. No matter how her story ends, I will be watching—and probably writing about—the saga of Arima Kana until it reaches its conclusion. She’s simply the best.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
One of my favorite things about this anime, which is used in a couple of different ways over the course of this episode, is Makio’s very authorial and writerly narration. She describes Asa’s empty apartment, which they visit in this episode, this way, and it really adds an ineffable something to the characterization as opposed to if we heard fewer of her thoughts. It gives the work a very “literary” quality, which makes sense both on an obvious level because Makio is an author, but also on a less obvious once, in that she seems to use this formal discursive register to separate herself a little bit from the events she and Asa are going through. It’s an interesting tension, and one I hope the series continues to explore as it goes on.
One way this forms a tension is in her statements to Asa, that Asa’s feelings about her parents’ passing are her own business alone. She’s said this a lot over the course of these three episodes, and while she clearly does believe it to some degree, she also doesn’t believe it so much that she doesn’t ask questions when Asa comes home from her first day back at school—the graduation ceremony, ironically—in tears, having even gotten lost on her way back. Asa presses her for asking about it, and—again, I think this is an interesting bit of tension—Makio says she shouldn’t put so much stock in what other people say
The entire episode of Asa going to school, only to learn that her friend Emiri has inadvertently let the entire class and faculty know about the tragedy she went through, and acting out at both Emiri and that faculty is an interesting one. We don’t really see Asa acting this emotive very often and she’s clearly very angry that everyone will only think of her as “that girl with the dead parents”, she says as much. (All the while the visuals transpose the characters into a surreal Maypole Dance setting.) Emiri and Asa were friends before this, but she spends most of the rest of the episode ignoring her and, on her way out the door, says she hates her.
We return to Makio attempting to figure out what exactly happened here, and when Asa throws the whole “no one’s business but your own” thing back in her face, that is when she tells Asa that she shouldn’t put so much stock in what other people say. Even more interestingly, this is immediately before talking about her own schoolday friend (Daigo Nana, who we met last week), and how Nana wrote her a letter on their last day of school together that meant the world to her. These pieces of subtle hypocrisy aren’t drawn a ton of attention to, other than Asa calling them out the one time, but they’re very interesting and paint Makio as a very complex character.
Again, I’m just really interested to know where else we’re going here. You could easily make the case that this is an outside candidate for the best thing airing right now, and given how stacked this season is, that’s really saying something.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
In keeping with the spirit of the show I’m covering, and in my ongoing quest to make my first impressions writeups less identical, here, presented in no particular order, is simply a list of things I liked about the premiere episode of Ikoku Nikki. (English-market title Journal with Witch, but, seemingly, almost no one calls it that.)
1: Its non-linear storytelling. We start with a flash-forward, only establishing the actual premise after the OP sequence plays. This allows us to meet our main characters, the recently-orphaned Takumi Asa [Mori Fuuko, in her first starring role], and her aunt, the eccentric Koudai Makio [Sawashiro Miyuki], on their own terms, before learning of the accident that deprived Asa of her parents and Makio taking her in.
2: Its use of limited, but bold visual techniques. In particular, with its frequent cuts to the desert Asa imagines as she attempts to write in her journal, it reminds me of the sometimes casually-hallucinatory bilocational direction of the recent mystery anime Shoshimin Series. Of course, the context is very different, but I grew very fond of the technique in that series, and I am happy to see a similar method used here to elicit different emotions. Asa calls this desert “loneliness”.
3: Makio herself, a decidedly disheveled woman of 35 (making her the increasingly-rare anime character older than me) who lives in an unkempt apartment with bits of paper scattered everywhere. She is characterized as shy and just generally a bit of a weirdo. To say I felt seen, as someone in my 30s who also makes a living (well, “a living”) off of writing as Makio appears to do, also fitting pretty much all of these descriptions, would be an understatement.
4: When Makio gives Asa the journal, we see its rows and rows of ruling lines slowly morph into the sand dunes of the desert. This sequence in of itself is incredible, especially for how little is actually involved in it, but it’s Makio’s advice to Asa on journal-writing that really sticks with me: you don’t have to write anything you don’t want to, write only what you want to in that moment, and what you write needn’t even necessarily be true.
5: In general, stemming from both of these prior points, both Makio and Asa have fairly understated characterization. I admit I often struggle with fiction like this, as someone with generally low emotional intelligence who is bad at observing people. (And of course, observation of real people generally informs the sort of gestural tics and other expressive signals that act as a tell in this sort of thing.) Even so, I welcome the challenge here. I think perhaps what’s objectively true of Makio is less important than what Asa thinks of Makio, as a life raft in a sea of indifference. I am interested in seeing the two of them grow together, and that, really, is the main reason I found this premiere so compelling.
6: Of course, the louder and more direct bits of characterization help. Makio’s loud declaration that despite hating her mother and not even being sure she’ll be able to properly love Asa, that she won’t let her just be passed around by her family, is the episode’s best scene.
7: The scene where Asa, in her lonely desert, discovers Makio walks it as well. Without directly saying anything, the series draws a line between these two people, their minds, and their lives. It is proven to Asa that she is not alone. This really ties the episode together for me, and I am absolutely fascinated to see where the series will go from here.
It is shaping up to be a very strong anime season. That’s a good thing, but a problem with that is that works that are somewhat less conventional, like Ikoku Nikki, risk being overrun by their flashier peers. I really hope that doesn’t happen, there’s a ton of potential here, and what is here already is very, very good.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.
It’s that time of year again, folks. Namely, it’s the end of the year. Or rather, by the time you’re reading this, the start of a new one. Now, the past couple of times I’ve done these, I’ve given the article a big long prelude where I talk about my year and the state of mind I went into the article with and so on and so forth. I haven’t really done that this year. My year sucked! Everyone’s year sucked! My year sucking is not remarkable! Right up to the end, it kind of sucked! Because unlike most years where I give myself a lot of breathing room to do these lists, this time I crammed all of my work into the last three days of the year, a brilliant decision that I am absolutely fucking never going to make again. Seriously, I’m writing this at 9PM on New Year’s Eve! This and the bit at the end are the last thing I’m writing, but still!
Anyway, let’s just move on, and talk about the anime. Despite my struggles with writing this list, they were consistently a high point of my experiences this year, and I do value that.
I completed a good bit fewer than my average in 2025—only an even 20 this time—and spent a lot of time I would’ve spent on watching seasonals I wasn’t really feeling watching older anime instead. I don’t particularly like the idea that I might be slowly turning into one of those “no one makes good anime anymore” people, but I do have to admit that this seems to largely be a better use of my time. As such, a lot of the anime on this list are sequels this time around. I admit that’s a little boring! But it’s not like I actively planned to only follow stuff like that, it’s just how things shook out. The counterweight to that though, is that I didn’t really finish any anime this year I’d call outright terrible. That’s right, for the first time ever, a full list has absolutely zero shows on it I’d say are just straightforwardly don’t-watch-this bad.
There is one I’d call disappointing, though.
And, as you know, this list goes from worst to best. So let’s start there.
#20: MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM GQUUUUUUX
God help me, even with barely any of the series under my belt, I’ve become one of those people who complains about modern Gundam. Thankfully, the problems with GQuuuuuuX (which I’ll be typing with just one U from here on out) don’t require any deep knowledge of the Gundam back catalog to explain and are instead very modern issues with what is at its core a very modern anime. GQuX, very simply, is one of those anime that was clearly initially conceived of with the expectation that it would have many more episodes than it actually got, and when the word came down that they would only be getting a standard single cour, whatever attempts were made to edit this thing down to that format failed. The alternative explanation is just that no episode count would’ve made this story work, which is not exactly a great consolation prize.
