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(REVIEW) Today, Tomorrow, and Every Day Onward – Beginnings and Endings in FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY’S END

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

This review was not commissioned.

It’s all there in that first episode. The flowing rivers and the rolling hills, the heroic romance in the swish of a cape and the slash of a sword bringing an end to a wicked Demon King’s reign somewhere far away. Fireworks spark over a city to signal the triumphant return of the heroes. A meteor shower streaks overhead. Suddenly, it’s decades later, and the adventurers who embarked on this grand epic have grown old. A bell tolls, a man dies. All of them have grown old but one.

Wherefore the anime elf? That’s what Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End asks, at least at first. That’s what I asked, back when it premiered, nearly a year ago. Everything I said in that article is still true, at least about those first few episodes, but time, as Frieren is keen to point out, has a way of making fools of all of us.

In the months since it premiered and its first season ended, Frieren has gone on to be widely hailed as a modern classic. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most broadly-acclaimed anime of all time. The most famous (and most infamous) sign of this is its current spot at #1 on the MyAnimeList audience rankings, overtaking the darling of the Toonami generation, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, after many years of only occasionally-interrupted reign at the top of that list. But one can easily find dozens upon dozens of essays, videos, reviews, podcasts, random forum posts, and so on proclaiming it the greatest anime ever made, or at least the greatest made in the past decade or so.

Simply pondering the question of something’s quality, whether it’s “good or bad”, is rarely the most interesting approach when engaging with a work of fiction. But nonetheless, with Frieren, it’s at least worth considering. Because consensus like that can become overwhelming and prevent honest assessment of what a series is and isn’t. There is an aura of untouchability around the thing now; criticism of the series is met with the assumption that you’re just an aimless contrarian and not to be engaged with seriously. This has happened before, often to works that—like Frieren—don’t display many obvious hallmarks of being culturally Japanese. Cowboy Bebop was the posterchild for this attitude for years, but FMA:B has had that status as well, as have a number of other anime.

We should be careful here, though, because criticizing a series’ fanbase is a very different thing from criticizing a series. The problem with that being that the two are here, and as much as this project has been about me wanting to find out for myself what I thought of it, some of it was in fact an attempt to see what others saw. Because I do have to confess from the jump that while I’ve actually come out the other side appreciating the series for what it is, I do find the universal acclaim deeply puzzling. And as I’ve returned to the show, I’ve only found it more and more so as I’ve trekked onward.

Yes, returned. I actually dropped Frieren as it was airing! The sudden swerve into the demon plot after the initial arc left me uncomfortable and unimpressed, and my plan at the time was just to never touch it again. Nonetheless, circumstance is a funny thing, and through a chain of events I won’t recount here (because they’re boring), I was indirectly persuaded to give the series another shot. When I came back to Frieren, I was hoping to either be converted or be vindicated. Converted in the sense that I would see what everyone else seems to see in it, and would understand its near-universal high praise from viewers. Vindicated in the sense that I would at least feel justified in having dropped it the first time around, that this would be a clear cut case of me being right and everyone else being wrong, and that this is the work of some great huckster, where I am just somehow one of the few not taken in. Instead, neither has happened. What I’ve discovered is a fractured, self-contradictory anime with no clear picture of what it wants to be. Occasionally beautiful, sometimes funny, at times thrilling, more than once absolutely infuriating, quite often just flat-out puzzling. Normally, I like to start a mixed review by listing off the uncomplicated pleasures of the work. With Frieren, there are none of these. Nothing about this show is uncomplicated.

Frieren at The Funeral

Instead, let’s start at the beginning. Right at the funeral. Here, Frieren the character [Tanezaki Atsumi] grieves for Himmel [Okamoto Nobuhiko], the “hero” of the Hero’s Party who we will hear brought up again and again, openly and loudly questioning why she never tried to get to know him while he was still alive. Over the course of the ensuing months and years, she reconciles with her two other companions in the party in her own, loose way—the priest Heiter [Touchi Hiroki] and the dwarf ‘front-liner’ Eisen [Ueda Youji]—takes on an apprentice, in the form of Fern [Ichinose Kana], a human girl, initially a war orphan adopted by Heiter, with purple hair, and hatches a plan of sorts. She will retrace the route she took on her journey to slay the Demon King nearly a century earlier, hoping to spark her memories before all sign of them fades, and thus perhaps understand her companions better with hindsight. A bit later on, she’s led to the idea of following in the footsteps of her mentor, the human mage Flamme [Tanaka Atsuko], who, in her last writings, claims to have discovered the location of Heaven in the form of a realm called Aureole. The idea, then, is to either literally meet Himmel again or at least commune with his spirit, as Aureole is allegedly accessible from the northern tip of a region called Ende. Conveniently, Ende is near the Demon King’s old castle. Thus, begins a journey tied in a symmetrical loop. One preoccupied with finality, finity, transience, nostalgia, sentimentality, and loss.

Frieren and Fern meditating among nature.

Or does it? Some of those things are definitely themes of the series. It’s absolutely about nostalgia and sentimentality, in part. In nearly everything Frieren does, she’s reminded of Himmel and her time with the Hero’s Party. Sometimes these reminiscences, which often take the form of direct flashbacks, are meaningful elaborations upon some connection between what Frieren is doing and what she has done. Just as often, though, they serve to simply repeat the same events twice in two not-that-different contexts. There’s a localization-induced pretense to the subtitle Beyond Journey’s End, because Frieren’s first journey and her second are not actually terribly different. Over the course of this series, this constant flashbacking begins as simply a technique being used, hardens into an irritating tic, and then becomes an outright crutch.1 A way to fill time and space when the story is out of ideas in a given moment.

As for those other things; transience and especially loss? They are not nearly so prominent as the first episodes, especially the outright first, would have you believe. A friend pointed out to me that after that initial scene at the funeral, Frieren doesn’t ever openly grieve Himmel again. She certainly is fond of remembering him—again, the constant flashbacks—but she rarely seems terribly sad about it. Frieren is not an overtly emotional character, so it isn’t that strange that she never has another outright crying fit like that again, but it is odd that she doesn’t even seem particularly melancholic when remembering him most of the time. This itself would be easy to wave off as the effect of the passage of time were it not for Frieren’s own massive emotional continuity in almost all other areas, almost everything else about the character is consistent before and after an initial timeskip of a few years where she trains Fern before setting off again. This is not. It’s downright odd, even accounting for the whole “Heaven” thing, and is representative of many of Frieren‘s more general issues, to such an extent that when it was pointed out to me, deep into my work on this piece, I felt like I’d been handed a skeleton key to a particularly challenging lock. Upon thus picking it, I have found myself focusing more on the amount of empty space in the vault than the jewels that are actually there.

Let’s back up a bit. Since I am, as I often do, getting ahead of myself. We can roughly divide Frieren, or at least the anime, primarily what I’m looking at here, into four acts. The first is that initial scene of mourning and its aftermath. Upon meeting again with Heiter, Frieren is eventually convinced to take Fern on as an apprentice. She does something similar upon adding Stark [Kobayashi Chiaki], a young warrior originally trained by Eisen, to her group. These three form the core of what I’ll follow the direction of the fandom in loosely terming “Frieren’s Party,” and they are our three main characters. Frieren herself gets the lion’s share of the focus, with Fern at a respectable second. Poor Stark, a warrior in a world of wizards, is relegated to a distant third, and has only a handful of focus episodes to his name. These early episodes are pleasant, however, and aside from a few disconnected foes that must be subdued, including a dragon in Stark’s first focus episode, are largely peaceful. They’re also emotionally resonant enough that any qualms are easily waved off. If Frieren as a series is ever simple, it is so here, but things don’t remain that way for long.

In Tristram

This first act of the anime comes to an abrupt close when the party enter a town currently in the midst of negotiations with a host of demons. This, the series attempts to demonstrate, is foolish. Demons in the world of Frieren do not have minds in the same way that you or I do, and are more akin to natural disasters than people. Any attempt at kindness or cooperation is met with deceit and slaughter. Predictably, once Frieren introduces these ideas, through the mouth of Frieren herself, who immediately turns into a racist grandma when the subject of demons comes up, it promptly sets about proving her completely correct. The demons are eventually revealed to be under the control of a “Sage of Destruction”, Aura [Taketatsu Ayana], a remnant of the original Demon King’s forces. Throughout a painfully contrived plot that admittedly does have a lot of very effective visual work, the series shifts gears in its first major way here, and it never entirely looks back.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that we need to digress here, to talk at some length about how Frieren treats the demons. Not just because, personally speaking, they are why I left this anime on the back burner for nearly a year, but because not addressing this issue honestly is, in fact, disrespectful to the work itself. Praise is meaningless if it’s disingenuous.

The fact of the matter is that the way Frieren writes demons, as infiltrators with no interiority who destroy communities both within and without, who always band together over any other ostensible loyalty, who cannot be reasoned or negotiated with, and so on, is uncannily reminiscent of certain kinds of anti-Semitism. Now, is this intentional on the part of Frieren? I prefer to think well of people, and I have certainly been given no reason to believe that author Yamada Kanehito is bigoted in this or any other way, so I do not think so. It’s very easy to dismiss all of this as the writer regurgitating harmful tropes and stock plot beats from other works. Since the idea of something that isn’t actually capable of thinking or feeling but outwardly acts like it can pops up more than once later on in other contexts, one can easily file this away as, perhaps, someone trying to draw a loose analogy to AI, or philosophical zombies, or various other such concepts. Perhaps it’s as simple as trying to give our hero some villains she can fight guilt-free. But those echoes of real-world prejudice are there, and they’re meaningful, because this kind of rhetoric hurts people.

Even if it didn’t, one of Frieren‘s own main defining character traits is her hatred of demonkind, so this stuff is baked right into the narrative, and is so in a way that I think actively cuts against Frieren‘s attempts to present itself as a story at least in part about the title character learning a little compassion. I do not mean to indict the character of Mr. Yamada in any serious way, but treating this as the problem it is is absolutely necessary to talk honestly about Frieren. We can discuss it and we can confront it, but if we ignore it, everything positive we say about this series is meaningless.

In a sense, it is unfortunately true that none of this is actually unique to Frieren. Fantasy, especially high fantasy, has a problem with this sort of derived racism that runs very, very deep to the genre’s roots. Ever since the first essay criticizing Tolkien’s depiction of the orcs, this has been an ongoing subject of discourse. That thread runs from Tolkien’s work, through Dungeons & Dragons, winds its way through several generations of JRPGs, anime, and manga, and continues to exist right up to the present day. It is uncontroversial to say that the narou-kei scene—which Frieren is not a part of, but they exist in the same landscape and are in conversation with each other, so this is still worth noting—has a huge problem with stock Fantasy Racism, going right up to, for example, Reign of the Seven Spellblades, which aired in the season before Frieren began, and The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic, contemporaneous with its second cour. In those stories, as in Frieren, imagined ethnic conflict is a plot greaser; a worldbuilding detail that lets us sort the characters into groups, and gives those groups an excuse to fight. When this is handled irresponsibly—and it often is—we get situations like the one in Frieren.

To a certain sort of person, this criticism is never going to make sense. They will say that fantasy is fantasy and consider any objection of this sort to be looking for something to complain about. “They’re just bad guys, you’re overthinking it.” I am unlikely to persuade such an audience that this is a real problem, but I would at least like them to take me at my word that it is very bothersome to me, it sticks in my craw badly enough that it was on my mind throughout almost my entire time watching the series, during both my favorite and least favorite of its episodes. To such an extent, in fact, that if someone who were not me chose to be far less charitable toward the series, for any number of their own reasons, I would completely understand. Especially since the series goes out of its way to prove Frieren’s initial assumptions completely correct.2 Even extending it so far as to make them shared sentiments with her mentor Flamme, thus recontextualizing both characters.

The demon issue that dominates the second act also heralds a major change in writing style for the series. Some foreflashes of this are visible during an early episode where Frieren and Fern fight a demon wizard by the name of Qual [Yasumoto Hiroki]. Curiously, the narrative treats Qual with a lot more dignity than most of the later demons, and there’s a sour bit of foreshadowing in his corner of this narrative. It’s mentioned that Qual pioneered the use of magic for combat, something that has, by the series’ present day, become a standard part of every mage’s arsenal. There’s a grim irony here, given what the series becomes after Qual’s brethren show up. Grim enough that were the other demons similarly characterized I might assume it was intentional, but it really doesn’t seem to be.

An immediate, obvious signpost for how drastically Frieren changes in such a short amount of time, is the topic of mana. Mana, as you surely know, is in its modern usage a general catch-all term for magical energy in fantasy fiction. It means different things in different contexts. In Frieren, as soon as it’s introduced, it becomes an analogue of Dragon Ball Z‘s power levels, or just generally speaking, various forms of battle shonen “aura” that have kicked up and down the genre for years. Late in the demon arc, we learn that Frieren can manipulate her mana levels to conceal the true extent of her power from those around her, and by the time the show has put these ideas into practice, Frieren has fully changed into a straight action series with a fantasy veneer.

Frieren’s instantly-memetic showdown with Aura in episode 10 is representative here; a whole episode of doled-out backstory and rules lawyering leads up to Frieren revealing to her demonic enemy that she’s been suppressing her mana for decades, thus giving her the win over Aura in a magical weighing of souls, and leading to the episode’s infamous conclusion where she turns Aura’s spell back on itself, and orders the demon lord to kill herself. It’s anticlimactic, bizarre, and not satisfying in the least. The fact that it’s also needlessly cruel and petty is almost a minor nitpick by comparison.

It has been months and months since I first saw a screenshot of this, and I still cannot believe that it is a real, unedited line from an official sub track of a widely-watched and widely-liked anime.

It really seems like the main intent here is just to convince us that Frieren herself is super badass. This itself merits further questioning though, when we talk about “Frieren herself,” who are we even referring to?

At the risk of adding a lengthy digression to a lengthy digression, it did occur to me over the course of the series that Frieren’s characterization is, to say the least, peculiar.

There Are Three Elves

Frieren is easily the most complex of any of the show’s characters, with her companions Fern and Stark by contrast fitting into relatively straightforward anime archetypes. Over the course of the series, three distinct modes emerge. Three Frierens that alternatingly compliment and contradict each other. Since the character informs the series that bears her name, it’s important to pin these three down, and I’ve done my best to do so here.

Firstly, there is Frieren as the elf in the classic fantasy mold. She is removed from humanity, but through the initial influence of Himmel and his party, she comes to discover it in both a literal and abstract sense over the course of her time with them, and more fully after his passing, as the series goes on. We will call this facet of the character Frieren the Elf, as it is she who gets the lion’s share of the show’s explorations of empathy and understanding. She’s also the version of Frieren we meet first; this is Frieren of Frieren at the Funeral, the manga’s unofficial alternate English title. This is the one Frieren who openly grieves for Himmel, the one who seems most nostalgic for her time with him, whose constant flashbacks emphasize to her that she needs to appreciate the time she has with her apprentice now. This is the Frieren who sets out to retrace the journey of the Heroes’ Party before all sign of it fades like train tracks beneath the wildflowers. I’ll admit a bias here in that she’s my favorite facet of the character. I don’t seem to be alone here, though, in that she seems to also be the most widely-liked and, certainly, acclaimed version of her. When people talk about “Frieren the character,” they are usually talking about the Elf.

Secondly, there is Frieren as a simple magician. This is more of a comedic figure than anything, obsessed with magic to the point of being willing to do absurd tasks to gain knowledge of incredibly minor spells. Sometimes she plays the straight man, but just as often, she’s the instigator for these hijinks. This is the Frieren of the somewhat infamous nudity potion gag, the one that gets stuck in mimic maws because she’s blinded by the possibility of rare lore, and the one who expresses bemusement at the highly regimented systems for “authorizing” mages that humans tend to come up with. Generally speaking, she’s the most overtly silly of the three. But she’s as important as any other, and in her more tender moments is the Frieren who bonds most closely with Fern, and is the one who laments the decline of magic in her world. This Frieren, we will call Frieren the Mage.

Lastly, we must return to the whole demon thing, because the final facet of Frieren is the ugliest and least personable version of the character. A dark, cold avenger who places her self-appointed task of driving demons to extinction above all else, both because of a deep personal grudge and as an inheritance from her mentor Flamme.3 This Frieren is responsible for most of the overt action scenes that the character participates in, as well as her sometimes cold attitude in general. She is a constant, unpleasant reminder of the series’ worst and most ill-considered impulses, and is often lurking beneath the surface in even otherwise less action-heavy episodes. When she emerges, the series becomes violent in an often very sudden and jarring way. We don’t need to name her, the series itself calls her Frieren the Slayer.

