Tag: Review

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: THE DETECTIVE IS ALREADY DEAD Rises From The Grave

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.

Yeah, take a second to really take in that title up there. I feel like Todd in The Shadows talking about Mike Posner.

The Detective is Already Dead. La detective ésta muerta. This series, gratuitous Spanish subtitle and all, has, improbably, returned to us, from the great anime graveyard. Rescued from Limbo by…honestly I have no idea. I guess the light novels were selling well, that’s the only explanation I can think of.

How did we get here? I’m supposed to be on hiatus, you know. A combination of burnout a month or so back and the fact that I’m currently working on a project wholly unrelated to this blog means that I completely planned to take this season off. If I did any First Impressions articles at all, it would be for the handful of things I’m really looking forward to, surely, like Fools’ Night or something, right?

Well, I have a bit of a score to settle here, I guess.

The Detective is Already Dead, for those of you who have forgotten or just didn’t know in the first place, is a truly bonkers light novel adaptation originally from all the way back in 2021. It has a quite good first episode and a remainder of the series that varies wildly in quality. I wrote a review of that first season after it ended, very, very confident that it would simply never get a followup. It was a sometimes-good, sometimes-bad, but always-weird series that just seemed too odd to survive on television long-term. Let me quote myself, in fact, while also recommending you just read that article if you want the full rundown on the first season’s plot.

This is another of this year’s anime that will absolutely not survive the march of history, mentioned as it will be only as a curio or a “hey, do you remember that show with….?” answer. At best, perhaps some of the staff will go on to bigger and better things. In which case it will be an amusing trivial footnote. Call it a victim of the production bubble, call it just poorly-conceived. It is impossible to imagine Detective outside of this present time and place; mid-to-late 2021 specifically. It’s a born relic.

This is not the outright wrongest I’ve ever been on this site. (That’s probably still the article where I talked about how much I was looking forward to the future of idol anime, published right before that genre basically stopped existing.) But…well, it is a bit embarrassing, I suppose. It is important to admit that I was wrong, though, because I think what I failed to understand at the time is that Detective actually isn’t unique at all. To understand why, it’s helpful to quickly break down the whole “light novel anime” idea in general, as the implication of that term has changed greatly over time. At first, it meant dialogue-heavy, highly-conceptual pieces, stuff like Boogiepop Phantom. Then, at some point, the meaning shifted to refer to science-mystery-urban fantasy-battle every-genre-in-a-blender works, the most prominent example of which is probably the “Raildex” (A Certain Magical Index / A Certain Scientific Railgun et. al.) franchise. Nowadays, if you say that an anime is adapted from a light novel, most people will assume you’re talking about a narou-kei series, usually some isekai thing where a guy gets reincarnated into a fantasy world with some number of busted “cheat skill” superpowers.

These are all very different things, and I think the main mistake I made in classifying Detective back in the day is that it’s actually more akin the second definition than anything else. (Although its dialogue-heavy nature puts it in conversation with the first as well, in the same way that Monogatari‘s does even if this series is certainly not that one. It wasn’t the only one of these from around then, either. See In/Spectre from the year before.) In this way, Detective is—I know how this sounds—actually a bit ahead of its time in this regard, because this stuff is starting to make something of a minor comeback. (In fact, a new Raildex anime—the spinoff A Certain Dark Item—premieres in just two days.) So where Detective really sits in the greater context of 2020s TV anime is in the “throwback” sector, intentionally or not.

So, its due credit given, and it contextualized, I hope, at least a little better in the grand scheme of things, what does a return of this series five whole years after its first season really look like? Well, I admit I was curious to find out, so here we are.

We open on a brief, sorely-appreciated recap of the first season; Siesta [Miyashita Saki. I don’t normally do these little asides anymore, but it’s worth noting that this is actually probably Miyashita’s most prominent role. It’s either this or as the main girl from Harukana Receive. I say this with some surprise, as I always thought she was very good as Siesta.] and Kimihiko’s [Nagai Shin, who is similarly seemingly known almost entirely for this.] first meeting on a plane, mid-hijack, their battles with the secret organization SPES, their brief adoption of the little girl Alice [Naganawa Maria] who turned out to be a system, one of whom was the evil Hel [Hanamori Yumiri] who ultimately killed Siesta. In fact, Nagisa [Taketatsu Ayana] the girl who has essentially replaced the late Siesta as Kimihiko’s partner, is also part of this system, and I admit I don’t remember if we learned that in season one or if it’s new information to us here.

(Siesta was also somehow present in there. The series returns to its baffling heart transplant motif here and, ah, of course, I can’t believe I was ever confused about this! Nagisa developed the alter after receiving Siesta’s heart in a transplant, she literally stole her heart. It’s yuri! How silly of me for ever finding it odd. In any case, the Siesta alter seems to be gone now, so this isn’t really relevant. If you’re reading this and don’t understand system terminology, I am deeply sorry.)

Present for this recap are Kimihiko and Nagisa themselves, as well as Charlotte, nickname Char [Shirasu Saho], a blonde who was one of Siesta’s prodigies, and the be-eyepatched idol Yui [Takao Kanon. Yeah, Togawa Sakiko is in this show.] who I seem to vaguely remember threatened to shoot someone back in the first season. All of these characters—basically season one’s whole cast—were kidnapped by Siesta herself, and the recap is delivered by her, posthumously, via a recorded video. I must get in here the mention that the video recapping these events begins with, quite possibly, the best title drop of all time.

Absolute goddamn cinema.

Ah, but you may ask, how did she kidnap all of these people if she’s dead?

Well, obviously, Siesta, at some point, made a “bio-robot” maid modeled on her own likeness who could continue to carry out her plans after death.

Meet Noches [Miyashita Saki again. Obviously.]

Noches’ main role is to spoon out even more exposition, and this one is a doozy. It is revealed here, you see, that the “Great Detective” role that Siesta occupied in life is one of the twelve “Tuners”, key people of extraordinary powers throughout the world who combat the dangers to humanity that rise periodically throughout the ages. They’re basically the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as translated to a light novel concept. You get it. (Someone should tell Alan Moore about this series, I bet his reaction would be extremely positive.) She explains that the people in charge of choosing the Tuners—whoever they are—are likely to accept Nagisa as a candidate.

She isn’t actually sure if she wants that, though, and she and Kimihiko spend some time discussing the subject at school later on, after Noches has let them go. The conversational rhythm they get into here is honestly actually pretty good. I don’t recall particularly caring for Nagisa back when I watched the first season, but she makes a shockingly good showing in this episode (the strongest in general, I’d say). In addition to the more lighthearted banter, they discuss Nagisa’s trauma. Recall that Hel is her alter, so when she remembers Siesta’s death, it is from Hel’s (and thus her own) physical perspective. There’s a genuine sense of guilt conveyed pretty well here, which Kimihiko, who also failed to save Siesta, shares in. This particular bit of bonding is easily the best-written segment of the premiere, and it made me genuinely invested in what happened next.

You see, if Nagisa does want to be the next Great Detective, Noches challenges her to find a “mistake” hidden in the video that Siesta recorded. Kimihiko and Nagisa eventually come to the conclusion that there is no such mistake in the video itself, such that the “mistake” must instead be something Siesta actually did wrong herself during the events in question. They mentally run down a list of people they could ask about it; Siesta herself is out of the question obviously. Charlotte and Yui, they conclude, would not know anything they didn’t already share. And then it hits them, the one person who was there that they could ask that they haven’t already: Hel.

Full credit, this is a pretty cool twist. The way it’s executed is neat, too, as Noches (who comes up with a procedure to ‘safely’—I’m sure that’ll hold true—resurface Hel) frames it more like summoning a demon than anything else, with the compelling imagery of Nagisa standing in front of a full-length mirror while holding a smaller one. It works, too, and Hel’s red-tinted return is where the episode ends. Obviously the way Hel is played—she’s literally described as an “evil personality”—is quite far from sensitive, but it’s at least an interesting thing plot-wise, and I have to admit! The cliffhanger made me want to tune back in next week.

I did not expect to find myself popping for Hel, of all possible characters, making a return. But, here we are.

What to make of all this in the broad sense? Well, aside from the fact that I’ve just come to appreciate this genre a lot more over the years (I will take a second wave light novel anime over a third just about any day of the week), it does fall into a pattern that a lot of premieres have fallen into this season, in that it’s a good enough premiere to make me want to come back for episode two, but not one that’s so great that I’m fully confident the rest of the anime will be as well.

2026 has been an insane year for anime, but that claim seems to really stop at the end of the last season, as the Fall season so far has been very dry, one of the seasons with the fewest “must-watch” new anime in at least a couple years. (Sequels and spinoffs are a different conversation, of course, and I do acknowledge that several acclaimed shows are making a return—not including this one, necessarily—but it’s still pretty thin on the ground out there.) In this landscape, something like this is about as good as most premieres can hope to get, and I’d put it in the same quality tier as, I don’t know, fellow light novel anime Nia Liston (a third-wave LN anime with many elements of the second by my reckoning, if its premiere is any indication). Ultimately, I think my reaction does betray some nostalgia for these characters (which I was perhaps not even aware I held), but the boring truth is that this is the kind of show where I will keep tuning in for exactly as long as each episode is about this good and no longer. If it slips below that, the likelihood of me finishing the season goes way down. That’s just how it is! It’s not an interesting thing to say, but it’s the truth.

Still, as I said, there is just some serious novelty—at least to me—in seeing this, of all anime, finally back. I can only…thank? blame? the light novel readers who I am sure are the only reason this got greenlit at all. It is a very surreal feeling to be reunited with one of the first anime I wrote about on this site that I just had no idea what to make of. Even now, having a better understanding of it and its influences, it’s still pretty damn weird. (You may have noticed very little actually happens in this episode. Starting a season with an episode that’s this dialogue-driven is ballsy in its own way.) So if my feelings seem a bit shuffled around but, as they did in my original review, still a bit mixed, I must apologize for not being able to provide some better answer to the question of: why this show, and why now?