The bizarre thing is that, taken moment by moment, GQuX is actually a lot of fun. The main characters have an interesting dynamic, between the relatively privileged dreamer Machu, the displaced and struggling Nyaan, and Shuji who…is a graffiti artist. The initial battle royale-type setup with the Clan Battles is a good time, as is Machu’s initially coming into possession of the titular Gundam in the first place. The series’ interplay with the older Gundam material is also interesting. As would be expected of something that’s working in the so-called Daicon lineage, (specifically helmed here by director Tsurumaki Kazuya), There are a lot of great action setpieces and interesting bits of character work (Nyaan joining up with Zeon makes everything very weird in a compelling way, for example) even when the story is hard to follow. This is good, because “when the story is hard to follow” is most of the time.
I’m not a big believer in a story having to be 100% legible to everyone at all times, but with GQuX there is a real sense of trying to keep way more plotlines than it can reasonably juggle in the air at once. Concepts, plot beats, and people are introduced in one episode and dropped the next. This can be a strength in this kind of series, but GQuX doesn’t really pull it off. The real issue, as it often is, is that none of this stuff comes together in a way that makes any sense, either thematically or just on a more basic level as a story. And while I do maintain that the textual interplay between this and the older Gundam stuff is interesting, it doesn’t exactly help make GQuX more coherent.
If you’re charitable, this makes GQuX a fun but messy watch, like so many anime in this particular tradition—say, Gurren Lagann or something—if you are much less charitable, and given a particularly indefensible decision in the final episode especially I’d blame no one if they were, it comes off as afraid of committing to anything in particular, or, even worse, being willfully regressive. All of this, even the worst of it, might be forgivable in a show that didn’t come with a name that carries a lot of weight and legacy. We all have our problematic faves after all, but GQuX was not lucky enough to be born so unburdened. If it reminds people of the more amateurish end of fanfiction—and I’ve seen that description thrown around a lot for this show—I can’t really blame them. A benefit of actual fanfiction is that if it’s bad, no one really cares, because it’s a medium with a very low bar to entry, and the standards are not particularly high. And at its best, fanfiction is adventurous and freewheeling. Actual anime can be the latter, but despite some honest efforts, GQuX mostly doesn’t manage it, which is a shame, because it clearly really wants to.
In another lifetime, I might’ve been nicer toward GQuX. I still don’t think it’s terrible or anything. It’s nowhere near as bad as the dreck that’s bottomed out the list in previous years, and if we compare it to, say, Love Flops, it’s a masterpiece. Still, I do feel let down by it.
The Daicon Lineage that stretches back to the original Daicon Film shorts, through GAINAX’s most influential work, and continued to permeate throughout the 2010s via that of Studio TRIGGER, was for a very long time one of my favorite schools of anime period. But increasingly, either as a function of the anime in that lineage genuinely getting less focused over time or, hell, maybe just me getting older, I increasingly feel like I’m being scammed out of an actual, meaningful story by pretty cuts of animation and cool directorial tricks. I enjoyed GQuX week to week while it was airing, but if it has a real legacy for me personally, it’s making me wonder just how much I’m willing to put up with for this kind of thing at all. Maybe blaming the anime itself for my own disillusionment is immature or lame, but I feel how I feel, and this is my list at the end of the day. That, more than anything, is why it’s bringing up the rear here.
#19: NECRONOMICO & THE COSMIC HORROR SHOW
When Necronomico premiered, I mentioned that if you can’t swing “good,” “weird” is a good second option to aim for. What I left unsaid there is that this does imply that the thing in question isn’t actually good. Or at least doesn’t start that way. And indeed, I’d say Necronomico was, by its end, more or less fine—and definitely still weird—but it’s no one’s idea of a masterpiece.
Still, that novelty is worth something. There are lots of death game anime, but the specificity of the “streamers as contestants subjected to the will of the Old Gods” setup is pretty unique. The show’s main strengths lie in its willingness to put its cast into wacky, bizarre life-or-death situations and tie those situations to the characters’ lives. This doesn’t make the writing particularly deep, but it does make it hit when we learn about, say, popular girl Kagurazaka Kanna’s abusive childhood, or the entire thing with the teacher character toward the end of the show. It also keeps main character Kurono “Necronomico” Miko consistent and engaging to follow. The best element of the anime, though, is Cthulu, depicted here not as a tentacle-faced octopus behemoth but as a haughty ojou with green skin and big hair. She’s inhabiting the body of Miko’s main squeeze, which gives the two a pretty incredible toxic yuri dynamic in a show that one would not really expect that from. (It isn’t even the only one of those, but I don’t want to spoil the whole series, you know?) Necronomico ends on a bit of a whimper—and hilariously teases a sequel that will almost certainly never happen—but it was a decent time while it lasted, and if someone liked the show a lot more than I do, I would understand.
Is it really better than GQuX? Honestly I’m not sure. I mostly put it above Machu & Friends on this list because while GQuX actively let me down, I never expected much from Necronomico in the first place, and it actually managed to surprise me a few times. Is that fair? Not really, but I’m the one making the list. Next!
#18: YANO-KUN’S ORDINARY DAYS
There are two no-frills het romcoms on the list this year. This is the worse of the two, but it’s still a solid showing for the genre. The premise here is pretty simple, our boy Yano Tsuyoshi frequently gets in cartoonish accidents and injures himself due to what is vaguely referred to by those around him as “a predisposition”. Yoshida Kiyoko, our female lead, sees this and is promptly injured herself. Though in her case, it’s by Cupid’s arrow.
So begins a show laser-targeted at the sort of person who gets the most joy out of a series when they can screencap its main characters and ask “are they stupid?” about them. I sometimes fit this description too, and accordingly I liked my time with Yano-kun. It has a charming and straightforward appeal that is welcome in pretty much any anime season, and I was happy to have it as a weekly series to close out the year. (I watched it with a friend, in fact. It’s good for that.) There really is not a ton to this show, if you vibe with the relatively direct character dynamics, you’ll like it, and if not, you probably won’t. I did, so I think it was pretty good. Simple stuff.
I do, however, deduct a few points for teasing the audience about Yano’s heterochromia and then never showing it to us. Boo!
#17: THIS MONSTER WANTS TO EAT ME
Despite taking place in the dead of summer, there is a bone-deep cold to Watatabe, chilly as a coastal winter on the other end of the year. I think of Watatabe as a sort of warped fairytale, our despondent princess, Hinako, is not saved from her survivor’s guilt and depression by a knight in shining armor. She isn’t saved at all, really. Instead, the wicked (well, “wicked”) mermaid Shiori seizes upon her sadness, and they proceed to make each other worse in some very interesting ways, as revelations about the incident that led to Hinako’s suicidal nature come to light and continually rearrange what we think we know about these characters. Add to the mix Miko, Hinako’s childhood friend who turns out to be holding more than a few secrets herself, and you’ve got a tightly-wound dramatic character dynamic that not much else this year matched. Impressive, especially when you consider how few moving parts there truly are to this story.
The main reason this isn’t higher on the list? Honestly, just that this was one of a number of anime this year that were visibly fighting against a threadbare production. More than anything else, it’s made me want to read the manga. But when the story at the core of this series is such a coldly compelling chunk of frozen unease, that’s hardly a bad thing.
16: A NINJA & AN ASSASSIN UNDER ONE ROOF
A throwback to the earlier days of the studio’s history in some ways, NinKoro is a modern example of one of SHAFT‘s older specialties, unhinged, no-rules comedies, typified by the likes of Pani Poni Dash or And Yet The Town Moves. It wouldn’t be entirely correct to call NinKoro straightforwardly retro, as many of its sensibilities are very modern (it’s very gay, for one thing), but the spirit of a bygone era of comedy anime is in there. Cold-blooded killer Konoha Koga and airhead ninja Satoko Kusagakure make for a classic odd couple. But I think the show’s actual style is best explained by its favorite running gag; whenever a situation needs an extra dash of chaos, a highly overdesigned ninja from Shirobako’s village will show up and attack our main characters, before promptly being subjected to Konoha’s ruthless efficency, landing somewhere between slapstick and black comedy. There’s a beating heart in this thing too, in that Konoha and Satoko’s relationship is genuinely sweet, which puts NinKoro above being a mere novelty.