Viewed from a certain angle, all of this is actually a good thing. The character contains depth and contradiction. All we’ve actually done here, after all, to put it in reductive D&D terms, is point out her race, class, and character alignment. Were it that the character alone were written this way, I might consider it a positive of the series. However, fittingly enough, Frieren informs Frieren, and this is where we start to run into bigger issues.

It would be convenient for us if Frieren the anime were also divisible into three different modes, but in truth it’s really just two. There’s the weighty, heavy story it aspires to be to begin with, and there is the well-executed but very much traditionalist action-fantasy battle shonen it eventually becomes. Neither, on its own, is bad in concept, but reconciling the two in the manner that the series attempts is impossible. Trying to toggle between them is the series’ core misstep. If you’re enjoying the meditations on the brevity of life, the flashy battles are a distraction. If you just want to see Frieren kick some demon ass, like a shortstop, staff-wielding Doomguy, the ruminations on change and nostalgia are dull. It’s not impossible to thread this needle, but Frieren certainly doesn’t manage it, and trying gives the series a profound lack of holism. The only real thing you can say without caveats about all of Frieren is that you can say almost nothing without caveats about all of Frieren.

So it’s no surprise that when the Demon Arc comes to its ignoble end, the show immediately tries to pivot back into its earlier, more emotional mode. What’s a bit more surprising is that it almost pulls it off.

Sein the Priest

In its quieter moments, the show demonstrates an affinity for the natural world and the passage of time, and I really do think this is Frieren at its best. Even after it swerves away from this in the second arc of the series, it sometimes comes back to it. The third major arc of Frieren deals with a priest named Sein [Nakamura Yuuichi], who temporarily joins Frieren and company’s party. The episodes leading up to, and then detailing, Sein’s journey are some of the anime’s strongest points. Sein is a simple character, but he’s a compelling one, an older man who’s forced himself into the quiet life because he doesn’t really believe he deserves anything different.

Frieren the Elf, in one of her few truly great leaps in characterization, persuades him to take up adventuring in search of his friend, a free-spirited warrior nicknamed Gorilla [Tezuka Hiromichi], because she sees herself in him. In one of the series’ better uses of flashbacks, a direct parallel is drawn between her own initial reluctance to fight the Demon King and Sein’s broad apathy. The analogy being rather loose is actually part of why it works; it doesn’t feel like the story is contorting itself into knots to get this point across. It feels natural.

Stark gets some much-needed focus here as well, although it’s minor in comparison. In one of the show’s most interesting episodes, he poses as the late son of a nobleman, in a sort of mixed up prince and the pauper sort of scenario. It’s great, and builds on Stark’s previously-established background as the displaced child of a warrior village raised by Eisen after the village was destroyed. (By demons, because of course.) It’s also just a pleasant interlude, and its big flashy centerpiece is a ballroom dancing sequence between Stark and Fern, one of the show’s best visual moments put in service of nothing more complicated than a nice character moment.

There are other such character moments as well; a particularly lovely flashback a few episodes prior for example, one of the show’s best, sees Frieren the Elf and Heiter converse over what it means to be a “real adult.” When they conclude that nobody really knows, that we’re all just kind of putting on airs for everyone else, Frieren pats Heiter on the head, in a legitimately sweet gesture. Again, there’s nothing complicated about this, just a self-contained, brief exploration of some part of the human condition.

In a more general sense, these episodes feel representative. As they are where Frieren really feels like a journey. A trek through a sprawling, wild world filled with moments of contemplation and wonder. A world that has meaningfully changed since Frieren last wandered through it. This is where the show leans hardest into its sentimentality and nostalgia, probably its most effective emotional modes. In a rare few individual scenes and episodes, the series hits its highest highs, a naturistic, sometimes pastoral sublimity that feels like home. Any time Fern’s magic sets vegetables bobbing through the air to help a kindly villager, any time our heroes’ biggest obstacle is a blizzard or other natural impediment, the show seems to really find itself. This is the Frieren where I most understand the praise, the one promised by the tone of its ED theme and the similarly-fantastic second OP theme. That’s not to say these episodes are necessarily perfect. I could deal with fewer jokes from Sein about how he wishes he were traveling with a “sexy older woman”, and there is a very nasty and sudden Frieren the Slayer appearance in an episode where the party are carried off by a giant bird. Her first thought, naturally, is to blow it to pieces. Nonetheless, this is where Frieren comes closest to really clicking, and these complaints feel much more like nitpicks than the fundamental issues that riddle much of the rest of the show.

Frieren even seems to be, on some level, aware that this is the best side of itself, but for some reason is either unwilling or unable to fully embrace it. This is most obvious once Sein leaves the party, as when he does so, that easygoing nature leaves with him.

Monsters & Mazes

The fourth and final act of Frieren, or at least of the TV series, takes place in Äußerst, a city home to the so-called Continental Magic Association. One of several organizations dedicated to vetting and authorizing Mages that have sprung up over the course of history in Frieren‘s setting. Frieren herself (the Mage specifically), seems bemused by the whole thing, but it soon becomes clear that getting a difficult First Class certification from the CMA is the only way that the party will be able to continue northward toward Ende, as passage is only given to First Class Mages and those accompanying them. To obtain such a certification, one must pass a series of three exams only offered once every three years. Naturally, both Frieren and Fern take up the challenge. (Stark, unfortunately, spends most of this portion of the show completely offscreen.)

As soon as the bridge to Äußerst is crossed, Frieren rearranges itself to become an action series again. We’re introduced to a whole host of new characters here, most of them other First Class Mage candidates. Some of these characters are quite interesting in their own right. There is for example Denken [Saitou Jirou], a self-made man who’s found wealth and status in the Imperial Army, but who needs the certification for the one thing that he can’t buy; permission to visit his wife’s grave in the northern lands. He’s a soft, grounded touch, being essentially a second Frieren without the more troubling aspects and plus a very nice monocle and mustache. Equally compelling, in a very different way, is Ubel [Hasegawa Ikumi], who seems to be maybe the only Frieren character who understands the true nature of the show—or at least the arc—that she’s in, in that she’s outwardly ill-intentioned and sadistic (and human, a welcome change of pace) who dresses like she shops at Hot Topic, uses what I can only really define as “cutting magic” exclusively, and seems to go out of her way to play the bad guy in most situations. There’s also a pair of elemental sorceresses named Kanne and Lawine [Waki Azumi & Suzushiro Sayumi], who spend some time under Frieren’s mentorship and have a cute, yuri-lite relationship with each other. Not all of these characters are quite so interesting; Ubel’s sometime-partner Land [Komatsu Shouhei] is not much more interesting than his name, and Wirbel [Taniyama Kishou] is present in every episode of this arc but, in spite of that, I made it through the whole show without forming a strong opinion on him. I could say similar about Edel [Kurosawa Tomoyo]. Nonetheless, the hit to miss ratio is pretty good here, especially given the sheer number of characters introduced.

There are really only two exams that take up any substantial amount of time. The first involves the candidates being siloed off into competing teams and tasked with capturing a magic bird called a Stille.

This ostensibly simple task spirals out of control rather quickly, and by the last episode of the first exam we have Frieren shattering the magic barrier that seals off the testing area so Kanne can use her water magic to take down Richter in a fight. The fights themselves are magnificent, too, some of the best of their kind in recent years. The second exam, though, is even more of an elaborate production, with each and every episode showcasing some pretty slick spell-slinging.

It’s also around here that we finally properly meet Serie [Ise Mariya], the last character of any real note that Frieren adds to its narrative. In much the same way that Frieren had her mentor Flamme, Flamme in turn had Serie, and in fact was one of several human apprentices that Serie would take over the centuries. This creates an interesting chain of elf-human-elf-human apprenticeships down through the generations. (She also proctors the third and final exam, a simple interview where she passes or fails the candidates essentially based on her impressions of them.)

This is also, very much related to all of this, where Fern’s character arc really begins to make some sense. One of the few ways that Frieren effectively welds its more action-oriented and contemplative sides is by making a connection between them with the general concept of mentorship. Frieren teaching Fern well is one of the scarce through-lines that persists throughout the whole series instead of just most of it, and the Exams Arc is where that really comes to a head, culminating in her metaphorically surpassing her master by killing a magical clone of her during the second exam. Finally when it is she, not Frieren, who is awarded a First-Class Mage certification, Frieren can take pride in the fact that she’s done her job as a mentor. (Now, the series undermines this somewhat by making it clear that the only reason Frieren doesn’t also pass is that Serie dislikes her, but the general point remains.) This is perhaps the series’ most coherent thought, in terms of having a strong theme. As this also ties in to ideas introduced earlier, where Fern became a mage at least in part so Heiter saving her as a child would be worthwhile. Another minor character, a monk called Kraft [Koyasu Takehito] puts forward that all people want to be praised. For Kraft, the watchful eye of his goddess is enough, but for Fern, it really does at least seem to mean something that her mentor is proud of her.

And yet, it can’t all still help but feel a bit scattershot. Deep in the Exams Arc, long after it has left most other attempts at serious storytelling behind, there are two separate conversations in distinct episodes that allude to the idea that the real heart and soul of magic is not, in fact, blasting your enemies to smithereens. Rather than martial applications, the real core of magical ability is spreading beauty and making others happy. Flamme, the very same mentor who nurtured Frieren’s loathing of demons, first became fascinated with the arcane out of a desire to make fields of flowers bloom at her feet. Fern, in some echo of her mentor’s mentor’s philosophy, and guided by Frieren herself, does not use any but the most basic offensive magic when dueling other mages. There is other subtext to that conversation, but at least a part of it is this same sentiment; that war is not what magic is actually for.

If only Frieren itself actually believed that! It clearly does not! While it is true that the series has its fair share of intimate character acting and visual panache that is otherwise directed elsewhere—I hope I’ve made that much clear—the majority of its resources as a production are spent on flashy fight scenes. This is first evident in the defeat of Qual way back in episode three—another case of the show lamenting its own obsession with battle—and remains a fixation right up until its finale. Frieren the anime clearly believes that the most worthwhile, or at least impressive and spectacular, application of magic is in combat.

Absolutely nothing has stopped the author at any point from writing scenes in which characters use their vast arcane powers for nearly anything else. But, Despite Frieren the Mage’s obsession with minor arcana, this almost never happens, examples being limited to the vegetable-floating mentioned earlier and similar unflashy, practical effects. Where is the magic that interacts with music? With art? Where are the spells that make the world shimmer and sing? Frieren has ample room to show us anything of this sort, but despite its protests that magic isn’t primarily for battle, battle seems to be most of what it wants us to see of magic. And tellingly, when we finally see that spell that blooms a field of flowers in episode 27, near the very end of the series, the cut in question is, while still nice, far below the caliber of the artistry given to what is unequivocally battle magic in just one episode prior, where Frieren and Fern face off against the magical clone of the former. A field of white and red flowers springing forth from the ground just doesn’t stack up against billowing clouds of darkness, eerie glowing miniature black holes, and room-shaking explosions that throw off shards of what seem to be the very fabric of reality itself. Not in this context, at least.

Fair enough if making cool fight scenes is your actual intent, but in that case, why write these conversations? Why the pretense? This problem could, perhaps, be pinned on the adaptation as opposed to the source material. But the end result is the same either way; as with so much else in Frieren, it simply feels confused.

Zot

That lack of any strong aim is what I keep coming back to. All of Frieren‘s other problems are symptoms of this. This wishy-washy take on what magic “means” and “is for”, Frieren‘s own fractious characterization, the whole demon thing, etc. The prevailing sense I get is that of a series that don’t know what it wants to be. This is unfortunate, considering that many of Frieren‘s closest peers are extremely strong in this regard. Dungeon Meshi for example4, also has a running theme throughout of change. In that series, though, every single part of the story works in tandem to emphasize that theme, down to the very construction of its setting itself.

Dungeon Meshi is, admittedly, the elephant in the room here. When I think about Frieren‘s shortcomings—its self-contradictory nature, its general incoherence, its thoughtless creation and subsequent treatment of whole fantasy races5—Dungeon Meshi is often what I’m checking them against. It’s not a one to one comparison, as they have different overall storytelling goals (to the extent that Frieren has overall anything) and, technically, different audiences. But as widely-acclaimed constructed-world fantasy anime, they are definitely playing the same game, and given Frieren‘s near-universal praise, it is not at all unfair to point out that it comes up short compared to its closest contemporaries. Without spoiling anything about that series, Dungeon Meshi, end to end, feels very much of a singular whole. Every part of that story serves its themes of change, growth, and the value of life experience. Frieren‘s more general aims are different, but that doesn’t change the fact that it can’t say the same. That matters, and this lack of cohesion is why Frieren falls short for some, myself included.

Frieren, of course, is hardly the first anime to feel a bit aimless on the whole, but it’s notable how flimsy the series’ world feels when you take a step back. A lot of it ends up feeling very videogamey, and thus uncannily reminiscent of the narou-kei fantasy that Frieren is so often put forward as a substitute for. Any thought about its world thus becomes a constant back-and-forth, between one’s inner critic and their inner turn-your-brain-off advocate.

“Why are the demons so vicious?”
“Because they’re demons, duh.”
“Why are there so many dungeons, why is ‘clearing’ them both accepted terminology and something worth doing?”
“Because it’s a fantasy anime, don’t overthink it.”
“Why are we given multiple contradictory explanations for how magic works?”
“Just don’t worry about it.”
“Why is all the food we see just real-world dishes awkwardly xeroxed into a fantasy setting?”
“Well Lord of the Rings has potatoes, and I don’t see you complaining about that.”

and on, and on.

The truth is that the thing has a feeling of being written as it goes. Which might, in fact, actually be the case. In this interview, the manga’s editor notes that Frieren was originally conceived as a gag one-shot. Even when it had drastically changed tones, the editor seems to indicate that initial plans were for this to be a short series. I can easily imagine a scenario where the chapters covered by the first few episodes were the initial idea, and everything that came afterward was either hastily written on the fly or simply not made with any strong connection to the original concept in mind. That also explains why Frieren only begins making any serious attempt to tie these two halves of itself together in the fourth and last arc of the TV series.

This is all speculation, and ultimately, no matter the reason, these structural flaws are still present. But as is often the case, the mind reaches for any explanation simply because it is one. I have noted before on this blog that I tend to treat anime like riddles to be solved in some cases, and that’s definitely been the case with Frieren, one of the few I’ve ever come away from in that strange Earth Maiden Arjuna or Air space, where I couldn’t untangle a single, simple answer.

Anytime, Anywhere

So that’s where we are. Frieren is a beautiful meditation on how time changes all things. Frieren is a flashy action-fantasy series with some of the best fantasy animation of the last decade. Frieren is a troubling example of style over substance whose visual panache cannot hide its deep writing problems. Frieren is a sack of complete goofball nonsense with an overtly awful heroine. Frieren is a lot of things to a lot of people. I think it was foolish for me to assume I could sum it up in some simple, clever way, for myself or anybody else.

However, I do think, if I can take an honest stab at why this thing is so widely liked, if you can see past the contradictions—or if they just don’t matter to you in the first place—this very lack of strong identity might read as kaleidoscopic. Frieren is a lot of things because Frieren is everything.

I don’t believe that, of course. My claim remains—and I do strongly believe this much—that there is no “overall” with Frieren. It’s self-contradictory, aimless, and completely all over the place in terms of tone, mood, theme, and general quality. At the same time, those very qualities mean that short of disliking every single thing it tries to do (which I don’t), it’s hard for me at least to feel like this was all for nothing.

Maybe I’m just a huge sap, but when the show does a big, long credit roll at the end of its final episode, it did get to me. That it did so is proof that I care about these characters on some level, one of the most basic measurements of whether or not a story succeeds, to be sure, but a reliable one. I like Denken, who passed his exam, and can thus finally visit his wife’s grave now that the road to the North is open to him. I like Methode [Ueda Reina], the underrated hypnotist mage who quietly exits the series after calling Serie cute. I like Ubel, the grinning, knowing villain, who swaggers offstage with a smug grin on her face, silently promising to cause trouble again sometime soon. I like the element sorcerers Lawine and Kanne, who fail, but decide to give it another try in three years time. Obviously, I like Stark, the odd-man-out non-mage, even if the series only seems to occasionally have any idea of what to do with him, and I like Fern, who represents, both in and out of universe, a hope for a new generation that is greater than what their teachers gave them. I even, in spite of absolutely everything I’ve said about the character, still like Frieren—two out of the three Frierens, anyway—which truly makes me feel insane, given everything I’ve gone over in this piece.