I can think of at least one person, though, who probably would be able to give you a better answer. Unfortunately, she’s…well, you know the rest.

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 8

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

For the BanG Dream Yumemita column, new entries will be posted either on each Thursday an episode airs, or as soon as possible during the week thereafter.

We’re gonna take this one in reverse order, because a decent bit happens in this episode, but almost all of it—at least as far as “developing the plot”, if we want to put it that way, goes—happens at the end. Miyako has been in a foul mood more or less permanently since the events of last week’s episode, and here, it comes to a head. During a practice session, Nonoka attempts to cheer her up in her usual direct, lively fashion, and it has precisely the opposite of its intended effect. Miyako’s resentment toward the rest of the band and her frustration with herself boil over, and she has a full-on seething breakdown, where she rages at Nonoka for what she sees as a very shallow cheerfulness and at Arale and Ritsu for “pretending everything’s perfect.” Just when it seems like things have hit their nadir, Yuno abruptly joins the session and announces that she’s quitting the band. Quite the place to leave us for the next week!

As opposed to talking about the events that lead up to all of this, it’s perhaps worth evaluating Miyako’s emotional state. Miyako’s resentment has been building for a while at this point. It was introduced to us more or less as a joke way back at the start of the show where she chastised herself under her breath for making trouble for her supposed betters. It’s been gradually building since then, and at this point she both sees herself as responsible for the backlash Mugendai Mewtype have been getting online. (The concert may have technically been Viola’s idea, but Miyako was the one who proposed it to the rest of the band.) The fact that no one is openly angry with her seems to both baffle and deeply bother her, playing as it does off her mile-wide self-loathing streak. To make things worse, a phonecall from her editor earlier in the episode sees said editor offer to extend her deadlines. Even though this would almost certainly be a good idea, and the editor probably meant it completely neutrally, it contributes to the self-loathing spiral as well. Miyako feels like this is proof that she can’t handle all of this stuff at once, and she’s failed to “shine” even with her manga.

Arale and Ritsu have inadvertently perhaps made things worse as well. Earlier in the episode they agree to give Miyako some space. (Because this is Yumemita, they come up with this idea by imagining themselves as the leads in the Precure pastiche they’re both fond of.)

Is the fact that this conclusion is arrived to via a Precure pastiche a completely meaningless diversion that sidetracks the episode or a clever bit of foreshadowing that this simple idea derived from a children’s cartoon won’t work out in the often-complex real world? You decide!

Unfortunately, this seems to have just left her to seethe on her own, and made things worse. (As mentioned, she accuses them of deliberately pretending everything’s fine during her rant.) What Nonoka’s reaction will be to being told off so hard we don’t yet know, and Yuno, as always, is a bit mysterious. She claimed to be enjoying things during a rehearsal earlier in the episode, even saying that “the fun part” of being in a band is when the group’s sound starts to click, so her sudden desire to leave warrants some explanation. One also has to really feel for Arale here, who takes Miyako’s resentment pretty hard even in the early part of the episode, calling her description of Viola as her biggest fan “heartbreaking.” I also can’t imagine that she’ll feel great having seemingly caused an emotional rift by inaction. Given her past fears of causing problems by saying too much, she’s now caused one by saying too little.

This is all, more or less, where we’re at. I’ve left quite a few things out here—including Viola and Ritsu’s standoff near the start of the episode where Vi does some excellent villainous shit by going on a weird tangent about the Garden of Eden, and Ritsu admirably holds her ground despite this—because I’m trying to make these writeups breezier and less recappy. (And also because, to me, Miyako’s state of mind and the breakdown that results from it are the most pressing things about the episode.) Hopefully I’ve succeeded and this isn’t simply incoherent as a result!

I am aware, of course, that there’s been no shortage of discorse that the show is too much about Viola and her girlbossing as opposed to Mugendai Mewtype themselves.1

Despite that she’s mostly only in the opening minutes of this episode, she’s still played a crucial role in setting up these events—the concert was her idea, after all—so I doubt this episode is going to satisfy that particular crowd. (And I must stress, I don’t remotely agree. I like all of the Mewtype girls a good deal, with Arale and Miyako as my favorites, but Viola remains my favorite character in the show overall.) For those of us who are just along for the ride, I’m really quite interested to see what the fallout from this all looks like. I cannot imagine things simply snapping back to normal immediately next week.

Until then!

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

1: It’s worth noting that someone who doesn’t seem to feel this way at all is Miyako herself. Or rather, the pseudonymous VTuber that voices the character of Miyako. She’s spent the past few weeks drawing shipping art and even writing a delightfully unhinged bit of fanfiction. (Mind the Twitter link.) Of course, Miyako is not one of the writers, so you could easily wave this off as simply her playing the character on social media as well, if you were so inclined.

Posted on in anime

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 6

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

For the BanG Dream Yumemita column, new entries will be posted either on each Thursday an episode airs, or as soon as possible during the week thereafter.

We open this week’s episode with a dose of surprising realism. Yeah, Arale pulling Ritsu away from the concert wasn’t the most sensible thing in the world, for sure, but going by what we see here, it seems the groups’ management staffs are working on the fallout of the incident with each other. This is what Mugendai Mewtype’s manager tells Arale, at any rate. (Incidentally, this episode is the first time we get to ever see what she looks like in the show’s real world. All I will say about this is that I am heartbroken we don’t get to see that design more often.)

What I mean by that is that I think she’s attractive.

This leads to Arale apologizing to her bandmates, and there’s an absolutely delightful little sequence where Arale becomes a volleyball in VR and the rest of Mugendai Mewtype spike her back and forth as she says sorry. She eventually hits Miyako in the face, of course. For a minute, it seems like everything might be resolved just like that.

Still, she knows Viola is still a problem. She makes herself sift through nasty tweets to get a sense of what the public thinks of the situation, and, predictably, between the unexpectedness of the incident itself and Viola’s crocodile tears, everyone blames “Erea.” Bummed out but not defeated, she resolves to face whatever comes next head on, and interestingly we here break into a flashback to some time before the events of the series. The timeframe being some point after the video that got Arale booted from the LaGirls came out.

We see her struggling to cover a song from that magical girl anime she likes. Despite a lot of struggle, she eventually does, and she takes the comments she gets from sharing it—praise and criticism alike—to heart. The flashback ends with an email reaching out to Arale, saying she has potential as a singer. Presumably, this was the recruitment email for Mugendai Mewtype. There’s something interesting and a bit subtle going on here; now that she’s away from the immediate panic of the moment, and now that she and Ritsu have each others’ back, Arale seems to gain a level of resolve we haven’t really seen from her up to this point, and she confidently declares that this time, she’ll fight back for real!

The next day, she spends some time with Miyako, who can tell she’s deep in thought but can’t really think of any condolences or reassurances to offer, so the two split after spending some time together at a manga shop. Just when it seems like the episode might pass without any DramaTM, we come to the most important part of any episode of BanG Dream Yumemita: Viola doing some shit.

After Miyako and Arale part ways, Miyako is approached by a starstruck fan on the street. Except it’s not a starstruck fan, it’s Viola. Miyako, who (somewhat ironically) just doesn’t seem to really be online in that particular way, doesn’t recognize her from the ongoing drama or from her group. She does, however, think she’s incredibly pretty, and spends the rest of the conversation getting full-combo’d by Viola’s natural charms. It’s a bit lopsided, as far as such things go, and Miyako spends the remainder of the episode with her head in the clouds over having such a beautiful fan. (Her manga is apparently doing well, too, so she’s over the moon about that as well.) In fact, Viola spends much of the rest of the episode essentially seducing Miyako. The next day, she runs into her (waiting for her deliberately, more likely) and woos her by quoting Miyako’s own manga back at her. (Sidebar; there’s no fucking way she read that for any reason other than to do this, right? Viola does not strike me as a closet otaku.) Still not content, she also takes her to a swanky cafe’. Miyako doesn’t pick up on it, but Viola says something pretty interesting here, basically saying that she resents brilliant and beautiful things if she can’t control them, but loves them if she can.

Given what we know of how she treated Ritsu, there’s some truth to that. But again, Miyako is at this point so head over heels that she doesn’t pick up on anything, you know, red-flaggy about these statements. Instead, Viola steers the discussion back to Miyako, and mentions wanting to see her shine in a live show.

We don’t know if they’ll actually get to do that live show, however. Back in VR, the manager tells everyone that Ritsu will be joining Mugendai Mewtype. Evidently, the groups’ respective managers worked this out, although she acknowledges that this will make it look like Mewtype poached Ritsu from Fairy Bouquet. Arale is a bit frustrated at all this, and—well-meaning as ever—wants an opportunity to seize control of the narrative. Miyako, of course, suggests a live show.

Now the obvious thing for the show to do here would be to reveal that everyone is going along with this and a show is on the way posthaste, but that doesn’t actually happen. The manager explains that a live show at this point will just make everyone look worse, and that messaging is harder than Arale thinks. The episode thus ends on a bit of an uncertain note, as we don’t know whether the live show is happening or not. Still, despite everything, including Viola just straight up seducing Miyako, this is an overall lighter episode than the previous couple, filled with goofy pull faces and Arale hyping herself up. Overall, I think it indicates that the power of music might be able to pull through for our heroines after all, even if it’ll take some serious doing to actually get us there. The preview for next week describes Mugendai Mewtype’s “battle” as “just beginning”, so with that in mind, I’ll see you then, Girl Band fans.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 4

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

For the BanG Dream Yumemita column, new entries will be posted either on each Thursday an episode airs, or as soon as possible during the week thereafter.