In fact, it’s enough to make me wonder, at this point, is that spirit I mentioned really so bygone anymore? Recent examples, albeit mostly from other studios, seem to drop about once or twice a year. In fact, it isn’t even the last one on this list.
15: BAD GIRL
Less outright zany than NinKoro, and perhaps more properly a yuri series with a comedy bent, Bad Girl seemed to go rather overlooked when it premiered in July of this year. That’s a bit of a shame, because while it doesn’t have the production polish of some of the other comedies on this list, it’s another simple charmer driven by a straightforward but strong set of character dynamics.
The setup here is even simpler than some of the other comedies here, shy goody two-shoes Yuutani Yuu is tired of being nice, and wants to go apeshit. She tries to accomplish this by becoming “a delinquent”, which in her mind seems to consist mostly of wearing clip-on earrings and a jacket. At the same time, she’s crushing on Mizutori Atori, the class rep, which throws this whole delinquent thing into question. Add in a childhood friend, a streamer girl who craves attention more than anything, and a blue-haired menace who really seems like she’d rather be in Zenkowa or something, and you’ve got a pretty great set of characters that the show puts through their comedic paces. Often, this entails making Yuu the butt of some joke or another, and more than one character compares her to a small animal. The show is also surprisingly horny, and a recurring gag sees Yuu imagined in a sexy dog-girl outfit, but, given the general light goofing-around vibe and the series’ yuri bent, that’s not really a bad thing. It fits the tone.
Honestly, I like Bad Girl and NinKoro about equally. Why did I give this one a higher spot? Because I watched it with my girlfriend, and I think in a way that’s worth more than any tangible merit of the series itself.
14: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE
Every once in a while, an anime drops that just defies any easy categorization. If it seems pat to point out that this is true of Turkey! you’ll have to forgive me for stating the obvious. It is worth stating though, Turkey! spends most of its first episode setting the pins for a sort of MyGO!-for-bowling sports drama thing before making a hard swerve into a time travel historical fiction adventure, and I think it speaks to how well the show pulled it off that anyone stuck around after that. Bait-and-switch twists, even those that early, are devilishly hard to get right.
In its contrasts between past and present, Turkey! asks some interesting questions. As is common for time travel narratives, it draws distinction between the value systems of history and those we live with today, culminating in a really impressive turn around the show’s middle. In episode six for example, sweetheart Ichinose Sayuri helps her warrior friend Suguri defend her village from bandits. This, naturally, entails killing them, and there’s a rich vein of drama in how this kind of breaks Sayuri’s brain, as someone from a relatively privileged modern position, who simply isn’t equipped to reconcile that the kind person she’s grown to know over the show’s first third could do that to someone. The way the series attempts to reconcile this is extremely potent within the episode itself, involving the literal and symbolic image of a white flower stained red with blood.
That stretch of the series is probably the show’s peak, and if it never quite hits that high again—although it comes close—it makes up for any deficiencies with sheer over-the-top style. It also never actually stops being about bowling, incorporating the sport as both a peaceful recreation the girls bring with them to the past and as a serious, sometimes deadly serious synecdoche for its characters’ lives and priorities. Despite how different the events of the series are to most other emotionally-tense girls’ drama anime of this type, Turkey! is one of those, despite the time travel conceit and adventure elements. This leads to some great serious moments, but also a lot of delicious camp. Where else this year were you going to get a line like, from the finale, “I don’t care about your damn gods. I care about bowling.”? That’s all-timer material right there. That, as much as the more serious stuff, is the key to the show’s success.
For these reasons and more, Turkey! is a true army of one, and I would be unsurprised to see it become something of a cult classic in the years ahead.
13: RURI ROCKS
The first, but not the last, gorgeous slice of life series on the list, Ruri Rocks is a slow, contemplative anime about finding value in the natural world. The titular Tanigawa Ruri is interested in gemstones, first just because she thinks they’re pretty. Over the course of the series, however, she comes to appreciate minerals and the grasp processes of geologic deep time, guided by her older friend and mentor figure, Arato Nagi. Each episode focuses, by and large, on a mineral or similar material, moving from placer gold to pyrite, sapphires to sea glass, and so on, as both Ruri and by extension ourselves learn about them. After its first few episodes, the show’s world expands, slowly but surely, adding a few additional characters and broadening Ruri’s perspective.
Tellingly, the single best episode of the show is actually about actual mineralogy only in the loosest of terms, where Ruri finds an old crystal radio that once belonged to her late grandfather. This is another of the show’s main ideas; that what we do today can connect us, however fleetingly, to the endless yesterdays before us, whether that time scale is across human lifetimes or across eons. The result is a warm, gorgeous ballad about the forces that shape our world, and the beauty to be found in appreciating them.
I think some people will be surprised that Ruri Rocks isn’t even higher on the list. But honestly? This entry and onward, the list really becomes a total free-for-all. If someone said Ruri Rocks was their favorite anime of the whole year, I’d completely understand. That’s also true for everything above it on the list. (And honestly, if someone said their favorite anime of the year was Turkey! I’d respect the hell out of that, too.)
12: MONO
And hey, why not put both of the gorgeous iyashikei on the list right next to each other? Is it some contrarian impulse that causes me to rank mono as the slightly higher of the two? Maybe. But to be honest, this is another case where I like the shows about equally.
As Ruri Rocks is about time, we can, if we want to draw a contrast, say mono is about space. Nominally it’s actually about photography and video, but quite unlike the focused nature of its immediate listmate, mono is charmingly rambling in nature, and is content to devote entire episodes to things wholly unrelated to the hobby club that are technically its protagonists. Over the course of the series, we get individual episodes about ghosts (whose existence is just taken as a given in mono), the tribulations of both the mangaka that the main girls know and a few other ones that she knows, road trips gone awry, and much more. The real focus for much of this is on the beauty of the various landscapes mono gets to show off. I’ve described both Ruri Rocks and this series as iyashikei, but the love of rolling green hills and the like here feels of a piece with the spirit of the genre in an ephemeral, hard-to-place way. It’s pretty enough to double as a tourism ad, which makes some sense given that the original manga comes from the pen of Yuru Camp creator AFRO.
11: SHOSHIMIN: HOW TO BECOME ORDINARY, SEASON 2
Straight couples will literally do this rather than go to therapy.
There are a few returnees on the list this year, but this actually isn’t one of them. Shoshimin Series only made the honorable mentions last year, because I hadn’t actually finished the first season of the anime at the time, so this is its first appearance in a year-end list proper. This is maybe a good thing, if we’re going to pretend that these shows somehow care about their standings at all, because I actually thought the first season was kind of a mixed bag!
The anime’s initial setups of low-stakes mysteries, “solved” by our main duo of Kobato Jougorou and Osanai Yuki, didn’t entirely grab me. But, toward the end of that season, Osanai was fucking kidnapped, and the stakes started being appropriately raised. That largely continues into the second season, as Kobato and Osanai’s unusual relationship continues to evolve. Both of them have compulsive playing-detective-brain and struggle to get on with normal people, meaning that the only person who really understands either of them is the other, but they “break up” early into the season, and the bulk of it is done with them apart. This lets some other characters get a bit of focus, including Urino Takahiko, a member of the school newspaper club who makes a fool of himself trying to solve a local arson case, but largely the series’ main interest remains the psychodrama between and around Kobato and Osanai. Osanai, in fact, is a large part of the reason this series is so high in the first place. She is a treat of a character, a total weirdo with a sweet tooth who constantly feels the need to intellectually challenge other people. She’s a fascinating secondary protagonist, but honestly Kobato is a solid lead as well, and it’s probably to both’s benefit that they stick together at the end of the season. I’m not sure anyone else should be involved in the whole thing they have going on by series’ end.