In general, I can’t resist ending this piece on the best note I possibly can. To which I will point to the above paragraph as proof that I care about at least some of these characters. I will also say that the mere fact that I’ve struggled to pull what I could out of it is proof that I like at least some of what it’s doing. If the show was simply boring, I would not have bothered. Much can be said about Frieren, but it can’t be called dull.

There’s one other thing besides. If I can defer any kind of expected final judgement, it will be with the fact that Frieren, the manga, is ongoing. I’d say it’s gravely unlikely—28 episodes is more than enough time to decide that much—but not wholly impossible that somehow, the ending of the series will make everything else make sense in hindsight. Even if it does not, the thing about art is that it is hard to get its hooks out of you once they’re in. I have spent time in this world, flimsy though it may be, and want to know what will happen to it. We will meet Frieren—and Frieren—again. As the very last line of text in the series states; the journey to Ende continues.

Until the roads cross for us again, that’s all for now.

1: At one point, the character Serie has a flashback within a flashback that Frieren is already having. In a series that used them less this would merely be silly. Here, it filled me with a deep annoyance despite the scene itself being fine.

2: There’s an obvious bit of fanfiction you can write here where the demons turn out to not be hostile and Frieren learns an important lesson about letting old prejudices go. Obvious enough that I’ve seen more than one of the relatively sparse outright negative reviews of the series mention it. But fundamentally this just isn’t the kind of story that Frieren wants to tell, so we do not get that here.

3: If you wanted to, you could try to argue that this aspect of the character is a victim of conditioning, but the series does nothing to suggest this.

4: Frieren runs in Weekly Shonen Sunday. Which as you might imagine, is a shonen magazine. Dungeon Meshi was serialized in Harta, a seinen magazine. Given the ongoing collapse of traditional demographic categories in manga, I don’t think this distinction matters nearly as much as some might claim.

5: Mostly, but not entirely, the demons. So little is said about dwarves for example, despite Eisen, an important backstory character, being one, that they might as well not exist. It should be noted that Dungeon Meshi isn’t entirely innocent of this either, as while the majority of its different races are explored with some detail, there are a few that are not. For example the Kobolds. Still, that’s outside the scope of this article.

A special thank you to Josh, who talked with me throughout the process of finishing the series and writing the article, and to Anilist user Chain, who helped me locate the interview I link to at one point.

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

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

The Weekly Orbit [7/29/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello, anime fans! I’m quite behind on basically everything this week, but hopefully you’ll enjoy reading about what I did manage to cover, regardless. Also, here’s an odd thing, in two of the below entries I end up talking at length about the shows’ ED themes. That wasn’t on purpose! But hey, serendipity and all that.

Anime

Wistoria: Wand and Sword – Episode 3

Another week, another pretty OK Wistoria episode.

Will meets an underclassman here with the fairly incredible name Iris Churchill [Ookubo Rumi]. Initially, she seems like any other bumbling student, and Will spends the majority of this episode helping her defeat a giant ice monster. However, because Wistoria knows every trick in the fantasy book, Iris is actually a double agent for the Magia Vander and is scouting for promising students for what seems to be some kind of upcoming confrontation between the wizards and the angels that were mentioned back in episode 1, the ones that live “beyond the sky.”

This whole plot is the most interesting thing Wistoria has going for it so far. It’s still hardly original, and when we meet the Magia Vander here they too all fall into classic archetypes (most obvious with the haughty elf sorceress Alf Ellenor Ljos [Amamiya Sora]), but it’s at least decently compelling.

Iris herself seems to have some kind of Thing™ going on with Elfie, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more to the both of them than is obvious here, even taking the little twists we’ve been shown so far into account.

Oh, one other thing I did appreciate. When Will gears up to head to the dungeon (and we briefly meet his artificer friend Rosty), they draw him ripped as hell while he’s changing his shirt. I applaud the lack of cowardice, it would’ve been really easy to just make him look nondescript there.

Narenare -Cheer for you!- – Episode 3

The only way out is trusting the process.

Okay, no, let’s stop for a second. What is this show? I thought I knew. In fact, as of the end of this episode, I thought I might have some idea again, but I’m now sitting with it and thinking and….seriously, what is going on here?

In theory, Narenare could not be simpler. It’s a show about cheerleading. That’s a little unusual in the context of the “girls do stuff” supergenre of anime, but it’s nowhere near the weirdest of these things in premise. But that hides how strange the execution of this all is. In this episode alone, we see several scenes from the last two weeks involving the character Suzuha. Except this time, they’re from her perspective, and we see that far from being the cool, aloof near-cryptid we’ve been presented with so far, she’s actually just extremely shy.

The show lets us in on her inner monologue by way of a chibi version of herself that hangs out in thought bubbles and occasionally just rides around on her head. It’s hardly the strangest thing I’ve seen in an anime this season (Nokotan is airing, after all), but it’s a notably weird way to present this information given the show’s genre. This is a general trend that’s true of everything in this episode; Kanata suddenly getting “the yips” about cheerleading (treated with grave seriousness by those around her), Shion’s singer-songwriter aspirations, and so on. The show seems allergic to anything that would make its several running plot lines any easier to follow. Things are mostly followed up on by having them plonked onto the existing storyline in a decidedly odd way.

A friend1 compared this to Pride of Orange, another Girls Do X show that clearly had no idea what it was doing. But to be honest, I don’t really see it. Pride of Orange‘s main flaws were an overwhelming lack of interest in its own premise and cast, and just a general deep cynicism toward the entire idea of the hobby/club anime as a genre. I don’t get that off of Narenare at all. It is clearly sincerely trying to present an inspiring and straightforward sports girls narrative, but it seems either unable or unwilling to understand why those shows usually present things in the way that they do. The result is a strange, alienating effect, in a way that feels uncannily GoHands-y in vibe if not looks. (Despite a shared affinity for weird color filter bullshit, Narenare looks much nicer than anything GoHands have ever done.)

Anyway, I plan to keep watching, because I am interested in if this effect is intentional or not. My guess is that it isn’t, this thing has three different people on script and you could absolutely get something like this just by having too many cooks in the kitchen, but still, I’m curious to see if it manages to pull something out of this regardless or if it just completely crashes.

OTP, by the way.

Quality Assurance in Another World – Episodes 3 & 4

This show has a lot of issues, and I want to appreciate what it’s going for regardless, but it doesn’t make it easy.

The issues first; over the past two episodes it’s been saddled with a light-novely writing style that just actively saps the series’ momentum. I actually thought this was adapted from a light novel, and having since learned that this was a manga first, I’m baffled that this is how this is all being delivered. There’s tons of exposition just rattled off in a very flat way and the sheer incuriosity Nikola has about her own world is kind of weird (this, to be fair, might be on purpose). Some of the exposition is fine because it’s spiced up with flashbacks or some similar other visual trick, but when it’s literally just two characters talking it gets old quick. I’m hoping we’re moving past this part of the story.

What I appreciate though is just how utterly fucking weird this show is. There’s a bit here with our leads in a dungeon, and Nikola gets carted off to be sacrificed by…monsters that are giant coins with human faces? And the thing they’re sacrificing her to is a huge hand with a mouth that acts like a sea serpent?

These legitimately feel like monsters out of a buggy shovelware RPG, and I appreciate that about the show. Similarly, the fate of Haga’s two companions that we meet here are legitimately pretty eerie. One is stuck in the floor and the other is trapped in a kill loop, buggily hovering over a death trap that she can’t properly trigger because she has invincibility mode turned on. (All this is used to explain Haga’s disdain for the debug mode feature, fair enough.)

We also meet a gamemaster AI called Tesla here who introduces herself by abruptly possessing Nikola so she can give Haga orders. All rather bizarre!

And then the episode ends with our leads running into an NPC who’s T-posing. Which brings us to episode 4, which I did not particularly care for.

The comedic side of the series is still strong here. It’s hard to mess up something as inherently goofy as “a whole village is stuck T-posing because their model animations are fucked up.” But we also meet a pair of new characters here, a furry bug-tester named Amano who aspires to be a mangaka back in the real world, and Ru, an NPC he’s fallen for, who he ends up drawing manga within the game for. Ru is a pretty compelling, if simple, character; a disabled girl who loves hearing stories. But then, oops, she dies at the end of the episode, by having a literal building dropped on her head when some of the baddies from episode 2 return to stomp through town while riding a dragon. It just feels kind of hacky and I’ve rarely seen such a straightforward example of a female character being killed to give another Man Pain to motivate him. I’m not a fan, suffice to say.

So who knows where Quality Assurance is going to end up by the time it’s over. This is one of several anime that have had the broadcasts of their next episode delayed because of Olympics coverage, and depending on what my schedule looks like in nine days when it returns, I may just drop this entirely, if that’s how it’s going to handle things going forward. I don’t know, my opinion on this series soured fairly quickly.

The Elusive Samurai – Episode 4

Our first two parter and unfortunately I don’t think it entirely works. Still a good episode, but it doesn’t feel quite as essential as the last three.

Lots of eye imagery here, which makes sense given that Tokiyuki’s adversary this time around is an archer known for his preternatural eyesight. The whole dog-hunting competition is kind of where the episode falls apart a little bit because while I applaud experimenting around, the CGI just doesn’t look as good as the other weird shit the show has done. Even elsewhere in this episode, that stuff looks better.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 4

Honestly most of this episode is pretty dull. School drama is almost never compelling to me and that’s what the whole episode is built around. Worse, Alya and Kuze spend most of it apart so we don’t get any of their banter. (Also he basically solves the problem Alya’s caught up in for her which is not great from like an optics perspective, eh. This is minor compared to my other issues with the episode, but it still feels worth mentioning.)

The shorter second part of the episode is better since they’re back together and we get more of their repartee, which is the show’s main strength, and also a bit of relationship development (punctuated with a very powerful slap, since this is a pretty straightforward romcom anime at heart).

All of this is beside the real point of the episode, though; the song covered in the ED this week is fucking “Hare Hare Yukai”!

This is less of a weird pull than it might seem, given that Alya’s voice actress is a millennial and presumably grew up on the series, and there is a line to be drawn from Haruhi to this series, even if Roshidere‘s self-awareness is itself a pretty standard and accepted thing by now. (Somewhere in here Kuze thinks to himself that something doesn’t befit the main character in a romcom. Slow down, buddy, the fourth wall can only take so many hits.) I was delighted by this, and it redeemed an otherwise iffy episode in my eyes, so I’m happy it was done.

ATRI -My Dear Moments- – Episodes 2 & 3

I have realized that I like this show quite a bit.

On the face of it, ATRI depicts a fairly difficult situation. Its two main characters, Atri herself and her human caretaker Natsuki, aren’t exactly the most likeable of people. (Although Atri, who is merely clumsy and loud, is so more than Natsuki, who is sometimes outright nasty to her.) But something about these characters, and their world, compels me. I think it’s a fairly common thing to feel (even if you don’t necessarily think it rationally) that we are living in the end times of some sort, so post-apocalyptic fiction like this takes on a specific resonance in the modern day. But it’s more than just “the show is good because it depicts people getting by after a climate collapse,” which I think would be oversimplifying it.

I think I was closer on the mark with the AIR comparison I made last week than I initially realized. In addition to the obvious similarities—both take place in a coastal town, both have a heavily summer-drenched aesthetic that is a key part of the show’s visual and aural appeal—the general setup is fairly similar too, both in depicting a young (or at least young-seeming) girl and her male caretaker and their strange relationship that doesn’t neatly fall into any single category.

I’ve seen a lot of people deride the show as a rote male fantasy (in the vein of the many girl-with-a-quirk romcoms I’ve discussed this season) and while I’m not going to deny that there’s definitely at least a little of that, I don’t think it’s remotely the entire picture and seeing people write this off entirely because the main character is kind of a dick annoys me. Especially since I think his being a dick is part of the point of the series. (Hell, we get a very straightforward motivation for that here; when the ocean started rising, his dream of becoming an astronaut and helping with a climateering project fell apart and he hasn’t had any motivation to do much of anything since. It’s pretty understandable that this would turn someone crabby.)

I also like Minamo, one of the island town’s few remaining schoolgirls, very much an endangered species after the climate collapse that took place in this series’ backstory. There’s a very pronounced melancholy to almost everything she does, and she and Atri have a nice conversational scene together in her house—also half reclaimed by nature—in this episode where we learn her father evacuated to the mainland, and she chose to stay behind despite his wishes. That’s interesting! And when Atri visits her school at the end of the episode she seems to have some kind of weird flashback thing, which is also interesting.

The series has a lot going for it. In addition to everything I’ve just said, and also its deeper themes which are only just starting to take shape (persisting in the face of loss, even massive loss, is definitely going to be one), it’s also pretty funny! I can technically imagine how Atri’s antics might grate on someone but I find them endearing, and it’s hard not to when the character animation is so expressive.

Episode 3 isn’t quite as strong as Episode 2, but it’s still pretty good. Here we’re introduced to an entire secondary cast, the three young children that Minamo teaches about whatever she can at the high school, plus their older brother figure Ryuuji [Hosoya Yoshimasa]. The kids, especially their ringleader Ririka, seem fond of Natsuki, arbitrarily deciding that he’s secretly an assassin sent from the mainland and playing pretend with him based on that premise. Ryuuji is a lot colder to him, and seems to think his showing up at the school at all is an act of condescension. The episode deals in a lot of exposition about the situation on the mainland and the main thing to take away here is that the people of this island have essentially been abandoned. The kids, we’re told, actually did try to evacuate to the mainland and attend school there, but they were treated poorly and through circumstances we’re not given a super clear picture of, they eventually ended back on the island. They actually live at the school, with Ririka in particular spending a lot of late nights essentially camping out on the rooftop as she reads about electricity generation, hoping she might fix the island’s lack of electricity. By episode’s end, Natsuki has some idea of how that might be done, and his radical plan involves salvaging parts from the flooded-over disused windmills (a lovely shot of which serves as the episode’s visual center) and the fact that the school’s second floor floods at high tide.

All told, while this might be the weakest episode so far, the general buildup saves it, as does Atri’s continuing antics. I particularly like the bit here where she insists that she’s a “combat android” and we get a detailed, completely fake, flashback to her last days in “the war.”

Unrelated to the show itself, I want to briefly talk about the OP and ED and specifically the songs used for them. The OP, with a theme by mega-idol group Nogizaka46, is just an absolutely gorgeous thing and I really recommend watching it for yourself even if you have no interest in the show. The part where Atri dances and whips the ball (which later turns into the Moon!) around has such lovely, fluid motion that it’d make the entire project a worthwhile endeavor on its own even if the show itself were a complete throwaway.

But the ED, more specifically its theme, is actually even more interesting to me despite the fact that I like it less. Because it’s by 22/7. Yes, that 22/7, the idol group tied to the multimedia project of the same name, including its profoundly disappointing anime from a few years ago. That anime also had a great OP with some incredible visuals and a fantastic theme song, but the show itself was meandering and mediocre, and I don’t think it’s really stayed in the public consciousness over the past four years. (You’re more likely to find defenders of the earlier slice of life shorts.) Nonetheless, the group itself has stuck around. The ED is significantly cheerier than most of their songs, or at least the ones that I’m familiar with. But it’s pretty good! To be honest I’m just sort of shocked that they’re still active, although I think a good chunk of the original members have since departed (not that odd with idol groups, and I can’t imagine there’s much incentive to stay in 22/7 specifically).

It will be very odd if they end up soundtracking one of my favorite anime of the summer, but they well might! ATRI has tons of potential and I’m eager to see if it lives up to it, each individual episode has had its ups and downs so far, but it’s going to be the aggregate that really makes or breaks the show. I’m hardly the only person to have compared this to the KEY visual novel adaptations of old, and I’ve gotten the feeling that people really want that style back in some capacity. As such, I think there is a real chance for the series to leave a big impression on people. Here’s hoping.