It’s an interesting move to make the first “regular” episode of BanG Dream! Yumemita as much about Ritsu and Viola as any of the girls in the actual main band, but it does make sense. Ritsu is our little lost lamb. We get further confirmation in this episode that she is, mainly, a victim under Viola’s thumb and, accordingly, Viola gets to do her whole evil vizier routine up and down the entire episode. She’s the real star of the show here, and I think she’d be thrilled to hear me say that, because in this episode we get some indication of why she does what she does.

As I said in the first impressions article, it’s fairly rare for an anime in this genre to have an out-and-out antagonist. But there are some logical extrapolations you can make from how the music industry works—especially the very online digital space that Mugendai Mewtype work in—to craft a compelling villain. Viola’s is just that she’s a complete fucking clout shark. Viola wants big views, she wants the number to go up, and she wants the attention on her specifically. Much of this episode details the brief history of the LaLaLaLaGirls, her previous group with Ritsu and Arale. (There are two other girls but, bluntly, they don’t matter. One of them is literally named “A-ko.” The only thing you need to know is that one of them was the group’s center.) This is also scaffolded with the very specific way that she wants to tailor herself for her audience. In the context of the LaGirls’ group dynamic, she’s the imouto, the cute little sister that everyone’s supposed to want to dote on. She’s pretty insistent about this from the word “go” and is all the more so when the LaGirls actually get signed to a proper agency. The contrast between this and how much of a complete snake-in-the-grass she actually is is both obvious and absolutely delicious. This is a real kind of person! I think anyone who’s on the internet enough has tangled with at least one person who puts up a paper-thin façade of obnoxiously twee cutesiness to hide an inner core of jealousy and venom. I’m not the first person who’s made jokes about Viola posting Google Docs, and I surely won’t be the last.

You know this girl runs the absolute gnarliest antiship blog you’ve ever seen in your life.

The villain cred-building reaches its apex during the episode’s climactic story beat. Where we actually see the real conversations that Viola clip-mined for the edited-together “erea01” video from the premiere. I have to admit, I actually assumed myself that Arale really was being that blunt—I didn’t think she was being mean, mind you, but it’s not crazy for someone so forthright to occasionally stick her foot in her mouth—but no, even that much isn’t true! Viola straight up “Coolsville Sucks!”‘d her. Of course, when the video actually hits the group’s page and the consequences roll in, she plays ignorant and makes with the crocodile tears, all while being absolutely thrilled just offscreen.

Did I mention that the only way she even could do any of this is that cameras were set up to film the LaGirls hanging out together basically whenever they were around each other? And that earlier in the episode, the previous center of the LaGirls mysteriously and suddenly resigns, almost as if Viola had a bunch of dirt on her too and was jealous that she wasn’t the main focus of attention on the group? (She’s definitely the main focus of her new group. Which, incidentally, the other two girls in that band seem to be just fine with Viola’s open displays of domineering behavior toward Ritsu. Birds of a feather, one supposes!)

In any case, the video results in Arale being outed from the LaGirls, and Ritsu, in a moment that seems to really haunt her, does not do anything to help or offer support. After all, Ritsu’s image within the group is that of the perfect model student, and model students, as Viola is keen to remind her, don’t associate with troublemakers. (Never mind of course that Viola is the one causing the problems. To her, the image matters much more than the reality of the situation.) The episode ends with Ritsu once again meeting Arale by chance back in the present, and attempting to apologize. But Arale, who seems understandably hurt by Ritsu’s lack of support back then, smacks her outstretched hand away. This is not something that’s going to be resolved quite that easily, it seems.

There’s more I haven’t gone into here, of course.. Yuno, for example, seems to have a hunch that something is up with Arale (she saw her and Ritsu meet up in one of last week’s episodes, so she knows something is going on) and is doing a bit of investigating near the episode’s start. The preview for next week also seems to imply that the full band might be in the same place as Viola next week, which would certainly be interesting. Viola, it must be pointed out, is obviously being set up to either undergo some sort of comeuppance or one hell of a redemption arc. I think both options are interesting, although she’s so fun as the gleefully evil fame glutton that I’d almost prefer the former. We shall see what the weeks ahead bring us.

I’m going to be keeping these Yumemita writeups pretty casual. I love the show so far, but that has more to do with it being extremely fun to watch than me necessarily thinking I have a ton of deep insightsTM to offer, so I will be keeping things breezy. See you next week, Girl Band Fans.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: JAADUGAR: A WITCH IN MONGOLIA

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.

A genre represented a bit sparingly in the usual churn of seasonal anime is the historical drama. That’s not to say that there aren’t any—this isn’t even the first one I’m covering this season—but they’re a little less common than some genres, and when they do happen, they tend to stick to a pretty narrow geographical range; Japan itself, or, sometimes, China. As its title suggests, Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, is an outlier in this regard, and it actually starts farther west than that, in Iran, but while this is notable on its own, it’s not the only reason the series is worth attention.

For one thing, this is the latest offering from Science SARU, who are pulling double duty this season between this and their upcoming Ghost in the Shell reboot. (Witch in Mongolia in particular is the work of a creative team led by chief director Yamada Naoko and director Abel Gongora.) Here, they’re working to translate the striking art style of the original manga, whose creator goes by the pseudonym Tomato Soup, into animated form. The result is something that, likely more by convergent evolution than anything, looks just a bit like Kaiba‘s art style, but translated into a rich and breathing portrait of the medieval middle east as opposed to that series’ far-future psychadelic sci fi. So what you have here is a very strongly-realized historical setting presenting a compelling story about the power of knowledge and how it can help us deal with our circumstances, even when those circumstances are very bleak indeed. That’s interesting. That’s something truly different.

Of course, being a series set in the real-world past does come with a few hurdles we all need to jump together as viewers. To put it more bluntly; slavery is a major plot element of this series. I will never tell anyone that they have to put any discomfort with that aside and just push on through, but I think there is a huge, huge difference in how the practice is depicted here—an honest acknowledgement of a historical reality—and, say, the two-bit power fantasies of bottom of the barrel narou-kei dreck, which is where this stuff tends to pop up most frequently in anime. If you want your off-ramp, it’s here. This stuff is part of the story, and I am going to talk about it as frankly as the story itself does, there isn’t really any way to write about it without doing so.

Because—silly as this may sound—the actual events of the story are very important to establishing what the story is going for here, I am going to recap these first two episodes, looping in my own thoughts and observations where applicable. If this seems a little more “recappy” (and longer) than my usual first impressions pieces these days, that’ll be why.

Seeking a new servant in her household after the death of her husband, a woman named Fatima [Kuwashima Houko] visits a slave market run by a man named Ahmad [Takaoka Binbin]. There, she’s sold a new housekeeper and, in return for Ahmad knocking a few hundred dinar off the price, she’s also to take in a young girl named Sitara [Sekine Akira]. Fatima’s brother Muhammad [Mogami Tsuguo] attempts to instill some learning in Sitara, as Ahmad told Fatima that the girl has a knack for it, but finds himself frustrated when she’s unable to even learn the very basics of Quran recitation. Frustrated, Muhammad says that he’ll just pay back the discount and return her. Left alone after this, Sitara attempts to escape.

She does not, quite understandably, want to spend the rest of her life enslaved. She says she’s going home, but in her attempts to find her way out of the manor, she gets lost. In a garden, she encounters a young boy, also named Muhammad [Saito Jun]. (He’s the elder Muhammad’s nephew, son to Fatima and a late father. I will be differentiating him and the elder Muhammad by age.) She takes an immediate interest in him, including teasing him after her headdress accidentally slips off. Unfortunately! This leads to her being caught, and upon being scolded she breaks down that she misses the home that she and her mother used to serve in. (Zumurrud [Nikray Farahnaz], one of Fatima’s other servants, is unsympathetic and tells her that if she really wants a home to call her own, she should study hard so she’ll get bought by a worthwhile master. Ouch.)

In spite of this, the younger Muhammad makes an earnest attempt to connect with her. Enough of an attempt that he tries to teach her a little something; taking a metal bucket from Zumurrud, young Muhammad drops it in the courtyard from a great height, making a terrible racket. When this sends everyone but Sitara and Zumurrud into a momentary panic, he notes that, because these two had the time to see that the bucket was about to fall, and therefore to prepare themselves, they knew to cover their ears and avoided the clamor.

The younger Muhammad says that this kind of foresight; preparation to avoid calamity, big or small, is what defines learning. In saying this, he calls back to an earlier line from Fatima—when attempting to convince the elder Muhammad to teach Sitara the Quran, she explains that seeking knowledge is the duty of all Muslims—and highlights what is sure to be a main theme of the series.

This is enough to convince her to take studying seriously. And thus, we are treated to a montage. Sitara learns household tasks, learns to pray, and recieves an outfit from the house. As the montage (and Fatima’s period of prescribed mourning for her husband, the synchronization of the two feels deliberate) ends, Sitara speaks with the younger Muhammad once again. The two are clearly close at this point, and she’s surprised (and a little upset!) to learn that he plans to journey to Nishapur, and to other cities of the world beyond, to learn as much as he can about the world from as many different peoples and faiths as possible. It’s an admirable goal, and young Muhammad believes that it’s what his father wanted for him, but Sitara is visibly upset by the prospect of not seeing him again, and it’s not hard to conclude that the two have some nascent feelings for each other. No matter, young Muhammad promises Sitara that he’ll write to her. Now, Sitara is illiterate, but this is his way of encouraging her to practice her letters. He wants to become a great scholar and, hopefully, someday, teach many young folks like herself. With some sadness, she and the rest of the household see young Muhammad off on his journey, and the narration tells us that he will become a person of some renown. (This is true, because the younger Muhammad is the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.)