The series’ direction plays a big part in selling all the mind games here, as well. Often, it takes a hallucinatory, bilocational approach, directly inserting the characters into scenes while they speak that aren’t literal representations of where they are but rather of what they’re discussing. This highly stylized approach to visual conversation is something that I feel anime has been missing a bit, lately, as the whole “Monogatari-esque” / Faust magazine-core genre has declined somewhat in the last decade. In that sense as much as anything else, Shoshimin Series was a breath of fresh air.
My understanding is that the two seasons of the anime form a nearly-complete adaptation of the original light novels. So if we ever get more Shoshimin, it probably won’t be for a while. Still, I am glad to have finished it, and glad to get to put it on the list.
10: TATSUKI FUJIMOTO 17-26
The Chainsaw Man movie is not on this list. I know, I specifically didn’t give Chainsaw Man the gold medal back in 2022 because I expected its eventual followup would be even better. And it was! So me not covering films in these lists is really biting me in the ass here. Nonetheless, Chainsaw Man mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto has found a way to sneak onto the list regardless, thanks to this anthology adapting some of his earlier oneshots.
I did think about excluding Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26 from the list too. It’s not really a TV series as such, given that it’s an anthology of shorts, and the episodes are of varying lengths. But, it was close enough that I chose to include it. If it wasn’t one of the most original anime productions of the year, I might not have bothered, but by simple fact of being an anthology, with 8 different shorts by 8 different teams, it’s worth serious consideration. That structure did make ranking 17-26 on the whole kind of hard, since some episodes—the explosive romcom-action burst of “Shikaku”, the hormonal psychedelia of “Woke-Up-As-A-Girl Syndrome”, the grounded character drama of “Sisters”, probably the best of the lot—are fantastic, whereas others are just so-so, but even the least of these stories is interesting, and really reinforces Fujimoto’s status as a true original. I would love to see more mangaka anthologies like this get anime, or even just for more anime anthologies to exist in general. The format is severely underutilized in the medium, maybe the success of this one will spur some imitators? We can only hope.
9: DAN DA DAN, SEASON 2
Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I have to rate an actual battle shonen series on these lists, I always feel a little silly. Perhaps because the institution stands slightly apart from the rest of the seasonal churn. Nonetheless, there was more Dandadan this year, and like last year’s Dandadan? It was very good. Dandadan‘s strengths have not really changed, fun and novel character dynamics on top of a bed of intense, often outright surreal action pieces. Highlights from this season include a musical exorcism, the introduction of Evil Eye to the cast, and a huge, multi-part kaiju battle to round out the season. All of this is, genuinely, great stuff, but I think on some level, deeper analysis of the how’s and why’s of Dandadan might be best left to people with a lot more shonen head cred than I have. (The sort of people who have a better idea of what “newgen” means in this context than I do, maybe.) I find myself with a dearth of anything new to say about it compared to last year.
But honestly? Maybe that’s not a problem. There’s no issue with consistently hitting your strengths year after year, and if Dandadan wants to keep doing that, and going on and on, I’d welcome it with open arms.
8: TAKOPI’S ORIGINAL SIN
Most of the time, when I write these lists, I’m reaffirming the thoughts I already had on a work. Here, I’m actually going to do a slight bit of course-correction. When Takopi premiered, I, in hindsight foolishly, hemmed and hawed over actually covering it in any depth because it was so grim. This, with even just a few months of hindsight, is obviously stupid. So let me double down on what became my opinion of Takopi around when it ended. The situations portrayed in Takopi are extreme, and the titular space octopus / Doraemon-core kids’ anime escapee is simply not equipped to handle the tangle of abuse, social ostracization, depression, poverty, and tragedy he wanders into. His attempts to help largely make things worse, and the time loop that takes up the bulk of the show’s plot really takes great pains to express this. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” is a stone cliché, but it is so for a reason. You can’t just good vibes your way out of situations this dire.
As much for its affecting story, though, I rank Takopi highly on the basis of its direction. Iino Shinya was largely previously known for his work on the Dr. Stone anime which, no disrespect to that series, is just not playing the same game that this is at all. When Takopi needs to convey dissociation, the entire world of the show will wobble and waver. Overall, it’s just gorgeous, and that it is so in service to this kind of tragedy makes it hit all the harder.
The fact that Takopi isn’t even higher on this list is slightly an olive branch to those who instead find all this drama ridiculous instead of affecting. (I don’t agree, but I do get it. I think stuff like this requires a certain emotional temperament. ie. me being a huge sap, something that is not true of everyone.) But mostly, it’s just a testament to the fact that this year was absurdly stacked with good anime. I was genuinely moved by it, up to actually crying at the finale, and I think it’s going to stick with me for a long while. It makes perfect sense, but it is pretty stark that, faced with the overwhelmingly tragic situations of its protagonists, the only solution that finally works for Takopi is no solution at all. He simply removes himself from the equation, and only then do things begin to work out.
7: MILKY☆SUBWAY: THE GALACTIC LIMITED EXPRESS
Perhaps Takopi‘s polar opposite in terms of tone, Milky Subway is almost certainly the most obscure thing here. Milky Subway is a 3DCG youtube series about a group of convicts who have to figure out what’s going on when the space train that they’re on starts operating by itself. That premise, and the fact that the show takes place in a far off, gee-whiz kind of sci fi future you just don’t see very often anymore, would be enough on its own to set Milky Subway apart. Its real strength is in our main duo, though, the slightly airheaded and a bit whiny (in a cute way) Kujo Chiharu, and her we’ll just say girlfriend Kurusu Makina, a robot girl with a dry sense of humor and a lack of patience for anyone’s nonsense. They’re a blast to follow, and the bizarre situation they find themselves in aboard the train lends itself well to them playing off the rest of the cast as well.
If Milky Subway has a “flaw” (and I don’t really think it is one), it’s that it’s quite short. Each episode is only about three minutes long, and that’s with credits. Still, the result is one of the most unique experiences of the year, one that has as much in common with the broad world of web animation as it does with what I normally cover on this site. It’s also just straight up on Youtube, so if you haven’t seen it, fix that!
6: MY DRESS-UP DARLING, SEASON 2
We’re in the midst of a run of sequels here. You’ll have to pardon that, they’re not gonna let up as we keep climbing the list. Dress-Up Darling returns to us from 2022 and, perhaps surprisingly, is not the last Class of ’22 alum we’ll see here.
More important than its credentials though are that its fundamental strengths are all still intact. It’s still the radiantly warm, charming, easygoing love story of a pair of complete nerds, Gojo and Marin, who bond over cosplay, Marin’s favorite thing in the whole world, essentially. Far from having suffered from the time away, MDUD actually returned to us this year with even more visually sumptuous treats than it had when we last saw it. While there aren’t any more clips from Flower Princess Blaze in this season—the only fictional anime I’ve ever written a review of—there are plenty more where that came from, including a faux-OVA that kicks off the season. In fact, my favorite arc of this season revolves around one of these impressive bits of pastiche. Marin’s enthusiasm for a horror game called Coffin is central to the season’s final stretch. Coffin has a sort of willfuly faux-retro look I associate with the like of itch.io visual novels and such. To see an aesthetic like that in a series like this is really quite something, even moreso when it’s tied to a truly awesome-looking horror cosplay shoot the characters are involved in.