Manga

“Hitokiri” Shoujo, Koushaku Reijou no Goei ni Naru

This manga feels like someone read all of those “I wish somebody would just make a shonen manga with a lesbian as the main character” posts and took it as a challenge, to an almost comical degree.

To wit; the plot is basically a string of excuses for our lead to get into fights. Our lead girl was raised to be the bodyguard of a noble in fantasy-Japan, but before she could actually do that, her would-be master was murdered. The opening pages of the story are thus her getting revenge on this other person’s killer and then fleeing the country to go to fantasy-Europe, where she remains for what exists of the story so far. There, she meets a noblewoman on a train in the midst of said noblewoman getting attacked by assassins and offers her services. The noblewoman agrees to this, and from there forward the manga has, so far, solely been these characters moving from place to place and situation to situation, with bodyguard defending noblewoman (and her maid, a character in her own right) from attack.

All of this is handled in an almost childish fashion. Half of the dialogue consists of people threatening to kill each other. Of the half that remains, half of that half is the main girl explaining to her present opponent how she plans to kill them. This probably sounds like a complaint, but it’s honestly pretty funny. The end result is that our protagonist has such a matter-of-fact approach to murder that the whole manga feels like dry humor. Like, look at all this.

Interestingly, though. The manga implies that all this violence is something that weighs on her mind a lot. There are really only three kinds of scenes where she shows any real emotion, and two of them have to do with murder. For one, during battle, whether she’s being particularly sadistic or enjoying the high of fighting someone who’s an actual match for her.

For another, the one time her charge tries to exonerate her behavior by claiming that she’s not a murderer, our girl actually rather strongly insists that she is, even if what she does isn’t illegal. She seems surprised that anyone would even suggest otherwise.

The only non-violent strong reaction she has to anything is when she meets her future employer, who gets attacked shortly thereafter. We don’t have an inner monologue for her here, so we can’t know for sure what she’s thinking, but this thing is being marketed as a yuri series, so I don’t think I’m off in calling this gay.

All this together, I don’t really know if I’d call “Hitokiri” Shoujo, Koushaku Reijou no Goei ni Naru good exactly, but it’s definitely at least compelling. I’m not sure how much of that is intentional, these apparent character quirks could just as easily be the side effects of the shortcut-heavy nature of the narou-kei scene (and this does appear to have been adapted from a light novel). But with only four chapters out I’m at least willing to give it some time to see where it goes.

That’s all for this week, anime fans! Enjoy this book, as your Bonus Thought.

1: Hi Josh.

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

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

The Weekly Orbit [7/22/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello anime fans. I’m going to keep things brief and without too many pictures this week. I’ve been under the weather, so I didn’t have as much time to put this together as I’d have liked. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better when next Monday rolls around.

Anime

Mayonaka Punch – Episode 2

Mayonaka Punch‘s second episode gives us a pretty good notion of the show’s strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, it’s still very funny, there are a lot of good gags here (mayo-garlic turning out to be a hallucinogen for vampires is probably my favorite of these), and the character dynamics work well when the show isn’t trying to overexplain itself. The art and animation are also top notch, which is good, because it’s always difficult to forecast ahead of time whether or not there will be a fall-off after the first episode.

On a lesser note, though, what the show isn’t as good at is the broad-strokes plot points. This entire episode sort of feels like a weird detour; Masaki, Live, Ichiko, and Fu start a channel called the Chu Chu Girls, find some surprisingly early success, but are then forced to delete it via the intervention of a red-haired vampire named Yuki [Kayano Ai], who Live has some prior history with, and who threatens to rat them out to a figure identified only as “Mother.” This is all well and good, but our girls end up making a second channel—this time without using their vampire abilities—at the end of the episode, so this episode essentially ends in the same place as the last. It feels a bit like we’re skipping ahead and resetting to avoid having to depict these characters getting to actually know each other. There’s a lack of specifics here that I find frustrating, especially when Masaki flashes back to meeting the other two Hyped-Up Girls, and they bond over liking the same kinds of Youtube videos. What those videos are and how they brought them together is left unstated (although I suppose this tracks with the show’s general depiction of Youtube as a thicket of content-for-content’s sake. Not an inaccurate depiction, but certainly not a complete one.)

Still, I’m optimistic. There are strong character moments here, too, like when Masaki returns to her now-empty house after the Hyped-Up Girls have moved out and spends yet another night egosurfing negative comments about her. Additionally, the next episode looks much more gag-focused, and I think if the series sticks to its guns in that way, it will serve it well.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 3

Less comedic episode this time around. Mostly a flashback so we can learn how Alya and Kuze met. Pretty cute! I like that all Alya really wants is someone to recognize her hard work, that’s cute, and I think it works for the character. Again, this show is firmly still on my “just pretty good” list, but there are worse things to be.

Wistoria: Wand & Sword

Every minute I watch of this I have a nagging thought in the back of my head. Something like “this is fine, but I kind of wish this production team were working on something more innovative.” That’s unfair, because it’s not like if this show didn’t exist all of this polish would be magically going to Tower of God or something else airing right now, but it feels a bit hollow. You could probably get most of what’s genuinely worthwhile out of this show by watching gifs from it on sakugabooru.

I’m going to make a strange extended metaphor, please follow me down this path. Todd in the Shadows, noted Youtube Music Guy, once put forward the theory that there are two categories of pop stars, there are those who get the public interested in their personas and points of view and who will probably be at least somewhat famous forever, and there are those who will only remain in the public eye until their hits run out, and not a day longer.

Oomori Fujino, author of both the manga this is based on and more notably of the Danmachi series is, if we’re comparing creatives in this industry to pop stars—an admittedly dubious comparison, but bear with me here—the second one. His work has craft and fluidity and skill, and those are not by any means worthless things to have, but I am always at least a little cognizant of the fact that I’m seeing the sausage be made as he’s making it. More than just the fact that this series is a pretty direct riff on two other more popular IPs (Harry Potter and Black Clover), I just sort of can’t imagine someone caring all that much about this story on its own terms unless they have severe light novel poisoning. Even then, it mostly sticks out because it uses a number of basic storytelling techniques that actual narou-kei light novels tend to try to shortcut their way through. In other words, he is a consummate professional in a section of the industry presently dominated by amateurs.

This might seem like a weird turnaround because I think my first post on Wistoria came off as much more positive, but this is kind of just a different (arguably more cynical) way to frame what I thought upon finishing the first episode. Whether I phrase it as “wow, this is way better than the other narou-kei fantasy stuff going around right now. The main character has an actual motivation, clearly laid-out obstacles to overcome, and there’s not a pop-up stat screen in sight” or “It’s pretty grim that this is so much better than the other narou-kei fantasy stuff going around right now just because the main character has an actual motivation, clearly laid-out obstacles to overcome, and there aren’t any pop-up stat screens in sight” is kind of a matter of semantics. We will see if I manage to actually develop a strong opinion on this show by the time it ends, assuming I finish it.

Code Geass: Rozé of The Recapture

I don’t have a ton to say here. I appreciated the further ties back to the original series and the ever-more-absurd mecha action.

I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the contrast drawn between Toumi’s [Chiba Shouya] successful sacrifice, framed as heroic and worthwhile and even met with a salute, vs. the (failed) sacrifice performed by the bigoted Britannian commander whose name I’ve already forgotten. Obviously, within the literal text of the narrative Toumi is completely in the right while the commander is completely in the wrong, but it does draw attention to Code Geass‘ nationalist overtones, which are as much a part of the work as the things I actually like about it (most other parts of it, honestly. I’ve gone on at length before how weak I am to campy bullshit) are.

Bye, Bye Earth – Episode 2

Two episodes in, in what I suspect is probably the more indicative of the two we’ve had so far. My main takeaway from this episode was how much it reminded me of, surprisingly enough, Kino’s Journey.

Here, Belle journeys to Park City on the first step of her quest to become a Nomad and find her people. The Kino comparison sprang to mind because there’s an odd morality play sort of setup here. The City is divided in two, the good Topdogs and evil Underdogs, who live in different sections of it, but something about the specific use of “good and evil” here is….funny. Especially since the Priestess-King Rawhide [Tsuda Kenjirou & Satou Setsuji], who Belle eventually meets and forms a contract with, seems to embody both of them, there’s a sort of duality thing going on here.

My overall impression is honestly just that this is a very particular series going for a very particular thing. This is probably down to the age of the work—the Kino’s Journey analogue is less ridiculous than it may seem given the vintage of the original novels—and where this genre, the traveler story, has gone since. I am interested to see what the next step in Belle’s journey looks like, since it seems she will have to duel a centaur next week.

SHOSHIMIN: How to Become Ordinary

If I could identify any coherent thesis behind SHOSHIMIN Series, it’s how the world is often unfair and cruel to those who don’t fit in. Implicitly, then, it is also about how the world is often unfair and cruel to neurodivergent people. In fact, if I can identify a commonality among the conversations here, it’s that none of these people are “normal,” and they are continuously striving for a normalcy that they don’t have. Often by trying to impose it on others. Such a thing is common among friend groups with a lot of neurodivergent people in them, unless care is taken to avoid it.

The extremely mundane “detective work” provides something of a hook (and while I haven’t seen it, I believe it also calls back to the author’s previous series), but these are only indirectly, I think, related to the show’s actual point. Who can say, though? It might have some other cards to play, SHOSHIMIN remains an intriguingly circumspect work, the kind to make you resort to two-word chestnuts like “intriguingly circumspect.”

My Deer Friend Nokotan – Episode 2

How do you raise the stakes when your character dynamic already consists of a complete weirdo and the comparative straight-man forced to bounce off of her? Why, you add another weirdo of course. Thus, we meet Koshi-tan’s little sister Anko [Tanabe Rui] here. Anko is a bit less fundamentally unknowable than Nokotan (who accordingly has her implicit eldritch-ness toned down a little here, since it doesn’t work with the structure of this episode so much), but she’s about as much a force of nature.

I like Anko. Siscon characters are way overdone by now, but having one fits with the show’s ’00s comedy vibe and Anko is significantly scarier than is the norm for her archetype. She spends the (weaker) first half of the episode swearing revenge on Nokotan because she has it in her head that the deer has somehow stolen her sister’s virginity, a misconception that Nokotan herself of course does nothing to dispel. I am sad to report that whatever else may be said about me, if you have an anime character accuse her sister of making a “love nest” for herself and a deer, I will still find it pretty funny.

The second half of the episode is the real highlight here, though, as Anko and Nokotan compete in an absurd quiz show wherein Nokotan will have to be “deported” to a wildlife park if she loses. The subject of the show is, of course, Koshi-tan, and thus the episode once again gets most of its charge from humiliating its main character. Eventually, Anko, on the brink of losing, unleashes a flurry of kunai (where did she get those from? Who knows) on Nokotan, and while she dodges most of them with ease, she takes a bullet for Koshitan, and is promptly mourned by Koshi-tan and the rest of the cast with all the fanfare of Elmer Fudd weeping over Bugs Bunny. Meanwhile, she’s up in Deer Heaven, meeting with Deer God (not the subtitle group) and getting kicked back to Earth for unknowable reasons.

All told, a solid episode in a solid series, and I like the twist that Anko and Nokotan become friends at the end. My assumption is that life is not about to get any easier for Koshi-tan.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! – Episode 2

This was fantastic! Much more of a straightforward harem comedy than the first episode (except for that scene near the end), but a very good one, so I can hardly complain. Lemon [Wakayama Shion] is a wonderful character and I think she might be my favorite of the main 3 girls, I suppose we’ll have to see how things shake out with Chika, the short girl from the literature club. Some people will be put off by the comparatively horny nature of the first half of this episode. I can’t really pretend I care, much, personally. I thought it was pretty damn funny. (“But Nukumizu, it’s just us girls here!” can only be the result of truly intense heat stroke. Or maybe it’s foreshadowing and this will somehow turn into the first harem anime to star a trans girl. Anything is possible!)

Also, the nurse! Casually mentions having fucked in what is now her own office back when she was a student (possibly with the other woman who’s now her coworker?)! Wiretaps her office! Has a shipping chart! Most of the meta stuff from this episode came from her and she seems like she’ll be a great supporting character going forward.

The scene at the end of the episode where Lemon deals with her heartbreak by running laps after sunset is phenomenal, and I think if the show can continue hitting those sorts of emotional beats it’ll easily make my personal Top 5 by the end of the year.

2.5 Dimensional Seduction – Episode 3

I thought this was….fine, I suppose. I remain undecided on if the few things this show does well are worth putting up with the parts where it’s obviously lacking.

In this episode Mikari [Kitou Akari], the obligate normie girl in the harem who we met last week, does a cospaly shoot with Masamune and Ririsa. There is a little kernel of real feeling in how Mikari relates to Miriella, the character she’s cosplaying, because the character could never tell Ashford how she felt, and Mikari herself can’t be straightforward with Masamune, so she relates to her in that way. That said, sitting with it for a minute made me just think about how the various in-universe anime in Dress-Up Darling aren’t a contrived bespoke metaphor for part of the main plot in that series, and how they thus feel much more like real anime that could exist in some alternate timeline than the fairly thin picture of Ashword Wars that the show’s given us so far. I can also imagine the target audience actually finding the stuff in Dress-Up Darling hot, which, just to be super blunt, is not the case here. The visual chops just aren’t there, so the show is failing even in its intended basic goals.

A small point in the show’s favor is that I think this whole mana infusion thing is a crack about Fate/stay Night, which, hey, that’s something. Even then, that’s also kind of a weirdly dated reference point for a show in 2024, even keeping in mind that the manga is 5 years old.

There remains something broadly structurally impressive about most of the show being set in a single room with only a few characters, but it also makes the series feel kind of claustrophobic. This is a cousin of the same problem the Giji Harem anime is having right now. It’s not as severe here, but one does get the distinct sense that this probably works better in print where there’s not as much of a sense of place as in an anime. It’s also extremely languid in pace, and compared to how well-structured the other romcoms airing this season are that’s a very notable weakness. Although at the end of the episode, our leads stay overnight at school to get work on a cosROM done, which is a nice interruption from what has quickly become this series’ norm.

All this said, I think I am fairly close to dropping this. It doesn’t hold a candle to Makeine obviously, but it’s also not nearly as good as Roshidere, an equally low-stakes romcom with a horny streak that, despite its vastly different premise, is just handling itself with much more confidence and style than this has so far.

Wonderful Precure – Episode 25

This is a very fun and antics-heavy episode. I particularly like Mayu’s ongoing quest to play matchmaker with Satoru and Iroha (up to “narrating his inner thoughts” at one, hilarious point).

Mayu helping Yuki into the water is really cute until Komugi (intentionally) ruins the moment. I also quite liked their fight against the sea turtle garugaru and the nice “wonder of nature” moment with the normal sea turtle afterward toward the end of the episode.

Wonderful Precure has just kind of been quietly tossing off great episodes for a while now, and I’m a little sad that I haven’t always had the presence of mind to talk about them. This is not as hands-down excellent as the episode from a few weeks back where we finally get some hint as to who our main villain might be, but it was still very good, and next week’s episode promises to be so as well.

And that’s about all I’ve got for you, today. As today’s Bonus Thought, I’ll ask you to ponder this screencap, also from Wonderful Precure. I don’t know what it is, maybe lingering affection for that one OG Transformers episode? But something makes protagonists surfing inherently very funny to me. Maybe you agree.

“She will never be surfing.”
Spits out cereal.

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Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Summer 2024 Stragglers, Part II

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.

The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies: Bit of an unusual story with this one, as it’s an adaptation of a manga, the author of whom, Fujiwara Cocoa, passed away a good nine years ago. My initial understanding is that they signed off on the project before then, so there’s nothing scummy going on here, but having since looked around I can’t actually find a source for that, so I have no idea! I like to think she’d be happy about this but it’s hard to know. It’s always a complex thing when a work is an adaptation by a creator who’s no longer with us.

Anyway, this is an entry in two separate but related anime genres. Firstly, it’s a romcom with a heavy speculative fiction element—this time, as you’d probably guess, derived from magical girl anime—and secondly, related to that conceit, it’s also a show purporting to show the “behind the scenes” workings of a Saturday morning kids’ action cartoon genre. If you think of it as Demon Girl Next Door meets Miss Kuroitsu From The Monster Development Department you’re not ridiculously far off.