The narration also tells us something else, however. That this is the last time he and Sitara will ever see each other in person.*

We cut to eight years later. One of Sitara’s recitation practices is interrupted by the sounds of the Tussian militia outside, heading off to fight a band of troublesome nomads. This disruption is quickly forgotten as one of young Muhammad’s letters arrives. In it he talks about how in love he’s fallen with the sciences; astronomy, geometry, medicine, and how he prefers their methods of learning to the purely theological. He also encourages his family to let Sitara learn these disciplines, as well, suggesting Ptolemy and Euclid as starting points. Euclid’s Elements is a bit hard for her to grasp, but when Fatima introduces her to a book on astrology and astronomy (recall, this was the 12th century and the two were not well delineated), she’s captivated. In here, Fatima repeats the “seeking knowledge” line, once again underlining it as a main theme of this story.

Back in the manor proper, one of Fatima’s other servants, Anis [Ise Mariya], scolds Sitara as she burns something in the oven. It’s true, she tells Sitara, that some slaves are given education to entertain or delight their masters, but decisions of this nature aren’t made by the slaves themselves. “We’re property, not people.” She says, in a way that is so matter of fact that what she’s saying actually comes off as more chilling. All the moreso because of how this episode ends.

The militia, mentioned briefly earlier, are revealed to have fallen to the nomads. The episode closes on a brief exchange between two of these men; a commander of some sort, and his superior, on horseback, who asks if Tus has any scholars because he’s “looking for something.”

When the Mongols are inbound to the city, Muhammad and the rest of the household treat them more like a natural disaster that will blow over. The slaves, along with the rest of the valuables and Fatima as well, hide in a spacious cellar underneath the manor while the elder Muhammad takes his sons up to the mountains to hopefuly ride out the proverbial storm.

Fatima and Sitara have a bit of a heart to heart in the standstillish world of the cellar, speaking about Fatima’s books (a collection her late husband spent a lifetime building) and how important they are.

She also asks Fatima if she “cares for” Muhammad, and both her actual reply and the little flight of fancy she has—she and Muhammad decked out in fancy clothes, eating pomegranates together—make it a clear yes. Fatima says that she wants Sitara to serve Muhammad “by his side, as a human being.” For someone in Sitara’s position, that’s high praise. Days pass, and after a few, there’s some noise outside the cellar. Fatima assumes it’s the older Muhammad, returned to come get them. It is not.

It is here that we are formally introduced to the Mongols invading the city. We don’t learn his name just yet, but the leader of this little expedition appears to be a prince, one of the sons of Genghis Khan. For whatever reason they may have, he is looking for a copy of Euclid’s Elements, a book that has of course come to mean a lot to Sitara over the years. Unable to restrain herself, she shouts at the Mongol prince to return it and calls him a thief. Unfortunately, not only is the prince clearly offended by the mere act of being yelled at, he has a servant on hand of his own, who translates the insult into his language. This is enough to incur his wrath; he tells Sitara—his servant translating all the while—that bravery from one as delicate as she is unseemly, and promptly brings down his sword on her head.

Fatima, of course, cares enough for Sitara to not stand idly by while she’s attacked, and jumps in front of the blade. Dying in Sitara’s arms, she calls her her daughter. It is a sad and tragic event, and it does not seem like it’ll be the last of those in this series.

Brought up in the first episode is the limit of theoretical knowledge. The younger Muhammad embarked on his journey in part because his own teacher scolded him for his lack of life experience. Here, we see those limits in plain relief. There is simply not anything that Sitara, as she currently is, could possibly have done.

No matter the era, the place, or the reason, an invading army is almost never welcome. Witch in Mongolia portrays this pain with a very raw, immediate touch. After Fatima’s death, Sitara is left to watch as the invaders plunder the manor, and when they finally lead her away in a train of captives, we see the beautiful sandstone buildings and sky-blue dome tops of Tus rendered as so much rubble underneath the smoke and fire.

This happens all over the world, and has happened, from the dawn of human history to the present day. The methods change, both those for delivering the killing blow and those for extracting the wealth, but the fundamental injustice of the strong trampling the weak has not. Tus, after its sacking in 1220, was, in fact, eventually rebuilt, but it did not last, and the city didn’t survive the 1200s. Those are incalculable lives and stories either lost or displaced, and Witch in Mongolia is about just one of them. As Tus burns, Sitara and a throng of other captives are marched out of the city and into the surrounding desert. She manages to meet back up with Zumurrud and Anis, although the former is badly suffering from watching her brother be shot by archers before her very eyes. Later, the captive train comes across a field of the dead, and a woman attempts to run off upon recognizing one of the bodies. She, too, is promptly shot to death by one of the Mongol archers.

This is all very, very bleak. Obviously. Even saying as much feels a bit trivial. Keeping Sitara going are memories of her time with Fatima, eagerly awaiting the bloom of the flowers in Safar and her letters from young Muhammad. It may seem somewhat strange, to an audience living in the modern world, and given Sitara’s own reaction in the opening minutes of the first episode to the prospect, that she looks back on serving under Fatima so well. But, we must remember that despite their arrangement being what it was, it is clear that Fatima cared a good deal for Sitara, and it was under her tutelage that she was able to learn about the world. I am of course not remotely saying—and I do not think the show is trying to say—that this justifies the practice, merely that it explains Sitara’s own feelings on the matter. It’s also important context for the decisions she makes toward the end of the episode.

When the train of captives reaches the Mongol city camp, the exhaustion and emotional turmoil is too much. Learning from some of its few survivors that Nishapur, too, has been burned to the ground (for the crime of defending itself; an entire city for the head of the invading force’s commander, per the Khan’s orders) pushes everyone to the absolute brink, as it now seems impossible that even young Muhammad is still alive. It’s too much for Sitara, too much for Anis, and too much for Zumurrud, who, later this same day, collapses, dying as she remembers her brother Mikhail, leading Sitara to wonder if she wasn’t missing her brother the entire time they lived together with Fatima. Sitara losing more people close to her does nothing to help her emotional state, of course. Anis attempts to calm her down by telling her not to blame herself for Fatima’s death. She reasons that, as slaves, they aren’t really held responsible for what they do in the same way as a free person would be. Whether she truly believes this or is saying it as much to comfort herself as Sitara isn’t entirely clear. But, it ends up not mattering, as with Zumurrud’s death, Anis has clearly reached the end of her rope as well. Overnight, she lunges at one of the Mongol soldiers out of nowhere, and is shot dead.

With essentially everyone in her life now gone, Sitara wonders if she shouldn’t just pick a direction and walk; an arrow will pierce her, too, if she does this for long enough, she thinks.

Then, unexpectedly, she’s interrupted not by one of the Mongol soldiers, but by the Mongol prince’s servant, the translator who was with her when Fatima was killed. He obliquely offers her a way to reclaim the copy of Euclid’s Elements that the prince stole, and on that note, the premiere comes to a close.

All told, this is clearly the opening act of a very considered story with a lot of long-term goals. I really, really want to know how the translator is going to go about getting the book back. It’s clear that this is, at this point, one of the very few things Sitara still has from her old life to hang on to, and that it’s an object with such obvious ties to the story’s themes is interesting as well. (And accordingly, what she might do with that book is inherently interesting as well.) Something I’ve neglected to mention up until this point is the opening narration, which promises us a “witch who made a vast continent her plaything.” I don’t know, precisely, how we get there from here, but I want to find out.

*In real life, there is apparently little to no evidence that these two people knew each other, but drawing a connection between the two—Sitara is based on a real figure as well, known only by that name and as “Fatima” to the historical record—is a fair use of writer’s privilege I’d say. For both the former of these particular factlets and the aforementioned historical identity of young Muhammad, I must thank my good friend Zersk (googling “Muhammad of Tus” and the like was getting me nowhere), who, fun fact, is also the artist who drew the witch icon I use to comment on this website. 🙂

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Let THE WORLD IS DANCING Sweep You Off Your Feet

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.

You blink, and two months are gone.

The only thing I’ve written on this site between the start of this season and the last was a stray review of the relatively obscure early-10s anime film Aura. And so it is the case that, with only that piece bridging this season and the last, the Summer 2026 anime season arrives on our doorstep. It actually did several days ago, in fact. The World is Dancing itself premiered yesterday (one of those weird situations where the premiere on streaming is ahead of the TV broadcast, Dancing will be a Thursday show for most of the season), and a few more scattered offerings debuted as far back as a week ago. Still, for me at least, this particular show is the spearhead of what promises to be the best anime season in a number of years. (I feel like I say things like this all the time, to the point where it’s perhaps blunted the impact of me saying them. So I do want to be clear that I think this is shaping up to be the best anime season of the 2020s so far period. We find ourselves in rare times.) The World is Dancing is a period piece, set in 14th-century Japan, following the life of the boy who would, in the future, become the founder of what we now know as Noh Theatre.

That’s two layers deep for our general concept. Nothing crazy, certainly, but enough that a more casual audience might struggle to connect to it a bit. But don’t worry, if your question is something along the lines of “what do people get out of this sort of thing, anyway?”, someone else is right there next to you, asking the same question. And that someone is our main character, Oniyasha [Hanamori Yumiri].

Oniyasha is the son of Kan’ami [Konishi Katsuyuki], the taciturn and stern head of the Kanze peformance troupe. What the Kanze perform is a sort of traditional dance theater called sarugaku (recall, Noh doesn’t exist yet), and much is made of Kan’ami’s attempts to advance the artform and make sure that the place of both his troupe and the style they perform in remains secure in the world. Unfortunately, being quite serious about all of this comes at the cost of a strained relationship with his own son. Oniyasha and Kan’ami do not see eye to eye as we begin our story, and Oniyasha spends much of the performance that opens the main part of the episode spacing out and wondering about the skeletal structure of birds and horses. (Creatures born to fly and run, respectively. Humans, he thinks, are surely not born to dance.) This leads to a bit of chaotic slapstick; in the midst of the performance Oniyasha’s zoning out leads to a chain reaction of fumbling that results in a knife stuck in the flank of a nearby horse. (To his credit, Kan’ami rushes in to save his son from said horse’s understandable wrath.) Oniyasha spends much of the time afterward feeling low, his father is quite upset with him and actually, at one point, chucks a turtle at him (objectively a horrible thing to do, but kind of so ridiculous—down to the turtle popping out of its shell to greet Oniyasha—that it’s hard to take seriously).