More than just being visually snappy though, Dress-Up Darling also continues to gently prod at the seams of gender expression. Another arc in this season sees Marin engage in some cross-play as part of a contest. New character Amane Himeno, is also a crossplayer (though if one wants to interpret Amane a bit more LGBT-y, I certainly won’t stop you), his whole backstory about dumping his girlfriend when she learned about his hobby and was disgusted by it is one of several ways that MDUD suggests that this kind of gender essentialism is on its way out. Honestly, more than maybe anything else on this list, I really hope it’s right about the world’s vibes. We needed that sunshine in 2025.
5: CALL OF THE NIGHT, SEASON 2
Of the two unexpected returns from 2022 anime on this list, I was actually more surprised by this one, in a way. Dress-Up Darling was popular, so a sequel at some point felt like a sure thing. Call of The Night, though, always felt like it was just outside the popular kids club.
Which only makes sense, Call of The Night sees the vampire as a stand-in for just about any kind of outcast. That’s why Ko, our male lead, fit in so well with Nazuna and the other vampires back in season one. But its second season took a turn for the queer (explicitly so) and, related to that, the dark. A majority of this season focuses on Nazuna’s past, giving us backstory for herself, but also characters like Hondo Kabura, who we met in season one but didn’t really get to know. (Kabura’s episodes, particularly the first, are some of the best of the year full stop.) In these stories, Call of The Night draws direct parallels between vampirism and queerness, adding it to the list of the many, many things that can get a person cut off from normal society. Anko returns here too, also getting a fully fleshed-out series of flashback episodes that frame her former relationship with Nazuna herself, directly in queer terms. All of that explodes in a final act that is as spine-chilling as anything else to air this year, nearly ending in truly dire terms when it seems like Anko is really willing to throw away everything to exterminate the vampires she’s come to hold in such contempt.
The queerness makes the fact that none of these relationships last, and their arguable replacement with Ko’s and Nazuna’s, sit just slightly uneasily. I don’t think it’s a real flaw, but if someone held it against the series I’m not sure I could blame them. Honestly, that unease is maybe the main reason it’s not in the top three. Still, you can’t argue with the effectiveness of something like this. It’s powerful. And, well, in addition to everything else I’ve said. In the last episode of the season, Anko makes a comment that she feels she’s gotten older but hasn’t really grown up. I relate. So hey, points for that, too.
4: THERE’S NO FREAKING WAY I’LL BE YOUR LOVER! UNLESS….
Here we have a show that’s going out of its way to complicate being on the list at all! Literally today, the day I’m writing this, December 31st, the show better known as Watanare, dropped a five-episode coda to its excellent first season. This was originally a theatrical release, so I’m not really counting it for the purposes of this entry. Just know that here—there’s always somewhere where this is true on the list, it seems, even if I wait until the final day of the year—I’m working off incomplete information.
Even so, Watanare was already fantastic just with the 12 episodes it initially aired with. I’d hesitate to describe Watanare as a romcom, although that’s probably the closest fit in terms of strict genre. If it’s anything, it’s a situationship dramedy, a harem series where girl after girl can simply not help falling under the spell of local dangerous pink thing Amaori Renako. Initially confessed to by overbearing rich girl Ouzuka Mai, Renako’s high school life quickly becomes a ball of un-resolvable romantic entanglement. It’s an absolute charm to watch from start to finish, as one never really knows which of Renako’s seemingly endless parade of girlfriends is going to throw things into a tizzy next.
As much as its writing (which is very good, don’t get me wrong), another important aspect of Watanare is its atmosphere. The series has a slightly unreal visual quality, I’ve previously compared it to city pop album covers and, honestly, I can’t really think of any better way to pin it down. It’s achingly romantic but not cloying, embracing all the messiness that comes with relationships and amplifying it until the knob breaks. It’s one of a couple anime where I’m kicking myself for not putting it at the top of the list! But it is what it is, 2025 was a very good year for the medium. Also, the finale’s conclusion remains an all-time way to end your high school romance show. No notes. Muri muri!
3: CITY: THE ANIMATION
Occasionally, an anime comes along that is both extremely good but also simply so good that it becomes a bit difficult to write about. What is there to say about CITY THE ANIMATION? Do you point out that it’s a massive artistic flex from, take your pick, director Ishidate Taichi who pulls off some truly unhinged stuff here, original mangaka Arawi Keiichi who has now had his work adapted into an era-defining comedy anime twice, just Kyoto Animation in general, putting the lie to any idea that they’re out of new ways to make a show just fucking slap from start to finish?
It’s true that this anime’s vast cast, a widescreen portrait of the titular city on the whole as opposed to just one or two residents, makes known a real joie de vivre that is tough to match in any year’s comedy offerings. It’s true that the directorial stuff really is that crazy, the way the show breaks into sectioned-off visual pieces in episode five only to knit itself back together into a quilt at the end of that episode must be seen to be believed. The same is true of the musical in the final episode, the show’s surprising number of silent segments that rely on expressive animation alone, etc. But at some point we’re just listing things about the show that are impressive, not necessarily the things that are good, and there is a distinction there.
So if I had to pin why I rate it so highly on any one thing in particular, it’s simply this: CITY was one of only a handful of things this year that made me optimistic about the future of anime. It was very easy to be cynical this year, for reasons I’m not really going to get deeply into but which I’m sure you can guess at if you follow the medium at all. In its specific mastery of the fundamentals, it’s a masterpiece in a very old-school, craftsmanship-first way, and I would not be surprised if it eventually emerges as the consensus best anime of 2025. It wasn’t my personal favorite, but it came very, very close.
2: UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY
Every year, I do a little thing on social media where I have people try to guess what they think my number one pick is going to be. There were two anime that were highly mentioned this time around, and one of those was Cinderella Gray. In literally any other year, you all would’ve been right.
We’ll get to why you weren’t in a minute, but 2025 was the year I got really into Umamusume. And if I wanted to put this entry at the very top of the list because of that alone, I think I would’ve been justified in doing so. But even if we ignore the entire rest of the series, I think the story of Oguri Cap’s rise to fame is one of the year’s best. Oguri herself is maybe the year’s single best protagonist, a lovable country bumpkin who also happens to be one of the absolute strongest people in her sport.
While the series more than makes sense in aggregate, I think Cinderella Gray is best thought of as a series of moments. (Any of you who just asked “hype moments?”, you’re the people I’m really writing this entry for.) Picture Oguri and a favorite race will spring to mind, one of her beastly final spurts, or a moment of tension. Or maybe you favor one of the other characters instead, and what comes to the forefront is a flash of white lightning, a victory clinched or lost in an instant, the scowling face of a prior era’s ruler. Cinderella Gray is a series of become verbs. Want. Strive. Struggle. Achieve. If I say that Umamusume as a whole enterprise has achieved an almost talismanic importance to me, I sound like a lunatic, so let me just say instead that it lights something in me that I can’t entirely name. Maybe that’s silly, but it’s the truth. For as goofy as Umamusume’s very premise seems and, honestly, is, it is genuinely inspirational in a way that very few things are. (In fact, I’ve said this before, but it is truly incredible that Oguri Cap is still inspiring people some some 30 years after the end of his career. Sure, it’s in a different form, but how many athletes, human or otherwise, can claim that? It’s a pretty exclusive club, and it’s not one he’ll be leaving any time soon.)
The explosive, world-conquering vibe check aside, it really is a great story, too. One that deals with the temporary nature of all of these things just as it effortlessly embodies the thrill of chasing after them. Future seasons of Cinderella Gray—and there will be future seasons, I’m almost certain—will shift the thematic balance in regards to which it emphasizes, but its first season (in two parts. Confusing!) is a triumphant, star-reaching pulse of a thing. It doesn’t hurt that every one of Oguri’s competitors, from her career-defining rivalry with Tamamo Cross to even cool-as-hell one-offs like Obey Your Master, are great characters in their own right. Added together ,what you have here are the first two chapters of an epic. And in fact, that’s the main reason this isn’t at the top of the list. They are going to make more Cinderella Gray, and—spoiler here—as someone who’s read the manga, I have every reason to believe it’s going to be even better than what we have already. Keep running, Oguri Cap, you’re not at the finish line yet.