I quite liked this! The jokes are very simple, mostly they consist of the Evil Lieutenant [Ono Yuuki] seeing the Magical Girl [Nakahara Mai] (neither character is actually named in this first episode) be cute, and then having a crisis of conscience when he finds this endearing or attractive instead of wanting to blast her off the face of the Earth. But I think this works for the show’s half-length episode format, any longer and it’d be a slog, any shorter and we’d be left wanting. 12 minutes is just about exactly enough to get the point across without it feeling like it’s overextending itself.

Visually the series is very pastel in a way I like (there’s an argument to be made that this is the better-looking between the two Bones shows I’ve seen this year. It might end up being the stronger one overall as well), and while the Magical Girl’s design is a little cheesecakey for my tastes it’s still pretty cute overall, and I love her hair. The Lieutenant has to settle for merely being passably handsome, so it goes! We also get lots of nice aesthetic touches indebted to the show’s latter parent genre; the Magical Girl has a henshin sequence (a very nice one, in fact), and the Lieutenant has faceless monster-person goons akin to the little ninja guys from Heartcatch Precure.

All around this is pretty fun and I enjoyed it a lot, it’s definitely filling that ‘Tis Time For Torture Princess niche of a character comedy with a nice warmth to it that I’ve been missing since that series ended a few months back.

Plus-Sized Elf: This is a fetish show for a fetish I don’t have, so, you know, I don’t really know what I expected here. I only watched this because a friend (who I will leave unnamed)1 roped me into it.

Some people might try to reach and say oh well it’s good to have any representation of different body types in anime, but that would require this to be representation and not a fetishizing joke, so I’m not really inclined to take that claim seriously. (Never has an anime made me so self-conscious about the thing I was going to drink while watching it.)

Also it looks bad and is paced like shit. This just makes me think of when Eiken got a TV anime back in the day. Even if you’re into this, what does it being on TV accomplish for you or anyone? I don’t get it.

SHOSHIMIN: How to Become Ordinary: This is….interesting. Specifically because it isn’t interesting.

The story, such that it is, is a pileup of artfully-arranged images. Images of normal, everyday things. Strawberry tarts, cakes, hallways, lost purses, street signs, bikes, grain, rivers.

Such that when things explode at the end, it’s by something as simple as someone stealing one of those images. (The bike.) There’s a strange elliptical quality to the whole thing, as though none of this really matters in any major sense, but of course, the case is always that if nothing in a situation matters, then everything does. This, I suspect, is some part of the point of SHOSHIMIN. Compelling stuff, in its own quiet way. I feel like I only half understand it at the moment, though.

Oshi no Ko – Season 2: I kind of wish I had never pledged to stop writing about this show on my site. It’s true that I have a lot of issues with the worst parts of the fanbase but the series itself is fucking brilliant and the anime is a compelling elevation of already-fantastic source material. Copying this entry over from my tumblr is a kind of half-compromise, since I’m still not giving it its own article. You can all feel free to tell me if you think this counts or not.

In any case, this Doga Kobo team should never be making anything but adaptations of excellent psychological dramas, I swear to god. If you had told me four years ago that Hiramaki Daisuke would be an easy A-List director, I would’ve laughed at you. (Which to be VERY clear, is an indictment of me, not him.) I have no idea how this guy went from directing the anime adaptation of fucking Koisuru Asteroid to this in just four years. (I have a friend2 who really likes that anime, maybe they saw something in his work back then that I did not. Who knows.)

The stunning trick they introduce here, okay. This arc revolves around Aqua, Kanna, and Akane participating in a 2.5D stage play for a popular manga. Whether or not a character is invested in their acting, whether or not they’ve actively got stage presence, is telegraphed by splattering paint around the environment, except instead of being a single color, the paint changes their entire character design, changing them from their mundane selves—the actors—to their transformed selves—their characters—it’s beautiful. I have no idea how hard this must’ve been to board and animate but it was completely worth it.

Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin: I was surprised that I did not like this that much? It doesn’t seem bad by any means, visually it’s very strong and there’s tons of atmosphere, but it’s also extremely exposition-heavy and the subtitles are very stilted, which hurts both my understanding of what’s going on and my ability to immerse myself in the world of the show. I’ll give it another episode or two, but unless the subtitles improve (or I can find a better translation) I’m not optimistic.

Wistoria: Wand and Sword: Another not-quite-isekai thing, yay.

This one is notable in that a lot of it is very clearly riffing on Harry Potter, down to character archetypes and even designs. Will [Amasaki Kouhei], our hero, is Harry (he even kind of looks like Harry) and other characters include a rude Draco-ish noble named Sion [Mizunaka Masaaki], a pretty clear Hermione stand-in, and an even clearer Professor Snape stand-in. Although the general premise, that our main character is the lone, magic-less swordsman in a world of sorcerors, actually borrows a fair bit more from Black Clover. No “boy who lived” stuff here, thankfully.

Most of this is fairly standard, but there’s a whole Wizard / Angel war in the backstory that comes up which is notionally interesting, as is the fact that the setting is basically a magic habitat dome. Will’s core motivation thus is to eventually become a Mage (I’m not using the show’s over-wrought titles) so he can see his childhood friend / love interest Elfaria [Sekine Akira] again. There’s some interesting visual symbolism in the flashback with Will’s arm literally dissolving to sand as he ponders that he’s “talentless” and can’t use magic.

The school he’s attending uses a numerical credits system. Which is of course solely a convenient plot device to get the ball rolling so we can get to our under-school dungeon and have a big ol’ fight break out. The fight in question is quite the spectacle. In content, it’s very basic, simply Will saving Sion, who’d stuck his nose at him earlier (and bullied him a long time before that) from a vicious, minotaur-looking thing, but the style is important here, there’s a lot of impressive action animation. It doesn’t have the most cohesiveness in the world, but conversely that means the individual cuts are compellingly expressive and if you’re a real sakuga-head type you’ll probably have a lot of fun with this one.

From that, you might think I was basically describing a shonen anime, and that’s because that’s actually exactly what this is. Unlike most examples of this genre-space which originate as amateur webfiction, Wistoria here started life as a manga, and the slightly higher barrier to entry of that format really does make all the difference here. Every single piece of this story has been done a hundred times before, from its xeroxed walled city setting, to the tsundere-ish girl who’s clearly crushing on Will, to Will himself, clearly based on the “has some innocuous skill that allows him to out-power his ostensible betters” sort of isekai protagonist, but the simple presence of flash and professionalism on the visual side, and basic storytelling competence on the other (Will has an actual motive beyond a vague desire for power, for example) make all the difference. I actually had a fair amount of fun with this overall, and I might keep up with it.

Bye Bye, Earth: This was an interesting one, it really grew on me over the course of the premiere and sitting with it after the fact, I think I kind of love it?

The decision to have the show’s very first scene of any length be our hero, Belle [Fairouz Ai], fighting and killing a majestic but destructive sea creature / plant animal called a fish flower is certainly something. If I could criticize it for anything here, the animation looks very nice and the show is solidly boarded and all, but backgrounds are a bit of an up and down thing. The first area we see is fairly nonspecific, but the forest we see later on is nice, and the interior of our protagonist’s house, where she lives with her mentor / surrogate father Sian [Suwabe Junichi] is cozy and meaningfully cluttered with esoterica.

At one point Sian and Belle talk about Belle’s “condition.” ie. she’s the only normal human in a world filled with anthros and kemonomimi. Somewhere in there, Sian drops the extremely Earth Maiden Arjuna-ass quote “Everything in this world tries to intermingle with everything else”, and this turns out to be basically the key to the whole episode. There’s a real running theme of interconnection (and our protagonist’s corresponding solitude) here. Sian describes Belle’s isolation as “homesickness”—for wherever she belongs, something she’s never really known—and advises her to go wandering in search of people like herself to cure it. She takes him up on that offer at the end of the episode.

I really like Belle, something about a powerful warrior who’s very philosophically-inclined and thoughtful is an automatic +1 from me in terms of protagonists. I had the thought in the middle of writing this that, oh my god, this is why they went with making everyone but the main girl an anthro, they all have ears, tails, something that marks them as being part of one animal tribe or another. very literally, they all have something she lacks. I’m an easy mark for obvious visual symbolism, what can I say?

She was also born from a stone, and in general her flashback to her strange childhood feels very esoteric and mythological. As a child, she attempts to steal Runding, now her sword in the present day, from the palace it’s locked up in, and this all happens under the glow of a massive, blue moon, a piece of visual iconography that feels intentional considering the series’ title. Runding talks, incidentally, and Belle seems to be able to communicate with it, which makes me wonder what it exactly is. Erewhon is written on it, which Sian claims means ‘utopia.’

At the end of the episode, Belle begins the trial she needs to undertake to become a wanderer, and in doing so, Sian erases himself from her memories as the two of them spar and he bestows her with a “curse” that she will carry with her for the rest of her life. There’s something deeply sad about the idea that Belle doesn’t even get to keep her one genuine connection with the man who’s basically her father.

And the episode just….ends, on that note! I’m actually very invested in this. I suppose you could criticize its narrative and symbolism for being obvious, but I like the journey Belle’s being set up to take, and I like how the world feels thought-out to some degree as opposed to being Generic ISO Fantasy Setting #7 (still got the ringed cities, though). All told I really liked this, I would rank it fairly highly among seasonal premieres.

ATRI -My Dear Memories- This, too, is an interesting one. I kept going back and forth on it while watching the premiere but I think I’d say my overall impressions are positive? It’s complicated.

What we have here is a future setting where massive flooding has sunk a good chunk of humanity. The state of things is telegraphed via the small-seeming islands that our protagonists live on; lots of overgrown buildings, using oil lamps for light and heat, that kind of thing. In the midst of all this we’re introduced to our lead, Natsuki [Ono Kenshou], who’s being lent a submersible by his “friend”, the generally scummy Catherine [Hikasa Youko]. While diving for salvage into what used to be the city he grew up in, he finds an android sealed in a capsule. This is the titular Atri [Akao Hikaru], and the rest of the episode is about Natsuki, Catherine, and innocent schoolgirl(?) Minamo [Takahashi Minami] interacting with her.

Their interactions are a bit fraught and this is where I started getting a bit skeptical. Catherine’s first instinct is to sell Atri despite the fact that the robo-girl is clearly human in all but biology, and the idea is taken seriously throughout the episode. Our characters go so far as to head to an appraiser. My immediate first reaction to this was very negative, and it’s definitely still possible that Atri (the show) will faceplant here, but I think what we’re actually doing is drawing a parallel between Atri herself and Natsuki with regard to the commodification of bodies. Natsuki, you see, is disabled, and only gets around with a prosthetic leg (which is noted to be old and finnicky; it locks up on him a few times throughout the episode and he has to break out an extendable cane). Natsuki needs money for a replacement prosthetic, something that will just allow him to live a comparably normal life, and Atri is considered a faulty machine—the appraiser outright calls her a collector’s item. There’s a difference in what kind of struggles they’re facing, but the connection is there, or at least the show seems to think it is. At the episode’s conclusion, Atri offers “I’ll be your leg!” to Natsuki. It’s definitely meant to read as heartwarming, but it’s a touchy subject to be sure, and I’m not sure how well the show handles it.

In general this seems like it could be a recurring problem. The series is definitely treating Atri’s status as a trade good as a bad thing, but there’s still something weirdly patronizing about the way she’s immediately super grateful to Natsuki for, say, buying her shoes. (I would argue that if you’re responsible for another human being, keeping them clothed is a pretty basic thing.) I think I’ll want to give this a few more episodes, seeing how it handles this whole setup, before I come down firmly on one side of liking its writing or not.

The visuals are a much less complicated thing to enjoy, though. They’re honestly just pretty great! I’ve seen a few people say that they’re bad which really puzzled me, the character animation is excellent throughout this first episode and the environments are fantastic. It may just be the title and the fact that I’ve watched it recently, but some of the shoreside scenes actually reminded me a little bit of AIR, another A-title anime based on a visual novel, just in how well they convey the feeling of summer, even if the overall goals of these anime are clearly quite different. The CGI isn’t the best, but it’s kept to a minimum and restricted to places where it logically makes sense, such as the submersible itself, so I wasn’t bothered. Also there’s a visual trick early on where some of Natsuki’s memories of living on the surface play out through the port windows of the sub, and that’s just really a lovely thing.

Enjoyed this overall I’d say, looking forward to seeing how Natsuki deals with the legacy of his late marine geologist mean butch grandma over the next few episodes.

1: You know who you are.

2: Hi Josh.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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: Succumb To The Power of MY DEER FRIEND NOKOTAN

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 will inevitably sound like hyperbole, but I’m serious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this before. Normally, when an anime picks up a pre-release hype train, it’s a dramatic work. Something with action, something that will make you hyped up or make you cry or maybe both. My Deer Friend Nokotan, a blisteringly absurd comedy series, is a rare exception to this rule. Its own hype seems to have come from its gleefully demented trailers. Not one, but two complete masterworks of the form whose onslaught of relentless shitposting and brutally catchy sloganeering seem to have more or less just beaten the entire English-speaking anime fandom into submission. The year of the deer is here. The rest of us are just living in it.

If I seem like I’m harping on about this, please understand that this is legitimately pretty weird. People were already doing things as zany as remixing the show’s theme song weeks before it even premiered, that kind of pre-release hype just doesn’t really happen for comedy anime. The only obvious point of comparison is Pop Team Epic, a similar example of a violently goofy show picking up a big following before it actually started airing.

So, obviously, this thing is a huge hit, right? Everyone’s watching it, everyone’s talking about it? Surely the only way it would be anything less than a consensus anime-of-the-season candidate is if a distributor did something very stupid, like, say, forcing every official English-language release to use subtitles so bad that there’s an ongoing debate about whether or not they were machine translated. In such a terrifying hypothetical, you might not even be able to watch the English dub, because the dub would be based on those unreadable subtitles.

Of course, that would never happen, right?

Right?

That you’re reading this at all is due to a person, group of people, or herd of deer in human guise going by DeerGod, who have seen fit to fansub the series. Their subs are lucid, carry the jokes well, and have a nice bit of flair to them. If there were any sense in the world, they’d be getting paid for it. Don’t blame me, OK? I, and most people who were excited for this series, tried going through official channels, and they did not have a version of this series that conveyed any amount of its original artistic intent.1 I will paraphrase DeerGod’s release post; if you want to support this project, buy the official English translation of the manga, done by Seven Seas. That translation clearly had actual work and care put into it, unlike the anime’s subtitles. Suffice to say I’m a bit annoyed about feeling the need to preface this whole thing with a rant about bad subtitles before we can even talk about the actual goddamn show.

Which is a shame, because My Deer Friend Nokotan is pretty fucking funny. As the trailers suggest, it’s a baldly silly, perfectly-engineered, 20-car pileup of a cartoon. This is a rare breed in the contemporary anime landscape, the most recent I can think of is TEPPEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, and that show had the manzai routine framing device to tame its nonsense into a semi-logical shape. Nokotan is a bit like a manzai routine too, at least in that there’s a clear fool and straight-man. Respectively the titular Noko-tan [Han Megumi], and her blonde classmate, the overachieving former delinquent Torako [Fujita Saki]. But unlike Teppen, and indeed unlike most comedy anime (but like Pop Team Epic and some similar anime, such as Teekyuu! and Ai Mai Mi), there is no “behind the curtain” here where we can be relatively sure we’re seeing these characters act in a sincere way that’s “outside” of their respective bits. Nokotan is all bit, all the time, and that’s part of what makes it work.

Torako, we’re told, has spent a great deal of effort into trying to put her past behind her. It seems to have worked, because every character she encounters treats her like a perfect girl-about-town, up to and including the Narrator [Toriumi Kousuke]. This all changes when she meets Noko suspended between on a power line on her way to school. Torako freaks out, eventually helping her down when Noko guilts her into it, and this, in some cosmic sense, seems to be Torako falling into a trap. Because from that moment on, Noko is a constant presence in her life, and the show leaves any remote semblance of common sense behind.

For example; at one point, when Noko transfers into Torako’s class, she finds that her antlers don’t fit through the doorway. Undeterred, she simply marches right in anyway, destroying the wall and peppering a bunch of her fellow students in the face with random debris in glorious slow motion.