Oniyasha spends much of the remainder of the episode in this daze, conversing with acquaintances and friends at various points about what dancing means, and what it’s for. He gets different answers, a boy of roughly his own age that works for his father tells him that when his father dances, the world changes, but Oniyasha can’t really wrap his head around this just yet. (Don’t worry, he’ll understand very well before the end of the episode.) In this early part of the episode I would describe him as almost…Bocchi the Rock-ian? Obviously their starting motivations are quite different, but Oniyasha has that “going through it girl” energy about him, despite being a boy. And there’s a snappy comedy to his head-in-the-clouds mentality throughout much of the episode. (Another obvious comparison, more by design, is Tokiyuki of The Elusive Samurai, another anime that takes place in the 14th century, one that is set to return later this month, in fact.)

The true hook of the episode comes at its end, however, and with it, a swerve into the more serious and contemplative half of this show. After leaving a conversation with his friend Kogane [Uchida Maaya], Oniyasha is lost in thought once again, and soon becomes lost in fact, as well. Not knowing where he is, he asks a farmer—a man with white hair, suspiciously important-looking, all things considered—for directions. The man points him off, and he soon finds himself hearing strange, raspy singing from a cabin in the woods. In it, there is a woman dancing. Dancing in a way he has never seen.

The actual animation of the episode here wobbles out into decoherence (the beginnings of this sequence in particular bring to mind Takopi’s Original Sin‘s use of similar, to very different ends, last year), to take us with Oniyasha as he’s swept away by this surreal and intense display of art. I have spoken often about the convention of the “passion ignited sequence,” the moment in an anime about an artform or sport or the like where we the audience can see the protagonist become enraptured by it. This is a particularly extreme example, as Oniyasha is not just taken with this mysterious woman’s dancing, he’s overwhelmed by it. And he honestly seems more than a little frightened. (The animation, it must be said, really helps sell this, almost more resembling a sequence of paintings than frames in the usual sense. Kuroyanagi Toshimasa‘s team at Cypic really know what they’re doing.) Running out into the night, away from the mysterious woman and her shack, he’s found his answer. If he can capture this, this particular kind of expression, that is what dancing can mean, to him and—as the closing narration hints—soon to many others, as well. Just like that, the seasons change.

The first episode closes with the unusual move of playing what will normally be this anime’s OP and ED sequences back to back. This has a particularly meaningful connotation here; one of the things we see in the “OP” is Oniyasha, dancing as the woman danced, seemingly in the thick of one of the more restrained and formal performances of the type his father’s troupe puts on. Perhaps this is his way forward, perhaps not. In either case, it makes The World is Dancing‘s premiere a very strong first episode in a season that is sure to have many, many more of those. We could hardly ask for a better opening act.

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) How AURA: KOGA MARYUIN’S LAST WAR Won the Battle

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Aura: Koga Maryuin’s Last War, is a simple tale about bullying with a more complex and nuanced worldview than that description alone might imply. The basics are very straightforward: high schooler Satou Ichirou [Shimazaki Nobunaga] was, in his middle school days, deep in the chuunibyou delusion mines. These days, after an incident we remain in the dark about until the final act of the film, he’s cleaned up his act and is a respectably normal guy. Satou Ryouko [Hanazawa Kana]—no relation—is decidedly not normal, herself caught up, imprisoned perhaps, in fantasies of that very same type. Hers are about the “Other Side”, a world in her own mind that she has left to become The Researcher, her wizardly, scholarly, witch persona, versed in scattershot occult knowledge. The bulk of Aura is about these two characters and their relationship, by turns close and relatively rocky, and how they deal with the world around them. Ryouko spends much of the film on an ill-defined quest for what she calls “dragon terminals,” but in a literal sense, this movie is about two misfits breaking through to each other. However, I say “in a literal sense” for a reason, because –

AURA: Koga Maryuin’s Last War, is, also, a bittersweet but ultimately triumphant love story. The tale of The Researcher {Satou Ryouko}, a wise sage from another world, and how she comes to find solace in another who has shared in her supernatural experiences. That other, of course, being Koga Maryuin {Satou Ichirou}. It is the tale of two lost souls—more than that, really, given the gaggle of background characters known as the Dream Soldiers who are, also, reincarnates from the Mirror World—who reach out to understand each other in a world that is hostile to them at every turn. But, of course, such things are rarely so simple.

Bullying, in the most straightforward sense, is the main conflict driver of Aura. Ichirou was bullied in the past for his Koga Maryuin persona. Ryouko is bullied in the present for her Researcher persona. This manifests in all the usual ways; social ostracization, foul graffiti slathered on Ryouko’s desk that calls her a whore and tells her to die, the theft of her shoes, and the occasional more physically direct confrontation. One of these bullies actively beats Ichirou up. Another, a gyaru, is responsible for most of the shoujo manga stock bullying previously aforementioned, and also makes a habit of flicking bits of paper at Ryouko. Late in the film, she even blackmails Ichirou by threatening to leak some embarrassing photos from his Koga days. (Aura must, chronologically, be one of the very last anime to use the old “mean, bitchy gyaru” stereotype as opposed to the more common “nice gyaru” of the present day. Can you imagine, say, Kitagawa Marin doing this shit? Unthinkable.) Complicating matters is teacher Dorisen [Mizushima Daichuu], who essentially assigns Ichirou to watching over Ryouko.

The Dream Soldiers admire him, too, for being willing to stick up for Ryouko. And for a time, especially in the film’s middle third or so, it seems that they might come to some sort of mutual understanding without any dramatic occurrence, two souls in resonance.

However, mere admiration is not enough incentive as the film reaches its climax, as the bullying becomes entirely too much for either of them to bear, and we learn the full truth of the incident that broke Ichirou out of his own chuunibyou persona. One wherein his parents discovered letters he wrote to the “princess” of his persona’s home reality. In them, he describes his parents as mimics, false people in a false reality, and they, of course, react badly. (Neither they, nor the film itself, seem to question why someone would develop a psychological complex in which their parents are impostors. If I have a chief criticism of the film, even “on its own terms,” it’s this.) After cutting off contact for a time, the final confrontation comes with the revelation that Ryouko has climbed onto the school’s roof. She plans to do something drastic.

Suzumiya Haruhi, eat your heart out.

There, she has assembled the Dragon Temple. To even the most mundane eyes, it appears as a school desk Angkor Wat, heaps and heaps of the things piled high into a pseudo-sanctum far too complex for a high schooler to have reasonably assembled alone, much less in a short time. If you are wise enough, if you are looking for the magic, it’s here. Right at this moment, an arcane suicide attempt that doubles as the light shining through a keyhole. AURA could have become bleak here, if it wanted to. It could have been the Bridge to Terebithia anime that never was. But it does not! Ryouko, the Researcher, the witch, here also a princess, is rescued by a dashing dark hero. The day is saved! And he gets the girl.

Ichirou sheds his shame for the sake of the girl he loves. Donning once again the guise of Koga Maryuin, he takes a prop sword and bashes through the desks, cracking Ryouko’s temple apart as he approaches her, pleading that she has to live in the real world with him. To live and suffer, to cherish the adventures they can squeeze out of our mundane reality. He tries his damnedest to make the case that it’s all worth it, but ultimately what gets to her is that simple plea for connection. That the two of them are the same.

AURA, then, stands at a crossroad in more ways than one. Mundane and magical. Of the past and the future.

Indeed, not only in plot but in presentation, Aura resembles an anime of the 00s proper more than one the 2010s, with its somewhat muddy color palette and generally moody emotional timbre. Of course, it is always helpful to keep in mind that every single anime studio did not instantly switch from grays and browns, sharp shadows, and airbrushed metal surfaces to KyoAni-style pop colors and tons of flashy VFX the very second that the calendar flipped over to January 1st, 2010. It is instructive, as the last decade fades into the rearview, to remember that any stylistic trends of a given time period are just that, as opposed to absolutes.

Consider AURA, also, as a magical work. We are never given reason to believe that Ryouko and Ichirou’s fantasy is anything but. But consider that there are multiple senses of the word “fantasy.” Consider, too, that all fiction is equally fictional. It bears repeating, could a high schooler truly have assembled those desks into such a magnificent altar? What of the minor character Kume [Morikubo Shoutarou], responsible for the dragon-shaped nails that spurred the imagination of both Ryouko and Ichirou? He identifies himself as a creator of small wonders, despite acknowledging that such things are rare in this world. And, again, there is the temple of desks that Ryouko constructs.

Depending on your proclivities, these sorts of questions will strike you as either the most fascinating thing about the movie or a heap of totally pointless navel-gazing. It is not hard at all to read Aura as a straightforward anti-escapist fable, a cautionary tale of how things can go wrong if you’re not living in the real world, and how no amount of retreating into your own delusions can solve the problem of loneliness. I suspect that this is more or less the “intended” reading of the film, and am well aware I am swimming against the currents somewhat with this piece.

But, that ignores that it is precisely becoming Koga once more that gives Ichirou the connection to Ryouko he needs to save her. And anyway, who cares solely about “intent?” Once a work of art is released into the world, it grows wings of its own.

So which is it, then? I, your humble reviewer, have tried, here, to represent both ideas in alternating line breaks. I, the writer.

And I, the witch. Ultimately, both are real (or fake) in their own ways. Such is the case, too, with AURA itself.