So, that’s 19 of 20 anime down. As I said, in any ordinary year, everyone who guessed my #1 pick would be Cinderella Gray would be absolutely right, and I hope I’ve conveyed at least some sense of why that’s so. Unfortunately, 2025 was not an ordinary year. So if you want to feel bad for Cinderella Gray, lament only that it was not born in a different era.
Congratulations to everyone who guessed my #1 pick. By my reckoning, that’s my good friends June, Astro, Persica, and Wolfie.
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1: AVE MUJICA -THE DIE IS CAST-
Look. I know, okay?
I am keenly aware of how it looks to have a girl band anime as my show of the year, two years in a row. Back to back girl band dramas! She’s lost it! She should have her anime critic card revoked!
Unfortunately for all of you, there is no license to be an anime blogger. I only write these things because I’m weird enough to want to. So here, at the end of one year and the start of the next, let’s do this whole song and dance one more time.
I think there’s a good chance that, at this point, people who read my blog regularly have seen this image of Sakiko more than the people who animated it.
I tried a few different placements of the top three before settling on this one. I would be lying if I said I was perfectly happy with it, but I made up the format of these posts in the first place, so I feel an obligation to stick to them. There are no ties. If I have to single out what I think is the best anime of the year, of those I watched, there really isn’t any doubt. It’s Ave Mujica, whether you want to call it by its marketing-mandated full English title or not, there just really isn’t any other option. Other anime this year were many things. In many years, being merely a work of deep, healing beauty, or being something inspiring enough to remind me to push forward day by day, would be enough to place at the top. That was the case in 2022 with Healer Girl or, yes, in 2024 with Girls Band Cry, and it was the case this year with Cinderella Gray. Nothing I’m about to say is meant to disparage any of those anime, which are all fantastic in their own right. But, this year was different. This year, the demiurge walked among us. She had blue hair and trauma, and she made it everybody’s problem.
Ave Mujica is, technically, yet another anime on the list that’s a sequel, being the followup to 2023’s BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!MyGO is an excellent series in its own right, and had the subseries stopped there, we would still absolutely be talking about it was one of the best anime of the 2020s. But, MyGO, at the end of the day, was still a band girl anime, the genre label that has emerged for this cluster of anime that deal with young girls processing their pain and sorrow through the power of music. I already went over the basics of MyGO‘s story leading into Ave Mujica during my review-not-a-review of the series, so I won’t repeat myself, but it is worth emphasizing that everything that happened in the first season, as great as it was, was still pretty normal territory for this genre. And then, at the eleventh hour, its final episode turned it into something else.
It does put me in a funny spot, though. More than anything else I’ve ever put this high on the list that I didn’t do literal week-by-week coverage of, I have already written about Ave Mujicaextensively. I have arguablywrittentoo muchaboutthe damnthing. Seriously, it’s a little excessive. But I couldn’t help it! Something about Ave Mujica drove me a little crazy, and maybe that’s a function as much of my own declining mental health as it is anything about the show, but I really do think Ave Mujica is a born classic. The best anime either define their times or embody them, and if there has ever been a better representation of the emotional cement mixer that is the mid-2020s, I’m not aware of it. Under everything, under the arguments about whether this is even really a music anime, under the tedious discourse about its ostensibly “problematic” elements, you have an anime about five people whose teenage emotional fallout, ongoing trauma, and unique neuroses are blown up to first theatrical, and then mythological proportions. It only makes sense that by the end of the season, Sakiko has declared herself a god lording over a walled garden. What else was she going to do?
There’s a further reason, in fact, that I put this at #1, the very real possibility that this all comes crashing down around us, some day very soon. I mentioned in the Cinderella Gray section that I sometimes rate things slightly lower on these lists because I believe they will become even better with subsequent entries. Crucially, I don’t really know if that’s true with Ave Mujica. Everything it’s built up is such a high-wire razor’s-edge balancing act that it feels completely impossible that season three, whatever it will entail, could ever top this. (Spare a thought, also, for Mugendai Mewtype, the other BanG Dream band slated to get an anime in the coming year, who have the unenviable task of following this.) I’ve been wrong before, and I would love to be wrong here, too, but the yawning uncertainty of the future does make me feel like I have to recognize Ave Mujica for what it is now. The dream, remember, is only illusorily eternal. The walled garden only exists until we wake up. Memento mori and all that. Is this the crescendo of this black opera? Do we wait on just the grim conclusion, or somehow, some way, will it find even higher to climb? I don’t know! That uncertainty is a little scary, but it’s also exciting.
So that’s how we close the year, with a screaming, gothic thrash of pain as we rocket toward a cryptic and hazy future. I’ve made a bad habit in the past of trying to directly tie my anime criticism in a given year to my emotional state, but, well, I don’t think a look at this list necessarily needs a genius to interpret. The future will come whether we’re ready for it or not, but, if we’re going down, at least we’re burning in the same fire. That, I think, is perhaps the spirit I’ve taken Ave Mujica (and Ave Mujica) in, and I hope the spirit you’ll take this entry in, as well. And if this all seems rather dramatic to you, well….yeah! It is! I’ve been a lot of things over the course of my ‘career’ as an anime blogger, but I’ve never been a liar. May 2026 be a year where a sunnier best-of pick makes more sense.
And that’s the list. One of the least-stratified I’ve ever done, I think (I truly do think basically anything from Ruri Rocks on up could conceivably be somebody’s anime of the year). As I do every year, I want to thank all of my lovely internet friends, those from the Ave Mujica Scream Zone who were with me every step of the way through experiencing the show itself, my friends from the Witch’s Manor and the other Discord servers related to those two. A big shout out, as well, to my bluesky and tumblr followers, as well as everyone on the Magic Planet Anime Discord. You guys rock, and I wouldn’t be here without you.
As always, consider tossing me a donation if you liked the list. These year-end lists take a lot of effort.
I’ll see you when I see you, anime fans.
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Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.
For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!
Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience.
One of Umamusume‘s recurring fixations is on the changing of the guard. This is part of its larger ideas about the nature of the competition and, as we discussed last week, transience. New racers debut, greenhorns become veterans, veterans become legends, and those old contenders go out in a blaze of glory or otherwise retire. Rinse, repeat, the cycle never ends. In a meta way, this is even true of this episode’s title, which is a phrase that echoes up and down all across Umamusume, most notably appearing in the title of its movie from last year. That’s a tale for another time, though, perhaps.
This episode, the Cinderella Gray anime’s finale (at least for now), is a very direct demonstration of this concept. We tie up the few remaining threads of Tamamo Cross’ story, but perhaps more importantly, we are reassured that Oguri’s is still in progress. She’s at the top of the mountain now, everyone knows her and everyone loves her. Not for nothing is one of the episode’s opening shots of a young girl standing next to not the real Oguri Cap, but a cardboard cutout. This is cute, but also just the slightest bit dehumanizing perhaps, showing us that Oguri is already being flattened into an icon as opposed to a person.
Stronger than anyone, loved by everyone.
Of course, all this means that Oguri is no novice anymore, and she’s been at it for long enough that others are chasing after the comet trail she’s carved on her way from Kasamatsu to the Nationals.
Enter Inari One [Inoue Haruno].