Meanwhile, the soundtrack switches over to the menacing “shika shika shika” theme music that it returns to, time and again, for whenever This Shit happens. The situation is clear; Torako lives in Noko’s world now, and there’s nothing she or her incredulous reactions (which serve as more of a break between comedic beats than comedic beats unto themselves) can do about it. This sets the tone for the rest of the episode; Noko will do something bizarre, Torako will be taken aback, and every other character present will act as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. We are basically watching Torako being gaslit, it’s great.

This continues for the rest of the episode. Noko does bizarre things like attempting to “thank” Torako for her help with a massive pile of deer crackers that the honor student obviously doesn’t want. She refuses to call her anything but “Delinquent-san” and “Virgin”, since her antlers (which appear to house some kind of sensors) and “animal instincts” tell her that Torako is both of those things. When she complains about a different nickname later on, Noko reverts to calling her those two things in order to get the new nickname to stick. In the episode’s last few minutes, Noko founds a “Deer Club”, an absurdist parody of the kind of do-nothing hobby clubs so common to the kind of school-based, lightly yuri-inflected light comedy that often gets filed under the “cute girls doing cute things” banner (see this frighteningly exhaustive reddit post, for a list). The club’s sole purpose is to “take care of deer, mostly”, and she manages to trick Torako into being its president with the enthusiastic help of her teacher. Played even a little bit differently, all of this would amount to a horror anime, and frankly with the bizarre visual touch of copy-and-pasted 3D CGI deer wandering around and spying on everyone to their apparent ignorance, it’s halfway there already.

I realize my choice of verbs is making Noko sound like a malevolent figure. To be honest, she’s actually mostly a cipher, we are given very little sense of her inner life—if she even has one—because the show is primarily, at least so far, from Torako’s perspective. Seven Seas’ manga listing asks the question, again from Torako’s point of view, “Is Noko[-]tan a deer, a girl, or something in-between?”, this seems a limited set of options only because it doesn’t include “terrifying deer-god from beyond the realms of time”, but it goes some way to conveying her utter confusion at this strange scenario she’s found herself in. Noko could be malevolent, she could simply be stupid, she could be a force of nature with no interiority at all and this entire show is basically the equivalent of being struck down by the gods for hubris. It flummoxes Torako all the same. Torako’s confusion, despite being the expected behavior for a straight-man character, is interesting, because she actually breaks the fourth wall a few times over the course of this episode. If she has the awareness of medium to know that she’s in an anime, then surely there’s nothing truly inexplicable about this situation, right? And yet, the thought never occurs to her, which just makes it all the funnier.

That Torako seems aware of the artificial nature of her world is telling, however, as it reveals Nokotan‘s structure as a deliberately depthless un-reality. These characters don’t exist beyond the jokes they were created to tell. This is true to some extent, with assorted minor variations, of any work of fiction, but it’s rare for a TV anime to draw this much attention to it. It extends even to the visual aspect of the series, which has a flatness to it that seems intentional or at least serendipitous. All of that is a fairly heady, maybe even pretentious, way of saying “the Deer Show is pretty funny.” But I can hardly help that I find the way in which it’s funny interesting. And besides, it’s not like this somehow puts the series above criticism, I could certainly make my nitpicks. In fact, I will!

  • Nitpick 1. Two scene slowing down = funny bits in one episode is hilarious, but definitely pushing it. Three is entirely too many and gives the episode a weird herky-jerky energy.
  • Nitpick 2. Compared to everything else, the jokes about Torako being a virgin just aren’t that funny, although how much it hurts her feelings kind of is.
  • Nitpick 3. There’s more bodily humor than I’d like: which is to say, any. I don’t really like thinking about spit or snot basically ever. I will admit this is a preference thing.

But nitpicks these remain. Nokotan is an oddity, but I hope it does well despite the obvious obstacles in its path relating to its distribution and such. It’s a legitimately brilliant little show, if this first episode is any indication, and the promise of more freaks characters being added to the mix only makes me more excited for what’s to come.

1. That this would happen the season immediately after the Girls Band Cry fiasco, wherein that series simply wasn’t licensed in English at all, is instructive. After all, simply not entering a market in the first place is to some extent a declaration that you don’t care what happens in that market. There just wasn’t an official product in the case of that series. This situation, where a disastrously low-quality one has been provided instead, is significantly more insulting, because it signals that you care enough to enter the market at all in an attempt to get peoples’ money, but not enough to actually provide a quality product.

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 or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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: Dead or Alive 1333 – In Search of THE ELUSIVE SAMURAI

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.

The opening few minutes of The Elusive Samurai are mostly setup, to establish our feudal Japanese setting, and some basic character humor. I must stress, not very good character humor. These are all cracks at the expense of one-note stereotypes; an ableist caricature that serves as a puppet ruler, a greedy, homely girl who hounds our main character because she has Mon signs in her eyes over the idea of marrying him someday, etc. I bring this up first not to criticize a Jump adaptation for having Jump manga humor (it’s an unfortunate reality of most things that run in the magazine, honestly), but to point out that Elusive Samurai pulls off a pretty nasty little trick with it, one that I can only respect. By the end of the episode, no matter what you thought of these characters and their flat interjections of comedy the first time around, you’re going to miss them, and appreciate the stabs of comedy that remain, no matter how out of place they’d otherwise seem.

The Elusive Samurai is interesting as an adaptation, essentially holding the manga open and bleeding it. The resulting effect is a series of incredibly strong tones, moods, and single scenes that work excellently in of themselves but only cohere if you take a step back. This isn’t a major departure from the manga, to be clear. Both feature a wild tonal seesaw. But the manga’s visual experimentation in the first chapter is constrained. Panels align to grids, pages are more or less orderly. Ambitious, but typical. The anime, meanwhile, is a shattered, slivered kind of chaos. Everything clashes with everything. All abrupt jolts. A procession of staccato jumps. It’s abrupt. Percussive. An analogy: Elusive Samurai is a song. Its plot beats, the rhythm. Tokiyuki, our lead, is the melody. When the action follows him, it sings and soars. He’s like a rabbit; nimble, ferociously committed to his own survival, and so cute you can’t help but be on his side. Yuikawa Asaki gives him an endearingly boyish voice, which goes a long way to elevating his already strong characterization from the manga.

I’m not trying to downplay that manga; it still does quite a lot with the 50ish pages of its opening chapter. But one gets the clear sense that it’s straining against the format a little1, which simply isn’t true of the anime. Every hook and jab designed to throw you off kilter feels intentional. Around the episode’s halfway point, Tokiyuki and his older brother—the child of a concubine—are playing with a kickball. It ends up on a roof, and it never comes back down. Instead, an ice-cold match cut turns it into a severed head, and from then on, Tokiyuki’s idyllic life is over.

Let’s rewind a little. Hojo Tokiyuki was a real person, a member of the Hojo, a house in 14th century Japan who were, in loose terms, nominal rulers of the country but several steps removed from any actual power. (The Hojo were, and Tokiyuki is the heir of at the start of the story, something absurd like the regents for the shogun for the Emperor. In turn, they, via Tokiyuki’s father, who is here the ableist caricature mentioned up at the top of this article.) The Elusive Samurai is thus, very loosely, historical fiction. Its events comprise the leadup to, and depending on the time period this series spans, possibly the actual events of, the Nanboku-chō Wars.

This friendly-looking tale of straightforward heroism is presented to us at the start of the series as an example of what we will not be seeing here.

This setting contextualizes all of these tone shifts somewhat. On the one hand, Tokiyuki is a child. He’s a boy of scarcely 8 whose tutors, throughout the episode’s bright forehalf, chastise him for being lazy, for running away when he doesn’t want to do something, and just generally being too carefree. But he is also a noble, and while his father’s position is that of a puppet, it is still a position. These expectations must weigh on him, and we get some sense of how when we’re introduced to our other main character.

Suwa Yorishige [Nakamura Yuuichi], a priest, is introduced to us, to Tokiyuki, literally beaming. The boy-prince finds himself in a tree and Yorishige appears suddenly behind him, offering portents of glory and doom in an extremely overbearing, forceful fashion.

A divinity dwells within him and seems to spill out of the screen; when he’s “on,” he emits radiant lights, dimmed somewhat only by his snarky assistant Shizuku [Yano Hinaki], who explains he’s a sham of a priest, but a real oracle. When Yorishige proclaims that Tokiyuki will, in a few years time, be a war hero beloved and feared in alteration, the prince is skeptical, and he promptly darts off once again.

Returning to his castle, we return to the scene of he and his brother playing. We return to the ball, and to the severed head.

When the violence intrudes in the episode’s second half, it is immediate, overwhelming, and oppressive. Like the smoke from a fire, but not like the smoke from a fire, as the city burns in very literal flames. The betrayal of Takauji [Konishi Katsuyuki], a vassal of Tokiyuki’s, marks a massive and irreversible turning point in the individual lives of not just Tokiyuki and every other character, but history itself. The two are juxtaposed; big, white text pops up like news headlines, proclaiming mass death, including of characters we met in the lighthearted first half of the episode. Tokiyuki’s archery teachers? Dead. His father? Committed suicide alongside his retainers. Kiyoko [Matsuda Satsumi], the girl who teases him in the very first main scene of the episode? “Violated and brutally killed,” per the sub track. These things aren’t dwelled on, exactly. They’re just presented as cold facts as the city of Kamakura burns to cinders. (Although it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that many of these characters are the very same who offhandedly called him cowardly in the episode’s first half.) The pounding drums of what’s become a war song.

One can hardly blame Tokiyuki for being completely devastated. When Yorishige appears to rescue him, he initially rejects the offer. He wants to die alongside his father. What’s more surprising is that the sham shaman obliges, pushing the displaced prince off of a cliff and alerting a group of samurai to his presence. In this hopeless situation, does the rabbit lay down and die?

Of course not. The running, ducking, bobbing, hiding, and dodging of the first half of the show comes flooding back. This time, with consequence. The samurai hack and cleave at him, but only hit each other. They go from an indistinct, merged smear of viciousness to cutting each other’s limbs off; both senses of the phrase “bleeding together” bleeding together. Improbably, Tokiyuki escapes. He, Yorishige, and Shizuku retreat into the night. The composition of the show has flipped around; now, Tokiyuki is the percussion, and the melody are the smoldering flames reaching into the night sky as he flees.

Yorishige lays out a plan. Tokiyuki can’t defeat Takauji alone, he must hide, he must flee, he must court allies and deceive his enemies. Tokiyuki must become El-ahrairah; cunning, full of tricks, listener and runner. That’s just how it goes for a prince with a thousand enemies. If it feels hard to read any glory into such a tale, that’s probably the point. A story where the hero is a coward and the villain sends armies to rape and murder townsfolk isn’t the cheeriest thing, no matter how much cheesing for the camera Yorishige might do. Then again, brutal violence is hardly a foreign element to this kind of historical fiction. That’s probably part of the point, too. The show spells it out directly; Tokiyuki is a hero of life. Takauji, his nemesis, one of death.

The series asks us to take on faith that this will be worth it, in the end, that it will tell a satisfying story. It’s a fair point to raise! All of these visual tricks are great and lovely and engaging, but does this story come together? If you take a very big picture view, you can read its dizzying fractiousness as intentional, as I’ve chosen to do here, but we’re in for 11 more episodes of this stuff, so it’s fair to ask what it will all add up to. And there is always the temptation to try to be definitive. If you forecast that a show will do this or that, and then it does, you look like a prophet. (Or, at least, someone who knows their Japanese history, in this case.) The honest answer though is that we won’t know if it feels “worth it” until we get there, and I think looking to divine the future is, in the case of something so freewheeling, probably doomed to frustration. The Elusive Samurai‘s visual element alone gives me more than enough to chew on to want to come back next week, but combined with the plight of Tokiyuki, fleeing into the night with his whole world in smoldering splinters behind him, it becomes magnetic. I have to know more.

1: Although it does experiment in its own way, eg. a raised sword jutting through one panel to pierce another on the opposite page.

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 or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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 Plastic Love of MY WIFE HAS NO EMOTION

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.

Certain typographical features of the below post are intentional.

The uneasy thickness of a nightmare permeates the scene, and a synthesized voice pushes a dinner tray into view. Singed metal and corrosion lay on a plate, served like a tidy meal. It’s a head; a human head, or at least something in the shape of one, smoldering and smoking, a revolting bon appetit for an unwilling customer. This is the kind of thing that would send anyone screaming awake, so when Takuma [Toyonaga Toshiyuki] does, it’s no surprise. For him, jolting awake is a moment of relief. Proof that he was just dreaming, that this jarring and disquieting interlude wasn’t real. That’s the problem though; with Takuma’s thoughts and with My Wife Has No Emotion in general. I’m not sure he’s right about that. (edited) [4:02 AM]

This moment, a surreal and genuinely disturbing dream sequence, is hidden in the middle of My Wife Has No Emotion‘s first episode like a knife between book pages. It colors everything that follows, and makes us see what came before in a different light, its influence spilling out from both chronological sides of the event. Look carefully, though, and it’s clear that the seeds for it were planted before the footage even began rolling. Go look at that key visual; note how Takuma’s eyes are closed and his hands squeeze his robot-wife in an apparent expression of domestic bliss that is nonetheless decidedly paternalistic and controlling. She, meanwhile, stares out at us. It’s a cold, creepy stare, but not necessarily a judgmental one. It almost seems like she just really wants to know. “Do you like this? Is this what you’re here for?”

In a sense, all of this is subtextual. Run the tape back and revisit our basic setup and you’ll see the familiar ingredients of a friendly rom-com with a sci-fi twist. Even then, though, simply describing the premise raises alarm bells. Lonely salaryman buys—has bought, this happens before the start of the show—an “appliance” as he calls her, a human-shaped robot to cook and clean for him. He is an overworked, pitiable mess of a man inhabiting a desolately empty apartment, and Mina [Inagaki Konomi], the robot maid in question, responds to him with, accordingly, pity, but also a towering amount of passive aggression. Assuming that’s not just me doing what Takuma may very well be doing: projecting our own thoughts onto a being that is, at the end of the day, not actually sapient. Akin to trying to “date” ChatGTP. In a show presented even slightly differently, I would have no trouble at all thinking this was supposed to be straightforward wish fulfillment despite all of these complications. Maybe it is, for a certain kind of person, but the second the show raises the possibility that this entire domestic setup is cover for something sinister, it’s impossible to stow the notion away, even if the anime itself might like to.

My Wife Has No Emotion should not, by all rights, be causing me to have these thoughts. Questions of meant—is this what the author meant to do here, is this how the author meant to make me feel—can be a trap. Without speaking to the original mangaka directly, we cannot know for sure what is meant by any single thing in this show’s first episode. Previously, I’ve treated questions of whether or not a show is Doing Something as a puzzle to be solved. We can do that here, too. We can observe how, despite the ostensibly simple setup of boy-meets-robo-chef, there is a strong air of the denpa all over this thing. A pronounced unease, a sadness that is at one point said aloud but is obvious from the outset. We can look at Takuma’s mostly-empty apartment. We can nod thoughtfully at his drinking problem and Mina’s attempts to curb it later in the episode. (Out of genuine concern, or is she just obeying her programming?) We can consider this setup in the context of the oft-slandered “rehabilitation” genre (I’m hardly a fan myself). We can compare it to past works in the medium to tackle the sapience of artificial, robotic humanoids; Chobits, Mahoromatic, Time of Eve. All of this, ultimately, might be like trying to search for sharks in a swimming pool. [4:13 AM] Speculation is speculation. We’re not going to know for sure if My Wife Has No Emotion will go there unless it does.

The nightmare in the middle of this first episode is strange, but to even go so far as to say it’s intentionally disturbing is to speculate. This is ultimately a work with an ambiguous, or more charitably, a very multilayered tone. Takuma lives alone and openly laments being lonely, so he projects this loneliness onto Mina. (Since the entire show is wholly from Takuma’s perspective we don’t know, and maybe can’t know, if she reciprocates.) He mentions having once had a girl over, but that this did not work out. We can make the reasonable assumption that being shot down made him not want to even try anymore. He’s clearly also at least a little scared of Mina, though. Is that a fear of the unknown—of not knowing how much agency truly lies behind those big, cameralike robotic eyes—or is it a much more basic fear of women? Is it both? Conflating the two wouldn’t be out of character, given what we learn of him here. [4:16 AM]

There’s also the presentation to consider. Mina’s character design is decidedly in the uncanny valley, even by the bug-eyed standards of moe designs, a feeling only reinforced by the moody staging, lighting, and backgrounds, and ramped up even further by the in-spots minimal, all-Casio-presets soundtrack. It switches to a fuller, more traditional romcom OST late in the episode, and that somehow feels even more artificial. Likewise, that scene sees the show gets “raunchy” in its final few minutes, and in doing so, it feels even more awkward. Like an intentional bit of self-sabotage. Message #anime-notes

My Wife Has No Emotion is a weird series that may or may not at some point bring that weirdness to the forefront for an extended time. But ultimately, that’s a gamble, and it’s going to be difficult to not feel suckered if this uneasy tone is a fakeout, bar an extreme strengthening of the series’ writing chops. Usually, I end these articles by offering a pithy summary and a blunt “should you watch this” yes/no recommendation. I’m not going to do that here, I think you already know if this bet is one you’ll take.