“As a film”, further criticisms could of course be levied. The directing, from Kishi Seiji at AIC ASTA, is a competent execution of the denpa visual style that, had, by this point, become well-established, but it is perhaps a bit lacking in true personal “oomph” other than its final climactic scene. (Even that feels very SHAFT-indebted, albeit not in a bad way.) There’s a bit of nudity that is beyond unnecessary, even as someone who is normally fine with that kind of thing. You could also argue, perhaps, that the gyaru antagonist has no real arc and is simply shoved to the side as the film ends.

But these are all craftsmanship issues, and I’m not reviewing a table, you understand? This isn’t some functional object, it’s art. None of those flaws being corrected would be worth anything if the film didn’t speak to me. That they’re present doesn’t undermine the fact that it does. AURA is a patently ridiculous movie, there is no shortage of scenes or screenshots you could take out of context to make it seem like the most absurd thing in the world. It’s also brilliant, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

If nothing else, it is absolutely fascinating to consider Aura‘s place in the broader continuum of chuunibyou-related pop culture. Because, by any reasonable metric, the chuunis won in the end. Setting aside the most obvious indicators (eg. that light novel adaptations comprise the bulk of anime adaptation today), there is an overall generally more favorable attitude toward these individuals over the past decade and change. You could very, very easily argue that Ryouko is genuinely mentally ill. And yet! The story treats her with no small amount of sympathy! Not that Ichirou’s more grounded perspective isn’t treated so as well, but if we were truly just supposed to write all of this off as Ryouko Being Weird, I don’t think the ending would be written the way that it is. And Aura isn’t unique in this regard! Compare it to its closest cousin, KyoAni’s seminal Love, Chuunibyou, & Other Delusions. Despite the chronology telling us it has to be the reverse, Chuunibyou essentially picks up the thread that this film leaves off, recognizing that the dividing line between the so-called worlds of fantasy and reality is itself somewhat illusory, and that in any case the two halves can exist in harmony. (A rather perfunctory post-credits scene on the part of this film perhaps notwithstanding.) Whether the world today would strictly be kinder to Ichirou and Ryoko I can’t entirely say, the bullies they railed against certainly still exist, but I’d like to think that more than ever, Ichirou would be empowered against them.

Part of Koga’s speech in the film’s final minutes asserts that the enemies of this world are invisible. This is a subtle, but very accurate, distinction. “Material reality”, so to speak, cannot be changed by fighting off dragons, slaying demon lords, unsheathing a cursed sword, or so on. But, it can be changed nonetheless. The weapons are different, the battles unseen, but they rage on, around us, every day. So fight on, Dream Warriors, we will win a kinder world for ourselves yet.

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Magic Never Went Away – The Sorcerous Beginnings of WITCH HAT ATELIER

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.

“Magic is a miracle that makes the world vibrant.”

When she was a young girl, Coco [Motomura Rena] purchased a book at a festival. This book, sold by a mysterious magician in a mask, is the inciting object of Witch Hat Atelier‘s story, and Coco obtaining the book in the first place is, thus, where our story begins, at least in a chronological sense.

Witch Hat Atelier‘s first episode isn’t much of one, would be the problem. The practice of releasing double or even triple premieres is an increasingly common thing. It’s often rather exasperating, in fact, but in the case of Witch Hat Atelier specifically, I understand completely why they went this route. Because if you were to only see that first episode, you’d only get half of the picture. Nonetheless, we do have to start at that festival, with that book and the pictures within it, central as they are to this story and, perhaps more importantly, what I want to discuss about this story.

If you want to recap the first episode, that’s very easy. Coco, daughter of a fabric seller, is a young girl obsessed with magic due to her acquiring that book as a very young child. Magic is everywhere in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, lighting up cobblestones beneath one’s feet, purifying a spring so one can drink from it, but the how is a mystery. Coco—everyone, really—is led to believe that magic is a matter of blood. You are born able to use magic, or you aren’t. Those who are so born are witches, and everyone else is just a regular ol’ person.

This is how, just to name an (unfortunate) cultural touchstone, Harry Potter, for example, handles things, with its convoluted throngs of wizarding lineages. (Although the general concept is hardly unique to that series.) Related to its presence there, though, I have always, to my core, hated this approach to magic in fiction. Some of this has to do with my own real-world practice of eclectic neopagan witchcraft, some of it has to do with personal beliefs about the nature of life, the world, talent, and skill. Some of it is just pure preference, in that I think it’s lazy worldbuilding. I also think it often leads to worlds rife with unfortunate, unconsidered implications about what the existence of inborn gifts of that nature might lead to or imply. It is something I have many problems with, to put it mildly.

However, I don’t bring all this up to criticize Witch Hat Atelier. Because what Coco and most others believe is not necessarily what is actually true. One day, a witch named Qifrey [Hanae Natsuki] visits her mother’s shop. While there, he takes a noted interest in her picture book, but mostly, he offers to fix a broken-down carriage—a carriage pulled by flying horses—when some neighborhood kids break it. (Being a handyman is, too, the job of a witch in this world.) Qifrey asks that he be left to the repair alone, he doesn’t want any prying eyes on him. Coco, precocious child that she is, outwardly agrees, but cannot resist the temptation to see magic performed. Sneaking into a crawlspace above him, she watches him work, and she learns the truth as he slowly sketches out a series of magic circles. Magic, in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, is not cast, but drawn. Anyone with a fountain pen, a bottle of special ink, and the proper knowledge can work miracles.

The knowledge of this fact is a secret, of course. Witches are sworn to keep this fact from the public, and this immediately, drastically changes both what magic literally is in the context of the events of the story and also its broader use as a tool of metaphor. There is a reason we devote more or less the whole first episode to this revelation—that and Coco being cute, of course—and it’s because Witch Hat Atelier is very interested in laying out what magic means and can be in very plain terms before it does anything else. Magic can be done by anyone, which nominally makes it accessible and democratic. But the witches themselves keep this knowledge from everyone, so magic is controlled as well. This pulls us back to the “wizard lineage” issue to some extent, but makes it an intentional point of consideration as opposed to a thoughtless byproduct. With this, Witch Hat Atelier wants to get us thinking.

If magic can create great works of beauty and provide numerous benefits to the world—and from what we see here, it can—it can also be terrifying. These are the central tensions that the story returns to over and over, and that last point is the note the episode ends on. Coco, now knowing that magic can be done by anyone, practices copying the many seals depicted in her picture book. She does not actually know what they do, mind you. She’s just trying things out and, essentially, guessing. Her first several spells are minor; a tiny fireworks show, a sprouting flame, but when she realizes that larger circles are more powerful and well-drawn ones even moreso, she gets the idea to simply trace the seals in the book. Nearly as soon as she’s finished attempting this, Qifrey bursts through her window, just in time to save her from a spell gone horribly right. Her entire house, and the fabric shop within, bursts into erupting waves of crystal, turning everything inside into a blue, prismatic, frozen-solid glitter. Qifrey is in time to save Coco, but not Coco’s mother, who is caught in the petrification and turned to a crystal statue instantly.

That is the note that episode one ends on. Coco’s childhood in ruins beneath her as Qifrey holds her tight in the air. Initially, he’s quite set on erasing her memories—by implication, the standard procedure for people who find out about magic but aren’t supposed to—but after some pleading from Coco, and the realization that without her picture book he’s down a lead about “them” (how vague and scary!), he changes his mind. Instead, he will take her as an apprentice. And so the stage is set for our real story.

But, of course, we can’t get to that without all of this. It’s foundational, establishing the contradictions of magic in this world and giving us reasons to both find awe in it and to fear it. The visuals, it must be noted, are laser-focused on getting all of this across. Coco’s first fledgling attempt to draw a magic circle fills her—and us—with a genuine sense of wonder as the circle literally floats off the page and then explodes into a crackle of glittering fireworks.

At the same time, the sense of fear and panic at the cascading crystal waves of Coco’s unintentional petrification of her own home is overpowering, it’s enough to strike genuine terror into a person. We immediately, intuitively, get it. This is the joy magic can bring, this is the danger magic can bring. We understand from the very first episode both the limitless potential for magic and how that potential might be turned to destructive ends; why we might want it to be free and thrive, and why we might want it cordoned off and controlled. As I say, contradictions. (On a less literal level, these are all still true. To me, magic is art, in its infinite capacity to both hurt and heal. But no single one to one metaphor works entirely.)

Something much more straightforward, it must be said, is that all of this is so effective that it should instantly dispel any worries over this adaptation. The Witch Hat Atelier anime was highly anticipated, and it comes to us from BUG FILMS, specifically a team headed by director Watanabe Ayumu (also simultaneously working on Akane-banashi, busy guy) and his assistant director Shinohara Shun. There was some understandable apprehension about BUG’s involvement with the project. Some of this simply stemmed from the long gap between the anime’s announcement and its premiere, but some stemmed from the unfortunate and severe broadcasting delays suffered by BUG’s last and only other TV anime project, Zom 100. (I don’t know if the Zom 100 premiere writeup is the article I’ve penned for this site that’s aged the most strangely. It must at least be up there, though.) Still, I think the fact that the Zom 100 debacle was an entire three years ago, the involvement of a different director here, and the quality of these first two episodes should allay these fears. In addition to the visual strengths I’ve already discussed, there’s also a truly charming use of pop-up storybook animations that mimics the use of similar in the manga without feeling quite one to one. Overall, I’d say this is the rare adaptation that is stridently faithful to the source material without feeling overly staid. That’s a very hard needle to thread, and the team working on the anime should be proud that they’ve accomplished it.

This all continues to be true in the second episode, the more subdued half of the premiere. One thing to know about Witch Hat is that it is a slow story for the most part, and accordingly this second episode is almost entirely about Coco getting settled in to the titular atelier, the small hillside school where she will be learning her new craft. Craft really is the word for it, too, as this episode also goes into more detail about how magic actually works, breaking down the different parts of the seals and how they affect the outcome of a given spell. It is as much science as art, like so many of its analogues in the real world, and getting to see Coco try—and fail!—to learn the basics of the craft is one of Witch Hat‘s little joys.