In the many (maybe too many) times I’ve compared Cinderella Gray to a battle shonen anime, I’ve largely avoided making too many specific attempts to slot characters into specific archetypes. There are a few examples where you can do this, but largely it doesn’t work, so I’ve held off until now. I say until now because Inari One is a pretty straight example of the whole hothead rival trope. She’s a good one, don’t get me wrong, but they did not break the mold when casting girlie. She calls herself “Inari-sama” when sufficiently riled up. She sometimes lets her own emotional outbursts get in the way of her success. Her temper is enough of a difference to be notably offputting at times, especially to her fellow racers, a strong contrast to Oguri who is mostly pretty affable. She’s literally associated with fire. Because she’s hot-blooded. (And also she has a vague fox motif and “foxfire” is a whole thing. That too.)
A character this broad would maybe be an uneasy fit for Cinderella Gray were it not for a few things. For one, as with every other character we’ve had to get to know quickly in this series, her debut episode is populated with brief flashbacks and asides that color her in and give her some depth. For another, when we meet her, she is very much in the midst of a “letting her emotions get in her own way” slump, which, to skip ahead a bit, makes her victory at the end of the episode feel earned in a way it wouldn’t if we hadn’t started here. For a third, she is very directly zeroing in on Oguri Cap herself. She says as much, and it makes sense for a couple of reasons.
Having won the Arima Kinen, Oguri Cap is pretty indisputably the strongest umamusume in Japan at the moment. Like Oguri, Inari One is from a relatively minor area in the context of racing, and also like Oguri, she’s aiming to challenge the nationals. Inari One is perhaps not the first person to explicitly aim for her head, she’s the first we’ve followed at any length, and certainly the first whose own rise mirrors Oguri’s so closely.
Of course, she has to actually rise first. Which at the top of the episode seems like it’s far from a sure thing. She looks like she’s about to win the race that opens her part of the episode, but at the last minute, one-off character and owner of a truly ridiculous hairstyle Face No More* passes her by. Inari throws a pretty hilarious temper tantrum about this in the locker rooms after the race, getting in some really great expressions while she does so, as No More insults her by pretending to not remember her name.
Some time after the race, she blows off steam while tearing up a practice track. But in doing so she risks wearing herself out, and it’s down to her trainer to remind her that, hey, that’s not really a great thing to be doing the day after a major race. As with a lot of the girls we’ve met over the course of this series, Inari and her trainer seem to be pretty close. A flashback sequence confirms this, showing us that they met when Inari was lost at a festival when she was very young.
It’s cute and it provides some evidence of a nice dynamic between them, Inari as a loose cannon who can only be reminded to keep herself under control by her firm, but even-handed trainer. In any case, Inari has a shot at truly proving herself; her trainer has entered her into the Tokyo Daishoten.
The Daishoten is the final race of the season. I have to admit, as someone who’s now current on the manga, I was never quite as in love with Inari One as I have been with some of its other characters, but I think giving us a full episode to get to know her was a good pacing decision. She’s fantastic here, and despite the nominally lower stakes of this race as compared to the Arima Kinen of the last two weeks, the presentation is action-packed and stylish enough for that to not really matter. Doubly so when Inari starts losing her cool and we get some outright scary visuals to illustrate that.
(This is a tangent, but it’s also fun that in the half dozen or so lines they swap between them, Inari’s two main competitors here, one-off characters Romance Bubbly and Fuyuno Nakasumi, seem to have a rivals yuri thing of their own going on. That’s called good worldbuilding, folks.)
Like Oguri, Inari is also being observed during her last important regional race by a veteran of umamusume racing. Not Symboli Rudolf, but one of her contemporaries, Japan’s third triple crown winner, Mr. C.B. [AmamiYurina]
Being a horse girl named Mr. C.B. is an admirable amount of gender. I have said this any time I’ve ever spoken about C.B. anywhere, and I will continue to say it, because it’s true.
Despite the pressure, Inari keeps her head on straight until the last spurt, where flames wreathe and nearly consume her, clearly signaling, along with the signature cracked glass effect which also pops up here, that she’s about to hit her Zone. Yet, just as she reaches out to grab ahold of that fire, she crosses the finish line, overtaking Fuyuno to win the day, and it disappears. A tease, sure, but the message is clear, this is absolutely someone who can go toe to toe with the Gray Monster.
Our last scene with Inari One here is during her victory concert where, in a move mirroring episode six (tellingly, where the show started associating Oguri with her “Ashen Beast” nickname), she explains that she’s moving on up to the nationals. Like Oguri’s fans, Inari’s are initially a bit reluctant to let their star go. But when she bids them farewell, cheers go up, and one gets the sense of what the “new era” promised by the episode title might entail. Oguri Cap will not stand at the top of the mountain alone for very long.
Inari’s story is just starting, but Tamamo Cross’s also comes to an end this episode. She’s present in just two brief scenes, where she departs on a plane and arrives at the hospital room of that old man she cares for so. He’s sitting up in his bed, and this sign of wellness alone is enough to make her break into tears. It’s a simple, sweet, and understated end to the White Lightning Arc. This is Tamamo’s exit, but the path she burned through the sport, and our hearts, isn’t going to be forgotten so easily.
It’s not all bittersweet moving on and flaming-hot new blood, though. Spliced in between all of that, there are a few short scenes of a Christmas party at Tracen organized a few days after the holiday. Oguri actually misses most of it, and she spends a good chunk of the season’s last episode sporting some truly impressive bedhead.
The party itself is cute. There’s a small aside of Dicta Striker attempting to cheer up Super Creek after her disqualification (she mostly succeeds), and also what is, to my recollection, one of the very few examples of straight-up fanservice in the whole series, wherein Black Ale has been tricked into wearing a slightly revealing Santa outfit by….someone. No names are given, so in the absence of evidence I’m going to assume it was Dicta Striker. It seems like something she’d do.
I’ve literally read the manga and even I am surprised at how many times Black Ale has managed to appear in this column after her single episode of any actual story relevance.
If there’s a note to end all this on, it’s probably what Musaka says to Oguri after she wakes up. Leaning on the fourth wall more than a little, he reminds her that, while she’s reached the peak of the proverbial mountain for now, her story is far from over. Challengers new and old are already coming for the crown.
“For the road was the rim of the Wheel, which encircled infinity.”
* I am 99% sure this is supposed to be “Faith No More”, as in the metal band, but F-a-c-e is how it’s rendered in REMOW’s subtitles, so it’s how I’ve written it here.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.
For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!
Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience.
Native Dancer was an American thoroughbred racehorse. Without getting so into the nitty-gritty that this turns into a column on actual horseracing, the very short version is that he was one of the best. It’s hard to beat 21 victories in a 22-race career (although some have done so). To list just one accolade, the AP’s list of the best racehorses of the 20th century places him at third, behind only Man O’ War and Secretariat. For our purposes, though, his actual career is less important than two other things you need to keep in mind about Dancer. The first is that he had a nickname, the Gray Ghost. The second is that one of his children was Dancing Cap, a horse who, himself, we are primarily interested in here because of one of his children. You’re reading a column about him right now: Oguri Cap.
There is little reason to suspect that any version of Native Dancer ever existed in Umamusume. In general, lineage plays far less of a role in Umamusume than it does in actual horse racing, and the closest Umamusume has ever come to acknowledging any of the legendary racers who fill in the strange, fuzzy area outside of its immediate characters of focus is the vague insinuation that Manhattan Cafe’s mysterious “friend” might be the metaphorical or literal ghost of Sunday Silence. (As always, I recommend IronicLark’s blog if you want Umamusume analysis from someone who really knows their horseracing as opposed to someone with a mere passing interest in it like myself.) Nonetheless, watching this episode today, I thought about Native Dancer and his nickname. I have absolutely no way of proving this, but I think one of the most important aspects of this episode, and indeed the episode itself, takes its name from that epithet. In doing so, Cinderella Gray asks broader questions about what Umamusume actually is. Not as a franchise but as a story.