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 or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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

The Weekly Orbit [7/1/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello, anime fans! We have a quiet lineup this week, but that’s only because we’re in the between-season doldrums where last season’s shows have all ended and this season’s have mostly not yet premiered. We’re here to cover one of the few that already did and an ongoing annual that I’m fond of. (Also one last finale, but to be honest I had little to say about it.) There’s also a new section of the column, here. Keep scrolling and you’ll see what I mean.

Before that, I do just want to once again plug my reviews for Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night and Girls Band Cry, the twin music originals that aired this past season. Honestly, they started out fairly different and ended up miles away from each other in every important respect, but the sisters-by-circumstance will probably always be compared just because they happened to air at the same time. I feel a little bad for the former in that I can’t help but think it might have been a bit better received if it had aired back in Winter. Still, for my money, both have their strengths, and Girls Band Cry is basically an instant classic.

Anime

Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture – Episode 2

I have a lot of positive things to say about this episode, but before we get to any of them we have to address my one big criticism of it. The main sour note here is just, man, do we really have to call the prison that the Japanese resistance are being held in a “concentration camp?” I’m not sure if the use of that term is to be blamed on the subtitlers or the writers (a bit of on-screen text actually says *relocation* camp instead, although I think that’s just a euphemism for the other thing anyway). Usually, I make some effort to excuse Code Geass‘ generally reckless use of politically-charged imagery, but it very much is possible to push these things too far, and that is definitely the case here. (The original series sometimes did so as well, so it’s not like this is a sin unique to Rozé, but still.) It’s very much a down note in an otherwise pretty good episode, and it put a damper on my mood. Not mentioning it would also just feel irresponsible. So! There it is. I don’t know why they did that and I’m not going to attempt to excuse it.

Anyway, the actual prison liberation itself is pretty good and very action-packed. The show’s establishing a pattern here with Ash taking down arrogant Britannian knights that is admittedly a cheap thrill but one that I’m pretty into. I like his little speeches when he inevitably bests them.

There are two main things we learn in this episode. One; Sakuya and Sakura don’t seem to actually be related and instead have a royal body double situation going on. What does this open us up for? Why, Code Geass Yuri, of course. I’m not going to blow anyone’s mind by praising wlw romantic tension in a show when the blog that I pull these weekly posts from has the URL “yurisorcerer.tumblr.com”, but nonetheless, I am going to say; good job with that, Rozé of the Recapture. May your bounty of lilies be endless.

The other thing is that hey, it turns out that Sakuya-as-Rozé doesn’t have as straightforward a relationship with Ash as we were initially led to believe (who could’ve seen that coming?). Given the flashback we’re shown, the case seems to be that Ash is under a very complicated iteration of Sakuya’s geass, and in fact plans to kill him after she’s completed her tasks of rescuing Sakura and freeing Area 11 from the Neo-Britannian yoke, to “avenge her father.”

We’ll learn more about that in the weeks to come, I’d guess. It really feels like Sakuya is a very complex character that we’re only getting to look at one layer at a time. I like that, it makes her notably distinct from Lelouch whose whole deal we basically understood right away even if it later became more complicated.

So, yeah, in spite of my major complaint, this was a solid episode. (I could complain about the fanservice too if I wanted to, but honestly I’m disinclined to do so. That’s always been a thing Code Geass has gone over the top with, and I feel like anyone still onboard with the series has to know that by now. Code Geass Ass Shots make a proud return here after being absent in the first week, in fact.) I’d put it about on par with the first episode overall.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 12 (Finale)

This sure was a final episode of a TV anime! I really don’t have a lot to say about this. The voice acting was good, Fairouz Ai and the cat boss youkai’s VA (who I can’t find for some reason) give their all here. This is a perfectly fine end to an extremely middling adaptation of a manga that is good but not like, that good, to begin with. Also it’s completely unrelated to any material in the actual manga! They just made a whole new ending up! This used to be a very common practice but it’s not anymore, and I’m surprised to see it brought back for an adaptation as underwhelming as this one.

Suffice to say, I’m glad to put this one in the books (har har har). Not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and even this year I’ve seen much worse, but I’ve seen much better, too.

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 56

Normally when I write these, even the less serious ones for the weekly column, I try to keep in mind that my audience is not me and I am not my audience. Obviously, what you’re ultimately always getting is my opinion, but I normally attempt to give some consideration to how others might feel, too.

All this to say, I can’t do that here. This is an episode with a lot of Rika in it. I cannot be normal about Rika. I have tried in the past and failed.

It should’ve been me.

She’s beautiful, fantastic, gorgeous, amazing, dazzling, attractive, and her voice [provided by Saiga Mitsuki] makes my head spin. She speaks to a nervous Liko with empathy and humor, she lightly talks herself up during the (amazing) fight, but honestly she could be a lot more boastful and it still wouldn’t feel unjustified. I spent enough of the episode having a gay meltdown that I probably missed some of the finer details, but can you really blame me? She’s just electric to watch.

You guys have no idea how hard it is to not just post thirty examples of her winning smile in a row.

Right, the battle itself. Liko’s battle partner is Katy, the usual first gym leader in the Scarlet / Violet games. She puts in a good showing for the first half of the episode, with her Lokix really standing out in giving a Pokémon that isn’t particularly prominent in its home game some shine. The little guy comes off as every bit as cool as his Kamen Rider inspiration.

When the battle comes down to just Liko and Floragato against Rika and her Clodsire, things really fly off the rails, and we get the delightful experience of watching Liko undergo some character growth in real time when she (perhaps inevitably) loses. The Liko we see here, properly invested in the outcome of her battles because Floragato is, and she wants what’s best for her partner Pokémon, is a far cry from the shy little bean we met over a year ago in episode 1.

Over in the B-Part of the episode, Penny [Hirohashi Ryou] makes her on-screen debut, and she’s pretty great, too, terse and a little mysterious. What little drips we get of her backstory seem to vaguely imply that this anime actually takes place after some version of the game’s events? Which feels like it can’t possibly actually be what they’re going for, but it’s an interesting thought, regardless. (It would definitely explain the rather strange name of ‘The Explorers’ for our villain group. Thinking on this the day after I initially wrote it, maybe what’s being alluded to here is actually the earlier explorations of Area Zero.) Either way, we’re definitely getting into some interesting stuff here, Penny and Dot come across a mysterious “Scarlet Book” with what’s clearly Koraidon on its front cover. Mysteries upon mysteries! And really a good reminder that for all that’s happened over the past year or so, we’re still really just getting started with Pokémon Horizons. Not that I’m complaining! It’s quietly become one of my favorite ongoing anime.

Around The Internet

So! Here’s a new section of the columns that I haven’t figured out exactly how I’m going to handle in the archives. Essentially, I wanted to give a shout out to both to fellow anime bloggers and also just to various other critics I’ve been reading recently. Some of these people also write about anime, some of them write about other things entirely, but my hope is you’ll check some of them out if you like my own work.

Short Reflection: Spring 2024 Anime, by Anime Binge-Watcher – A tumblr post of decent length by fellow anime blogger (and Magic Planet Anime Discord Server member!), Anime Binge-Watcher. I don’t agree with all (or even most) of ABW’s ratings for the anime we both watched this past season, but I appreciate their perspective on things regardless, and it’s always interesting to read a well-thought-out opinion from someone who you don’t entirely align with. Even more interesting to me is their opening recommendation of the Dead Dead Demons’ Dededede Destruction anime (retrofitted from a film, not entirely unlike what’s happening with Rozé of the Recapture), that was just not on my radar at all but sounds (and looks, given their screencaps) pretty arresting. I’m also super happy to see another person really give it up for Girls Band Cry. And they even draw a connection between the traditional “rival group” in idol anime and that series that I hadn’t really considered before, but makes sense now that it’s been pointed out to me, especially when taken in context with eg. the rock-inflected stylings of a group like Saint Snow. In any case! It’s a good article, and I recommend it.

Aard Labor, by someone seemingly going by just “Tom”, at FreakyTrigger – Here’s something that’s both way out of my wheelhouse and could also easily eat up a whole afternoon. I’m not super familiar with UK-based pop culture criticism site FreakyTrigger, but it seems that earlier this year, a person there tasked themselves with the monumental and unenviable task of reading, and then reviewing, volume by volume, the entirety of Cerebus the Aardvark, the legendarily unhinged Canadian comic book epic that plots the evolution of its title character from a simple “funny animal” placed in a Conan the Barbarian parody up to frothing-at-the-mouth, ranting antifeminism and existential terror of its final volumes. Cerebus itself was (and I assume still is?) pretty infamous for many years as an early example of the kind of pure-id getting lost in the weeds that we now mostly associate with webcomics. I will cop to having never read the series myself, its massive length and reputation as moral bugspray have kept me away, but I’m more than happy to see someone else dive into it, especially if they’re as observant and thoughtful as article author Tom seems to be.

That’s all for this week, anime fans! The coming week proper is probably going to be pretty busy over here, although it’s hard to say for sure, so keep an eye on your inbox so you can know when any first impressions articles or such go up. Also! I will once again ask that if you like anything I’ve written in this column, or on the site in general recently, please consider dropping me a tip on Ko-Fi. Due to various life issues, I don’t have a regular job, so these donations help me afford basic necessities like food, medicine, clothes, yadda yadda. (And occasionally less essential things! I would really love to buy one of Togenashi Togeari’s albums, but I’m getting into Christmas Wishlist territory there.)

See you soon, anime fans!

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Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Rock Will Never Die, But You Will – Youth, Guitars, Emptiness, and Catharsis in GIRLS BAND CRY

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

“We believe there’s a place where we belong. That’s why we sing.”

There is something fitting about the fact that, as of the time I’m writing this after the anime’s just ended, there is no way to legally watch Girls Band Cry in the west. It’s completely meaningless to call anything, much less an anime—the end result of many, many corporate machinations at the end of the day—“punk” in 2024, but there is something at least a little rock ‘n roll about how if you wanted to watch Girls Band Cry as it aired and you lived in North America, the UK, or many other parts of the world, you had to pirate it. Steal This Anime, they’ll call the documentary.

It’s appropriate because Girls Band Cry is a thirteen episode ode to the power of rock music, of youthful indiscretion, of the power of spite—of doing something just because everyone tells you you can’t—of love, of rebellion. I’m 30 years old, now, so I can’t speak to how Girls Band Cry may or may not be resonating with the actual teenagers of today, but I can say that for myself, for a generation that grew up on the pop-punk explosion, perhaps rock n’ roll’s last gasp of any real cultural relevance in the United States, it hits like revelation. The very short version is that this is an absolutely kickass tour de force, a complete triumph for Toei’s burgeoning 3D department, proof that Sakai Kazuo (also of Love Live! Sunshine!! fame, among other things) still has it and that his best work is ahead of him. This is a show that cements itself as an instant, iconic classic, and a series that other anime will build on in the future. If you haven’t watched this, you need to. Go look around, or ask a friend in the know if you don’t know where to search. You’ll find it, and it’ll find you. It’s a story about teenage rebellion. It’s a straightforward underdog rock band story, the best we’ve gotten in years, and a rare recent example to feel truly connected to the real world. It’s also, if you’re paying attention, a love story. Suffice to say, as is obvious from my effusive praise, I think Girls Band Cry is great. I could nitpick various things, and I don’t think it’s literally flawless, but it’s about as perfect as anime gets for me, at least. It’s an admirably dense text for its genre, too; thirteen episodes of the most emotionally resonant shit you’ve ever felt in your life. It’s an electric, nervy thing with a ton of heart. I love it.

Would you believe it all starts with a middle finger?

There’s an entire sub-article to be written about how Girls Band Cry makes use of the middle finger gesture. It starts as a running joke in the first episode, before being traded off for its more polite counterpart, giving someone the pinky finger. But then that becomes an in-group thing, something Togenashi Togeari, the band in Girls Band Cry (the name means something like ‘spineless spiny ant,’ I’m told), use to identify themselves, each other, their fans, their supporters. It becomes a fandom thing, a scene thing. A sign of belonging.

But before even that much, there’s Nina [Rina, in her first-ever anime role. All of Girls Band Cry‘s voice actresses go by mononyms and are new to the industry], a lonely girl keenly aware of her place in a world that is much, much bigger than she is. As our story begins, she’s just arrived in Tokyo, leaving behind a complicated home situation that we won’t learn more about until near the end of the series. The more specific reasons aside, the main sense we get early on is that the real reason Nina struck out on her own in the big city is just a sense that she felt like she didn’t belong in her hometown. Given some stuff later in the show, it is really easy to read Nina as a closeted (maybe even to herself) lesbian, but more generally, she definitely at least feels like a stranger in her own home. Getting away from it all makes an amount of sense. Much, much later in the series, we’ll learn that this all stems from trying to stick up for a girl in her class who was being bullied and being smacked down hard by the school system (and more literally, the actual bullies) for doing so. It quickly becomes clear that Nina is a pretty angry little thing, and that most of this anger is a justified expression of disgust with a deeply unfair world. That kind of anger can ignite a fire in a person, and I’ve always found these stick-to-your-guns-at-all-costs types admirable. I have a few friends like that, and they’re some of my favorite people.

Something that gives Nina relief from the general, well, pain of being herself, is the music of rock band Diamond Dust. Or at least, Diamond Dust as they used to be, before they replaced their lead vocalist Momoka [Yuuri] over what we later learn was a falling out about a shift in style at the behest of their label.

Nina, a real head, is a fan of their older stuff with Momoka, particularly the original version of their song “Void”, which makes things pretty astounding for her when she meets Momoka on a street corner, putting on a street performance. Nina introduces herself, starstruck, extremely awkward, and maybe a little smitten. The two hit it off pretty well, but Momoka plans to leave town the next day and quit the music business entirely.

Suffice to say, that doesn’t happen. Over the course of the remaining 12 episodes, Togenashi Togeari (who only actually get that name a fair ways into the series), gain three additional members; drummer Subaru [Mirei], keyboardist Tomo [Natsu], and bassist Rupa [Shuri]. All are fantastic characters, although they don’t get an even split of focus, as this is mostly Nina’s story, at the end of the day. Before we get more into that, though, we should actually talk about how this story is told, since the presentation is so important here.

Any anime is to some extent defined by its visual identity, and the sound work is always important as well, but both of these are particularly crucial to Girls Band Cry, which is genuinely attempting something new on the visual front, and sonically requires its viewers to buy into the idea of Togenashi Togeari as a credible rock band. The look of the show is the most notable thing about it, I’d argue (aside from that other elephant in the room we already addressed, anyhow). If you are one of the people who has held off on GBC because “it’s CGI” or “it just doesn’t look good,” this is me telling you, as politely as possible, that you are having an Goofball Moment and need to gently shake yourself out of it. I’ve long been a defender of 3D CGI in anime, but this is not a case like say, Estab Life, where the series is using CG to emulate the traditional “anime” look. Instead, Girls Band Cry focuses on capturing the feeling of being an anime, as opposed to clinging to techniques that don’t necessarily work in its particular format. This is obvious in details as basic as its apparent framerate. The common 3D CG shortcut of halving the final product’s framerate to make it look more like a series of traditional anime cuts is not present here, as Girls Band Cry‘s visuals are able to capture that look without relying on doing that. In general, the CG is fluid, cartoony, and wonderfully expressive. Not every trick it tries works perfectly, but it has an astoundingly high hit-rate for something that’s basically extending anime’s visual language on its own as it goes.