There’s also quite the primer on the history of magic here. Qifrey explains how, once upon a time, everyone simply knew how to use magic. This, of course, led to spells being developed so horrible that they defy description—the first application of any technology is warfare, after all—until one day, some banded together to put a stop to all this. Somehow—the details are left very vague—they cast a spell that wiped the memory of magic from all but a select few, leading to the current status quo. This is all told in a very broad-stroke way, but a way that’s believable within the series’ context. We are getting, more or less, the “official” version of things here, and we also detour into how Coco will have to pass a handful of trials before she’s considered a true witch and is permitted to enter the Tower of Tomes, the witches’ own Library of Alexandria, where she might perhaps discover the secret to rescuing her mother.

Qifrey also explains what separates permitted from forbidden magic. The short version? Anything cast on the body, other than the spell to erase memories to keep the secret, is forbidden. This means nothing that can harm another person, certainly, but it also means no teleportation, no direct flight, not even healing magic like we might find in so many other fantasy settings. Again, we come to contradictions. It is immediately obvious why anyone would want to keep things this strict and this simple, but it’s also obvious why some might object to this. So far in this narrative, no one does, but the very fact that this magic is “forbidden” as opposed to simply “lost” all but tells us outright that some do.

Whatever that may eventually entail, this is also a rather domestic episode. We also meet Qifrey’s three other students here, carefree and energetic Tetia [Haruki Kurumi], who is the first to greet Coco and does so with open arms, the coolheaded and somewhat detached Richeh [Tsukishiro Hika], who we learn perhaps the least about here, and finally, most importantly, there’s Agott [Yamamura Hibiku].

Agott, serious, disciplined, with inkstained fingers, makes herself immediately known as Coco’s foil. Coco, despite the harrowing experience of accidentally petrifying her home and mother, is still bright-eyed about the prospect of learning magic and is, in some sense, perhaps even naively optimistic about her own ability to reverse her mother’s fate. Agott, like all of Qifrey’s other students, has heard rumors of an Outsider who enacted a forbidden spell and is now being taken in as a witch. Unlike Tetia and Richeh, she is very blunt about how this has colored her perception of Coco; she thinks there’s essentially no chance that she’ll ever see her mother again, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be a proper peer of Agott herself or the other girls in the atelier.

Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. The very day after taking in his new apprentice, Qifrey heads off to attend to business at the ‘Great Hall’—whatever that may be the domain of knowledge of manga readers alone, for the time being—and Agott promptly challenges Coco to a test, presumably of her own design. Whatever awaits Coco, it is unlikely that Agott’s skepticism is the last, or most dangerous, thing she will have to face.

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Spring 2026 Roundup

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.

It’s been a while since I did a good roundup post! You know how these go, so let’s get on with it.

Akane-banashi: The widely-acclaimed Shonen Jump rakugo manga gets its anime adaptation this season. Depsite the trailers looking rather dull, I was actually quite impressed with this episode itself. However, as much as Akane-banashi at large is the story of its title character Akane [Nagase Anna], this first episode mostly isn’t. Instead, it’s mostly about her father, Osaki Tohru [Fukuyama Jun], stage name Arakawa Shinta. This episode takes place in Akane’s childhood, and it is clear throughout the episode that she loves and admires her father immensely. (And, well, if my dad was voiced by Lelouch Lamperouge I’d probably feel the same way.) She gets into a fight at school over a classmate disrespecting Tohru by calling him a deadbeat with no real job, and, when the kid’s mother wants to know what happened, she responds by acting out the entire scenario herself, in a very rakugo-esque manner, overtly gesturing to the talent she’s already fostering at a young age.

She might, in fact, be a better rakugoka than her father someday. Watanabe Ayumu (a man who is set to have a very busy spring, between directing this and the Witch Hat Atelier anime) and his team take great pains to depict Tohru as someone who is talented but who has to try quite a lot to really tap into that talent. The predominant mood of the episode is not of a preternatural talent here to blow you out of your seat like you’d get in an anime about rock music or such (or indeed like we might get later in this very series), but of effort. The very animation itself has a weathered, almost sepia look to it. A look that also gently implies that money might be an issue for the family. Certainly, it would explain Tohru’s desperation to become a shin’uchi. Rakugo’s third and highest rank, a shin’uchi. That level of accreditation would presumably open some doors for him, certainly.

The sweaty and nervous atmosphere of this guy absolutely bombing his promotion test is perhaps the emotional crux of the episode. Uncomfortable and unenviable, hotter than the spotlight directly on him. Even when things turn around there’s an air of inevitable personal tragedy over the whole thing and, yeah, he fails and gets expelled from the profession. So set is the stage for our true heroine, who we will be meeting in earnest next week. Incidentally, like last year’s Cinderella Gray, you can watch Akane-banashi legally and for free on Youtube. So that’s nice!

Daemons of The Shadow Realm: Fullmetal Alchemist author Arakawa Hiromu‘s latest ongoing, now in anime form! This first episode was, well, it was a fuck of a lot honestly! We start out with a very traditional and straightforward-seeming setup, two siblings born as night turns to day leads to an adolescence where the brother, Yuru [Ono Kenshou], protects his sister Asa [Miyamoto Yume] who lives in some kind of sanctuary inside the mountaintop village they call home. This is a bit odd in its own right, but it’s absolutely blown to pieces when planes and helicopters carrying armed soldiers invade, dropping both conventional modern military fighters and a pair of individuals who command supernatural agents called Daemons into the village to kill Asa and capture Yuru for unspecified purposes. One of these individuals, a woman, succeeds in killing Asa, only for her to inform a shocked Yuru that she is Asa (which Yuru, obviously, does not believe).

We don’t get any answers as to how or even whether that might be true here, though. He flees along with his village’s medicine seller (seemingly someone who’s tapped in about the existence of the modern world outside the village) and the episode ends on an interesting note. The medicine seller gives Yuru a key to a socket in front of the twin statues guarding the village. These, promptly, are brought to life as Yuru’s own Daemons, simply named Left and Right but taking the form of a buff demon man and woman.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The atmosphere of sudden, intense violence when the soldiers invade is classic Arakawa. They are downright ruthless, and the Daemon-wielder they have with them, Gabby, is honestly even worse, commanding her inky Pac-Man monster to chomp most of the village to death. All together I was a little surprised by how much I liked this since I”ve never been a huge Arakawa stan (I liked Fullmetal Alchemist just fine as a teenager, but not so much that I felt the need to seek out her other work, and I liked other things a lot better around that same time).

This show is slated for two consecutive cours and the pacing and plotting here is snappy enough that I’m really interested to see if I can keep it up for 24 whole episodes.

GHOST CONCERT : missing songs: An impressively incoherent full-speed trainwreck from the brain of Symphogear creator Agematsu Noriyasu. Agematsu has a lot of post-Symphogear stuff that is vaguely like this, in that they, like Ghost Concert, are concerned with the intersection of music (and artistic expression more generally) and technology. Ghost Concert piles a near-future sci fi setting where non-AI music is illegal on top of that, and then further adds a Fate-esque twist where the main character is a medium who can see and be possessed by the spirits of famous historical figures.

There is, suffice to say, a lot going on here, and if any of it made any kind of sense it might be great. As it is, well, I did already call it a trainwreck but honestly that’s underselling it a little. I have almost no idea what the different parts of this show have to do with each other, which given that we’re only a single episode in leaves me a bit flabbergasted.

What I will give the series is that it has pretty impressive action animation and direction—the directing here handled by Jinbou Masato and animated by a team at the infamous Studio ENGI—but aside from the fact that I don’t really expect that to last, it’s hard to latch on to empty calorie goodies like cool explosions, aspect ratio-changing AMV sequences, and glowing VFX during the fight scenes when you have no real idea of what’s happening or why. The episode’s actual plot is bizarrely vague, something about our main girl Aiba Seria being possessed by the ghost of Cleopatra and turned into an….evil slut, I guess? (As a side note it drives me crazy when stuff characterizes Cleopatra this way, but that’s more of a pet peeve than anything.) Possessed by Cleopatra and summoning the phantoms of Caesar and Mark Antony for help, she fights a blue-haired girl and a priest for vague reasons. There is singing. After the fight she has a massive row with her friends who I guess did not know she was some kind of medium? It’s all so hurried and haphazard that it barely registers as a story at all.

If nothing else, this at least seems to make the argument that the Symphogear guy doesn’t like genAI. I guess that’s nice, but it’s agreeable in the same way a Macklemore song is. Sure, the general sentiment is nice and some of the technical aspects are impressive. It’s still not anything you’d really ever listen to of your own volition.

SNOWBALL EARTH: I think even just a couple of years ago, I would’ve talked myself into watching a few more episodes of this on the basis that it “has potential” or something, but to be honest, an interesting premise alone a show does not make. We spend this whole first episode getting to that premise in the first place, so even if it did, I have not exactly been rewarded for my 20 minutes here.

The real death knell for the show is just its tone. We want this to be a serious thing about a lonely boy and his obligation to save the world with the help of his giant robot friend and we want it to be sad when the giant robot sacrifices himself at the end of the episode on some Iron Giant shit. But we also want this to be a goofy parody with a lot of knee-slapping corny humor that’s basically just a string of jokes that people made about Shinji in the early 2000s. It commits to neither so the two halves work against each other and the result is a show that mostly just pissed me off. This thing has the audacity to reference the original Gundam in its opening episode which if you’re going to do that, you better have more to show for it than this.

Petals of Reincarnation: Well this was really stupid! I’d say I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way but, honestly, here I sort of do. It’s about half and half, I guess.