First, though, let’s pick up where we left off last week. The back half of the Arima Kinen is, to put it as simply as possible, nuts. After entering her Zone and blitzing past most of the playing field, Tamamo Cross duels it out with Oguri Cap for first place in the final leg. I repeat myself, but it’s worth repeating, it’s not merely that there are impressive action scenes here—though there definitely are—it’s that the raw emotion on display here is a very rare thing.
In literal terms, what happens here is the race’s four strongest competitors angling for the lead. Super Creek puts up a surprisingly strong performance, banking on pure stamina as opposed to anything flashier. Dicta Striker’s shotgun final spurt is a spectacle to behold as well, earning her probably the single most impressive cut of animation in the entire episode and deservedly putting her name in the conversation with the other greats here. Between the fierce showdown between rivals and the fireworks animation, I fall back on my old standby comparison: this is essentially a battle shonen anime, and the earlier half of this episode comes complete with plenty of “oh my god, the ultimate technique!”-style commentary from characters like Symboli Rudolf and Sensuke Fujii. This stuff is fantastic on even its worst day, and if that were all the episode was, it would still be great.
But, let’s be serious here. One of two umamusume are going to win this race. It’s either going to be Tamamo Cross or Oguri Cap. One of Cinderella Gray‘s favorite storytelling techniques is to dot an important race episode with little dollops of backstory or reflection from the runners. Previously, this has been used to characterize Oguri’s rivals. In the penultimate episode of the first cour, Tamamo Cross got that treatment, where the show strongly suggested that despite a thwarted crossing of the paths when they were both children, Tama and Oguri were, in some sense, always meant to run together. This episode reinforces that connection, but also reminds us of something else.
We see flashbacks to Oguri Cap’s childhood, a tiny gray puffball of a kidlin enraptured with the lightning-fast running she sees on TV. Her own legs, though, are weak, and her mother1 bandages them as she tries to stand and move around. The young Oguri asks her mother if she’ll ever run like the girls on TV, and her mother hugs her tight.
Of course she will.
And as Oguri’s mind turns to her gratitude toward her mother, it flows to everyone who’s helped get her where she is. The Kasamatsu gang, Fujimasa March, Belno, Jo, Musaka, every one of her rivals, all of whom have asked her, why do you run? Who are you aiming for?
And the answer, of course, is that Oguri isn’t trying to surpass anyone but herself. To whom running at all is a miracle, something fought for rather than given. She’s doing it because she loves it.
As soon as she realizes this, it all clicks into place, and we get to the episode’s namesake. The payoff, the gleefully cool-as-hell ultimate technique, Oguri Cap’s very own Zone.
A ghost, one might say.
Oguri and Tama continue running the final stretch neck to neck. But we actually see only relatively little of the literal events of the race from here on out. Instead, we’re transported to an emotion-driven image space, where the two talk. They reminisce, Tamamo Cross speaks of races come and gone and races that will never come, wistfully talking about how she owes Obey Your Master a beating at the next Japan Cup. But, she knows this won’t ever happen. Together, still in the shared mind space, Oguri and Tama begin running again. Tamamo Cross complains about how short the race is, even here, the finish line is in sight.
Nothing, not in sports, not in life, lasts forever. Every story has an end. There are no perpetual dawns, and any time the Sun rotates around our humble planet, it’s one day closer to going out forever. Here, in what they both know is their last dance together, Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap bond for one final time over what keeps them going in spite of that, their love of life. Running more specifically, sure, but it is worth seriously understanding that finity and transience are two of Cinderella Gray‘s main thematic ideas.2 This, which is also what I was alluding to at the top of this column, is the first time we see those themes really underscored in a major way. It will not be the last.
Tamamo Cross’s story ends in defeat. Oguri Cap, reborn within the Gray Phantom, manages to edge over the finish line by just the slightest bit. This is not a sad ending, the victory and defeat are less important, perhaps, than who they are experienced alongside.
After the race, they have a talk that is heart-achingly sweet, and they embrace each other. To paraphrase the great Miko Iino, I am someone who enjoys hugs probably 50-70% more than the average person, this one here is one of the best anime hugs ever. I’m honestly jealous. Put it on the accolade board.
The end of the Arima Kinen is not a happy story for everybody. Dicta Striker gets properly fired up when she notices Oguri entering her Zone, but, the combined blood loss from her injury last episode and perhaps just general fatigue mean her body betrays her, and her legs give out as she attempts another shotgun surge. She still takes third, with Super Creek behind her taking fourth. Or at least, she would have taken fourth were she not ruled to be obstructing another racer’s movements after the fact, disqualifying her. It’s sneaky as hell to slip in the start of Creek’s upcoming arc here. But the nature of how Umamusume is written means it’s also a necessity, and it’s handled pretty well, juxtaposing as it does Creek’s embarrassment and loss with the overwhelming warmth of the rest of the episode’s final third.
(There are some other, smaller good bits as well, such as Symboli Rudolf heaping praise on Oguri, a really nice followup from that conversation she and Maruzensky had back in the first cour.)
That warmth truly is the dominant feeling. In what is by now a relative rarity for the series, we get an actual winning concert performance in place of the episode’s usual credits. Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and Dicta Striker—patched up after her injuries, including breaking a tooth! which is perhaps why the concert seems to take place that night instead of immediately after the race—perform “Next Frontier”, one of Umamusume‘s standards, and a swelling, triumphant note to close out the episode.
Except there’s actually one more thing. After the concert, Oguri Cap takes the time to thank everyone who’s inspired her, who made her the racer she is today. She thanks her trainers, her rivals, and the crowd. That includes us.
Overall, “Gray Phantom” probably surpasses “Wild Joker” as Cinderella Gray’s best episode, and it’s one of the best in Umamusume on the whole. It also got me thinking, though, about the series’ overall nature. For a while now, I’ve been workshopping an as-yet unpublished article about a different piece of the Umamusume franchise. In that article, as I am about to here, I propose that despite its ostensibly “silly” or “very anime” premise, Umamusume is actually part of a very long lineage of work that seeks to anthropomorphize the minds and lives of non-human animals. I don’t have an answer as to whether that instinct is selfish, a bad habit of seeing all things as reflections of ourselves, or selfless, a genuine desire to connect with minds very different from our own.
Regardless of which side you fall on, it is fascinating to me that Oguri Cap, in some form or another, continues to inspire people 33 years after the end of his career and 15 after his death. (To float another conspiracy theory, I have wondered if the real Oguri’s epithet of “The Idol Horse” is how the premise of Umamusume was come up with in the first place.) If I can show my hand a little, I do think there’s something beautiful about the ideas that Cinderella Gray puts forward here, even the sad ones. Ultimately, though, these questions are a bit beyond the scope of this column, and I’ll save any harder arguments for another day. Tamamo Cross’s story is over, and while Oguri Cap’s will not last forever either, we still have a good, long time with her, assuming the anime gets renewed for another proper season (here’s hoping).
This isn’t the end of this season just yet, however. See you next week, umadacchi.
Now where have I heard that before?
1: It’s interesting that what little we know about Oguri Cap’s mother in Cinderella Gray doesn’t really fit the profile of either of the real Oguri Cap’s parents. Nonetheless, I usually refer to her as Narubi in my notes on the rare occasion she shows up, since it’s shorter than writing “Oguri Cap’s mom” every time.
2: There is a reason that, despite being “just” the last time we will see these two specific characters compete, this whole scene feels an awful lot like a depiction of some kind of afterlife. Tamamo Cross thus joins the storied ranks of sports anime characters who are being treated vaguely as though they’ve died when they’ve actually just retired or graduated or what have you. Sempai will be furthering her education, no doubt.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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