With the constant deluge of narou-kei bullshit I honestly welcome something that’s an edgelord revenge fantasy in a more direct and honestly more imaginative way. Granted, the bar is in the ground so “imaginative” means we’re doing the “powers borrowed from great figures of history” shtick. Fate is usually held to have invented this, but in terms of competence and general responsibility with its historical characters I am expecting something more along the lines of Nobuna-Gun. (This show is where the “Hitler as a little anime boy with a sharingan” image that’s been kicking around the internet lately is from, for reference, if you’ve seen that.)

I won’t go into the events of the narrative because they’re not important, or, honestly, even interesting. But the fights in this first episode were pretty cool, especially for a new studio (BENTEN Film, supposedly mostly ex-Gainax of Fukushima staff) and a team helmed by a not particularly acclaimed director (the Grendizer U guy is doing this). The show has what is for better or wores an extremely distinctive visual style, with some very, very, very bold color choices. Downright garish ones at times. Add in some SHAFT-y dialogue screens and such and you get a series that has the air of being distinctly the budget version of a couple other shows. There are way worse things to be, even if that’s hardly high praise. And the female lead, herself named Haito le Buffett [Maruoka Wakana], proves that if you make Miyamoto Musashi a girl she will always be the coolest character in the room. (Although this version doesn’t hold a candle to Fate‘s, obviously.)

The main thing holding me back here is that the main character is a vacuous edgelord and I kinda hate him in the wrong way. We’ll see how much juice he can get out of Mega Man’ing everyone else’s powers, but honestly how much more of this I watch is going to be down to how cool the action scenes are vs. how annoying I find him and the other characters. Other than Haito, none have left a particularly positive impression so far. Between this, Ghost Concert, and Killed Again, Mr. Detective (which I did not write about here, because I frankly had very little to say), it’s at least proving to be an interesting season for shows that are just very odd above all else. If you like those, you may get some enjoyment out of these. Otherwise, well, there’s always this option:

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Don’t Get Walled Out by THE RAMPARTS OF ICE

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.

I don’t know, off the top of my head, how many mangaka over the years have been in a position where anime based on their work has aired in consecutive anime seasons. I don’t imagine it’s many, though, and as of yesterday, that exclusive club has gained a new member in Agasawa Koucha. Agasawa’s work was first brought to the silver screen this past season with You and I Are Polar Opposites. This Spring, her other manga of note joins it on TV screens worldwide; The Ramparts of Ice. This occasion was rare enough that there was a little piece of commemorative art done for it, a charming detail that nicely accompanies the charm of Polar Opposites itself.

Of course, we’re not here to talk about Polar Opposites again, even if the common sell for Ramparts to Polar Opposites fans is that it’s “like if Azuma was the main character.” At the end of the day, these are two separate works and, indeed, Ramparts is actually the older of the two, having run from 2018 to 2022 in its original serialization, first as an independent webcomic and then through LINE’s LineManga service, and then finally in print through Shueisha. That’s a long and complex history for something like this, but it’s worth remembering. Because it also, importantly, makes Ramparts a case of true grassroots success. So it’s worth going into it with an open mind, to try to see what early readers saw when they were first introduced to this story back in 2018.

We start immediately with a montage of memories from the perspective of our main character, Hikawa Koyuki [Nagase Anna]. She’s being teased—prodded and made fun of for her appearance and demeanor, mainly—by a variety of classmates over some number of years. She asks herself, the world, and us, why it’s fine for these things to happen if they’re meant “as a joke.” This is a solid piece of tone-setting, and immediately, with the visuals showing us Koyuki’s frosted-over point of view, and a glowing blue circle that she establishes in her mind’s eye, a cold barrier between herself and others.

As we return to the present, Koyuki in the second semester of her first year of high school, we see how this icy demeanor has put up a very real wall between her and others. When she has to give a pair of boys a class handout, they freeze up, and one remarks upon her departure that Koyuki doesn’t hang out with anyone in class at all, and that this was in fact her first interaction with her. Similarly, when she walks past a trio of other girls in the hall, the girl at the center of the group, Azumi Miki [Izumi Fuuka] throws a gaze in her direction, clearly affected by her frigid aura. Miki and Koyuki are actually friends, we later learn. (When she brings this incident up the next day, she wonders why Koyuki didn’t say anything to her!) Koyuki’s become so adept at projecting this “don’t come near me” vibe that she’s earned a reputation for it, and some even call her the “Queen.” The “ice” prefix there is left out, for our own imaginations to fill in.

There are a few immediate observations you can make here. While the show does not seem outright dour, it does definitely have an appropriately frosty atmosphere. One could criticize director Mankyuu and his team at Studio KAI for not bringing the same verve to the material that Lapin Track brought to Polar Opposites, but that would be to ignore that this material does not really call for bounciness or liveliness. It needs to feel frozen-over, and it does. Rare moments of warmth feel more like the first thaw of Spring, a herald of a more thorough melting to come, for sure, but not the main event just yet. Koyuki’s own view? Well, being so distant from everyone isn’t great, but it’s at least better than middle school. Ouch.

The first crack in the glacier comes when Amamiya Minato [Chiba Shouya] bumps into her in the hallway as she’s making faces in a mirror, wondering why everyone finds her so scary. He gently says that he’d thought she was scary, but sees now that she can make some funny faces, too. More important perhaps: he knows her name. This sticks with her, and we’ll come back to it in a moment.

Now, I did say the show is a romantic comedy, which may read as a mischaracterization if you’re this far into the article. “Dramedy” might be a closer fit, but it wasn’t a mistake. The show does have comedic material as well. So far, this mostly consists of people being wicked intimidated by Koyuki’s vibe. It’s nailed pretty well, and the stylistic shifts into a chibi art style are very cute. Expect to see some number of introverted otaku girls in your social circle changing their icons to a chibi Koyuki sometime in the near future, if you’ve got a lot of friends fitting that description on social media.

Koyuki’s rep is particularly sad when we see her text a friend (Miki, in fact) and realize she’s the sort of person to send someone a frog sticker in an IM and say “okey froggy” in response to a question. That goofy side is something she doesn’t really get to show people, and I think it’s very possible the whole thawing process will eventually leave it more visible to others. She and Miki have a conversation in the rough middle of the episode that is mostly a casual study sesh, but does also pretty directly lay out that this gap between who Koyuki is on the inside and what she presents to the world is going to be a big concern of the series. The same is true for Miki, whose rep as “the class idol” presents her with almost precisely the opposite problem. Everyone likes her already and puts her on a pedestal. Being treated like a saint, she’s afraid to goof around. The gap between the social mask and the true self, and how one might “know who they really are”—or if that’s even possible—really seems like it’s going to be a big theme here. Koyuki directly points out that she’s surprised that even Miki thinks about this stuff.

It occupies Koyuki’s mind elsewhere in the episode too. Here we should rewind to that scene with the mirror in the school hall. This is where we meet the two main guys of the cast. First, as mentioned, there’s Minato.

Minato is a jokester, and takes an interest in Koyuki after seeing her do all this stuff in the mirror. He doesn’t get very long to actually chat her up, as his friend Hino Youta [Inomata Satoshi] is close behind him and is worried that he might be picking on the poor girl. (It’s also Youta who offers Koyuki his hand after Minato accidentally knocks her over.) Both of these guys seem like they’ll be important in the long run, and it’s pretty clear, just from the genre that this show is in, that one of them will be Koyuki’s long term love interest. (Although I honestly couldn’t tell you which at this early stage.) A later encounter in the hallway sees Youta reminding Koyuki of a giraffe at the zoo she was frightened by as a child, as he is both extremely tall and has really bad eyesight. So any time he forgets his contacts (which seems to be pretty often), he has to really squint and get in peoples’ faces to tell it’s them. It’s a pretty good bit, all told.

Minato gets more development between the two here, however. He runs into Koyuki again after spotting her across the school courtyard. He definitely comes off as a little pushy in this premiere, as he tries to make friends with Koyuki while she’s getting herself a drink from the school vending machines. This must be on purpose, however. It’s important to consider that we’re seeing these things in part through Koyuki’s eyes, which means that her coating of permafrost tints every event in the story. She says herself that she can’t help but be wary when someone this different from her tries to strike up a conversation.

Minato’s attempts to get to know Koyuki better are foiled by two of his other friends trying to join in. This is entirely too much for Koyuki, and she bows out. One of his friends is creeped out, but Minato himself correctly observes that she seems like she’s putting up a wall, more than anything, and this seems to only renew his determination to chip away at the icy barrier around her.

As the episode proper ends, we’re shown another series of flashbacks, as Koyuki walks away, distressed. This time, we are clearly missing context. There’s a broken classroom window, whispered threats, and the old shoujo manga bullying technique of garbage stuffed into shoes. We don’t know what exactly happened to Koyuki in middle school, but it’s clear something did.

After the ED (soundtracked by an intense, bass-driven tune by J-rock legends Polkadot Stingray), there is a rather alarming scene where Koyuki is harassed by a pair of randos while walking to a community center to meet Miki. Her attempts to flag down a nearby Youta are to no avail, since he can’t actually make her or what’s going on out from across the street. There’s a real raw frustration and loneliness here, and if this is the kind of thing Koyuki has to put up with all the time—not something that would be hard to believe at all, she is a girl in a patriarchal world, unfortunately—it’s easy to see how those frozen ramparts could grow so tall and so thick. She is angry, and terrified that these two might do something if she expresses that anger and fear in the wrong way. It’s honestly pretty harrowing!

As an anime-only, I don’t know what precisely the rest of her story is going to look like, but the genuine emotion on display here in this first episode ensures I’ll be coming back next week and, if I’m being straightforward? I’d advise you to do the same. There’s something special brewing here, and I think those readers back nearly a decade ago who first fell in love with this story were really on to something.

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