In more general terms of style, the show manages to pull off keeping things relatively grounded on a presentational level while still feeling cartoony. Some of the usual anime hallmarks are absent here—no one but post-Momoka-split Diamond Dust have any of the usual anime hair colors, for instance, and in their case there’s decent reason to think it’s dyed—and the backgrounds in particular lean toward the realistic. Despite this though, GBC is perfectly willing to break that illusion of restraint whenever it has a reason to. This can be as simple as a character making a goofy pull-face (something the show is shockingly good at considering how hard that is to do in 3D), or giving a character a literal aura that radiates off of them and impresses the other characters or telegraphs an emotional state to us, the audience. In one scene, for example, Momoka is given a gentle, cool lavender aura. We don’t need Nina to directly tell us that she thinks Momoka is beautiful and admirable. The entire series is loosely from her perspective, and devices like this let us directly see how she feels. This is even more obvious in the “rage spikes” the show draws around Nina when she’s angry; she literally brims with red and black needles, representing the barely-contained boil of her temper flares.

Girls Band Cry can and does use traditional 2D animation as well, but only in very specific contexts; the idealized, crystallized memories that we all have as part of our core personalities, very occasional flights of fancy when the show dreams up what “real rock stuff” looks like, including the opening theme, and for minor characters. If we interpret the show as being from Nina’s perspective, we can think of the 2D segments as her romantic notions filling in the gaps as she’s telling us her story, even in remembering minor characters she has no real extended contact with. It is certainly not a compromise or a concession, which is what a lot of people—myself included—might’ve initially thought, as it’s important that these are the only times when Girls Band Cry uses these techniques.

In terms of sound, Togenashi Togeari are surprisingly believable as a rock band. Obviously, despite the show’s gestures toward an independent rocker spirit—gestures that become more and more important as the show goes on—this is an anime series, and those need to be backed by corporate money, so they’re not, like, The Clash or anything. They’re pretty fucking good, though! It takes several episodes for their sound to really come together, as it doesn’t entirely click until they pick up Tomo for keyboards and Rupa for a real bass about a third of the way through the series. In the great Girls Band Anime Power Rankings I’d put them somewhere above (don’t kill me here) honestly most of the BanG Dream groups, and Kessoku Band, but below Ave Mujica, Raise a Suilen, and Sick Hack, bands whose very existence kind of feels like the series they’re from is getting away with something. (Even accounting for the last of these having only one song.) TogeToge aren’t that, but they’re great as the protagonists of this kind of thing, since they make straight-down-the-middle, fist-pumping, angst-shedding alt-rock of a kind that’s basically extinct as anything with any real cultural currency in the United States but remains a viable commercial and artistic force in other parts of the world, obviously including East Asia. Their biggest asset is Nina’s vocals; clear, piercing, incisive, bright as a shooting star. She sings like her vocal chords are trying to climb out of her throat to strangle everyone else in the room, and while she lacks the complete knockout punch holler of someone like, say, real-world rock star LiSA, she more than makes up for that in knowing her instrument and in her sheer on-mic charisma. This all rounds together as TogeToge being a pretty damn good band, I’ve found myself spinning their songs both from the show and from their album Togeari a fair bit, which is more than I can say of a great number of in-fiction acts from anime in this genre.

The important thing to note here is that TogeToge don’t have to be better than every other rock band from every other series, though. The main thing they have to do is be better than Diamond Dust, as over the course of its central narrative, Diamond Dust become TogeToge’s main rivals despite appearing only very rarely; TogeToge’s opposites in approach and philosophy, and also subject to a personal grudge from both Nina and to a lesser extent Momoka. This, TogeToge easily pull off. To the point where I feel a little bad for the actual people behind Diamond Dust, as DD’s music is just not nearly as good or interesting. (It’s polished and professional, certainly, but it lacks the magnetism that TogeToge eventually develop, and their own lead is a much less compelling vocalist.) The deck is clearly stacked in TogeToge’s favor in this way, but that’s not a bad thing. I think stoking a bit of fannish partisanship within its viewers is likely intentional, in fact. As though you’re supposed to hear Diamond Dust and think “what, people would rather listen to this than our girls?!” Given that Girls Band Cry clearly takes place in some version of ‘the real world,’ it’s distressingly plausible! It’s a fun little story-hack, and it makes GBC a nice exception to the trend of band anime main character bands being the least interesting groups in their own shows.

There’s a level of cognitive dissonance here that merits a quick aside. TogeToge, despite the show’s own themes, are, in fact, exactly as much a commercial product as Diamond Dust. The main reason this doesn’t really matter is that getting you to buy into the illusion that they aren’t is something the show goes through great lengths to accomplish, and I’d actually argue this is the main reason the show works at all. (It’s also why it took a few episodes to click for me! Nina is such an incredibly polished and talented vocalist right off the bat that I found it a little unbelievable. Imagine my shock upon learning that her voice actress is actually a year younger than she is.) I will confess that I think I’d like TogeToge even more if they had a little more grit in their sound, but that’s a personal preference.

In any case, the story of Togenashi Togeari has elements of a traditional up-from-the-bottom rock underdog story, but more important is the band’s members using music to process their personal traumas. Nina has the whole bullying situation, as well as an overbearing family and an equally-stubborn father who are not supportive of her sudden decision to drop out of school and pursue rock music when they learn about it. Momoka has the lingering pain of leaving the original Diamond Dust, and ends up projecting her own experiences onto Nina who she clearly sees as a slightly younger version of herself. Subaru is the granddaughter of a famous actress, and is expected to follow in her grandma’s footsteps despite her own disinterest in the profession. (She calls it “embarrassing”, even!) Tomo is living separated from her family for reasons we only get a very broad picture of, and has previously dealt with people cutting her off when they can’t handle her frank personality. Rupa, Tomo’s roommate and easily the most mysterious character of the main five, is originally from Nepal, and lost her mother in an unspecified tragedy before moving to Japan with her father. A common thread here is that of seizing your life, every minute of it, to do what matters to you, not bowing to anyone else’s whims. In one of the most casually-devastating lines in a series full of those, Rupa lays things out in one sentence.

In other words; Girls Band Cry will be romantic, because it clearly cares about that starry-eyed rocker girl shit a lot, but it’s not going to bullshit you. The window for anyone to make an actual rock band and have it work out in any way is very short, and Girls Band Cry is keenly aware of that. This frank attitude extends to the characters’ personal problems as well, and each has an issue they struggle with over the course of the show. Nina is a cute anime girl and she’s ridiculously fun to watch, but her prickly personality makes it hard for other people to get along with her and she tends to retreat into her anger when in difficult situations. Momoka is genuinely a beautiful and cool rocker lesbian1, but she also actively uses that persona to deflect tough conversations that she doesn’t want to have, and as mentioned she tends to project her own hangups onto Nina. Subaru is easily the funniest character in the series, a lovable goofball who gets most of the show’s most comedic moments, but her screwy attitude seems to stem from feeling repressed in her home life, and it’s downright uncanny how she acts around her grandmother. Tomo is similar to Nina in a lot of ways, as her blunt, often critical way of talking about things with people can make her seem rude or thoughtless to those not attuned to how she thinks. Rupa, lastly, actually seems to be the most well-adjusted member of the group, but there are a few moments when the façade cracks and it’s clear that something, perhaps the loss of her mother, is still weighing on her. It’s also worth noting that she drinks a lot, and while the show mostly plays this for laughs, it’s hard not to read a certain level of coping mechanism into it. The show’s command of characterization is just excellent overall, and it reminds me a lot of another anime original with a script by screenwriter Hanada Jukki, A Place Further Than The Universe, which also had a cast of strong characters and a deft hand with staging conversations.

Our central story is actually fairly straightforward, compared to all of this complex characterization. For the most part, we’re tracking TogeToge’s formation, relative rise, and as it turns out, very brief time on a major label here. I don’t want to bleed the anime of its specifics, but the short version is that the first 2/3rds of the show focus largely on Nina and Momoka’s relationship, which goes from that initial meeting to a sort of strained friendship before the two come to accept each other in episodes seven through nine.

We need to talk about one other character here, Mine [Sawashiro Miyuki], a singer-songwriter whose time in the show is brief but makes a huge impact, especially on Nina. In episode seven, Mine, who is an indie musician getting by even if she’s not famous, explains to Nina, after a joint show, that the reason she still does music for a living even if it’s very hard is that it feels like she has to. She goes into some detail about how she tried to compromise with herself, to take up a teaching position or something else more “stable”, but she couldn’t do it. Making songs, performing those songs, connecting with people via her art. It was too important. Nina seems to really internalize this. I’d argue it’s also basically the thesis of Girls Band Cry itself. Everything else is extraneous, what matters about making music—or any kind of art—is that you’re getting something of yourself, your soul, across to your audience. That’s what Nina got from the original version of “Void,” and that’s what she hopes to do with TogeToge.

Momoka can’t quite see that. She spends most of the early series convinced that Togenashi Togeari are destined to fail. Not just fail, crash and burn. Because she failed with Diamond Dust, and can’t seem to consider that the only data point she’s working off of is her own. Given what little we see of Diamond Dust, who mostly seem to be happy with their new direction, it’s entirely possible that Momoka splitting off was actually the best thing for both her and the band, but Momoka just can’t see it and continues to insist that she’s going to quit TogeToge in the near future. At one point, Nina is so fed up with all this that she just slaps Momoka across the face.

Would you believe that doing so actually makes their relationship much stronger? In fact, you can pretty easily argue that shortly after this, they become more than just friends. Nina, in episode eight, straightforwardly confesses to Momoka in the middle of a very hectic scene that I can’t bring myself to spoil the minutiae of. If you see people call Girls Band Cry a yuri series, that’s why. Does Momoka reciprocate? Well, she never actually says so, and I know that the lack of verbal confirmation will disqualify it in the minds of some, but based on what we actually see throughout the rest of the show; the two affectionately leaning on each other at various points, the fact that Nina has Momoka’s name circled on a calendar and a note reading “spend time with Momoka after practice” jotted down at one point, etc., I think the situation is fairly obvious. Maybe more than any of that is Momoka’s constant reassurance that she loves Nina’s voice. It’s clear that she’s not just talking about her literal vocals—although probably those, too—but Nina’s point of view, her passion, and her inner fire.

In fact, after this point the entire band seem to form a really coherent unit not just musically but as friends. I saw another fan of the series mention that the way you can really tell that TogeToge get along is that they’re comfortable being jerks around each other. And that’s honestly, completely true! TogeToge love to mess with each other, but it’s also obvious that they really do care. This is most obvious, at least it was to me, in episode ten, where Momoka has to be stopped from driving all the way back to Nina’s hometown by herself to pick her up. You don’t do long highway trips for people you only kind of care about.

About that; episode ten sees Nina return home to try to explain her situation to her parents, mostly her dad. Nina’s father is another great character who really shines despite a limited lack of screentime, and I’m absolutely in love with how the show stages the first conversation between the two where they’re not really listening to each other. How does Girls Band Cry communicate that? By sticking them on opposite sides of a sliding door. Subtlety is for losers.

The entire episode is fantastic, but the key points touched upon here, particularly where Nina says that the original Diamond Dust’s music saved her when she was feeling—she says this explicitly—suicidal in the aftermath of the bullying situation at school. That is the real power of art. That’s what TogeToge are seeking to channel, and episode ten is where Nina really starts understanding that. The self-acceptance she shows here is hard-won, and this is the sort of thing I refer to when I say that Girls Band Cry is really Nina’s show at the end of the day. I have rarely felt proud of an anime character, an emotion-object combination that just objectively doesn’t make any sense, but Girls Band Cry got it out of me.

As for the band themselves, they eventually sign with a real publishing company. (Or are they a label? To be honest, I am a little unclear on this point, but it doesn’t really matter.) The episode after this is where all of this buildup—the character arcs themselves, the emotional peaks, the sound, the love, the lightning—hit their climactic note. This is the best episode of the series, the best anime episode of the year so far, and one of the best of the ’20s in general. They play a festival, with TogeToge on a B-stage, in what is nonetheless the biggest moment of their careers. Diamond Dust are at the festival, too, but we only get to see a very brief glimpse of them playing, because this is not their story, and they’re not our real stars.

Togenashi Togeari aren’t up on the main stage, they aren’t playing to the biggest crowd, and they aren’t the main attraction, but for the three minutes and ten seconds of “Void & Catharsis”, their big roaring emotional fireworks display that is, in its own way, a response to Diamond Dust’s own “Void”, they feel like the best and most important band in the world. The entire series hinges on this concert scene, which is good, because it’s one of the best of its kind, and “Void & Catharsis” is TogeToge’s best song. It’s been weeks since I first saw it and it still blows me away. I might go as far as saying that it’s the best in-show rock band concert since the iconic performance of “God Knows” in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a full eighteen years ago. If it’s not, it’s definitely at bare minimum the best of this decade so far, and it’s hard to imagine it being topped by anyone any time soon.

It’s not just the visual tricks the show pulls out here; wild, zooming camera angles, cuts to 2D-animated segments that dramatize the girls’ own backstories and traumas in the way that so much great art does, some of the most raw rock poster animation I’ve ever seen in any television series, etc. It’s the song itself, a screaming and, yes, cathartic anthem about rebellion as personal salvation. Nina has no time for anyone’s bullshit. She’s busy screaming about insubordination as admiration, how telling someone they’re aiming too high is a rotten thing to do. She won’t be obedient but she’s scared to even try to resist. She doesn’t want to die. She wants to live so bad it hurts. She inhabits not just her own trauma but her bandmates’ as well, singing brief sections of the second verse from the perspective of Momoka, then Subaru, then Tomo, then Rupa. She channels the painful split Momoka endured from the original Diamond Dust, the towering expectations placed on Subaru, the forced clamping up that Tomo put herself through, and the unimaginable tragedy of Rupa’s loss of her mother. She’s not just a singer, she’s a medium. She takes on their pain as her own and lets every razor sharp line bleed her voice until there’s more blood on the stage than sweat. In a particularly astounding lyrical turn that I’m not entirely sure of the intentionality of, there’s a line in the chorus that is a completely coherent sentence in Japanese, translating very roughly to something like “because my anger can’t be stopped”, but sounds phonetically like the English phrase “so I can die young.” That kind of intentional bending of language, to facilitate a bilingual pun that calls back to and reinforces an earlier line, no less, is normally the domain of rappers. Particularly heady, lyrical ones (the likes of Kendrick Lamar or Lupe Fiasco or such), so part of me wonders if it’s not just an astounding coincidence. But if it’s not, that’s some 5D chess shit, and I feel wrong not pointing it out even if it is an accident because, holy fuck, what an accident.

It must also be said, she looks amazing throughout the entire concert scene; an honest-to-god icon of rock n’ roll rebellion in an age where the very idea should be a laughable archaism. She pumps her fist both toward the crowd and back at her own band to egg them on. She stomps around on the stage like she can barely control her anger. She glares at her audience, maybe Diamond Dust specifically, since they’re also watching, like she’s trying to kill them with her mind. All this while rocking a billowing yakuza shirt and with quick-apply teal dye that I must imagine smells like an unfathomable mix of chemicals slapped on the underside of her hair. In one particularly great moment, she makes an open-palmed gesture toward the crowd and then clenches her fist tight. It’s clear that not only is she insanely good at this, she really loves doing it. For all of her fury and thunder it’s also obvious that she’s having the time of her life on that stage, and who could possibly blame her? She gets to be in a rock band. Who wouldn’t love that? That feeling itself is embedded in “Void & Catharsis” as much as the righteous anger stuff. It’s subtextual, but it’s definitely there.

All this about Nina and barely a word about the other girls. The truth is that despite being a hobbyist musician myself I’m not much of a music theory gal, so I can comment only in generalities. Still, Rupa’s pounding, oscillating, heavy bassline grounds the song, as do Subaru’s nimble drums. Tomo’s key work—some of her best—provides some much needed texture to contrast the main sonic palette of the song, Momoka’s guitar, and have a sparkling, star-like quality that really reinforces the piece’s sky-looking aspirations. On the note of Momoka’s guitar, holy shit Momoka’s guitar. For the most part her riffs here are the song’s muscles, they give it strength and fullness and make it more than just a bed for Nina’s vocals, but there’s a really great moment where Momoka gets a full-on solo, a sparking piece of pyrotechnics that really sends “Void & Catharsis” over the top. I have it on authority from a guitarist acquaintance that it’s also fairly technically tricky, and I have no reason to doubt them.

All this to serve a song and a scene that streaks across the show like a comet. 3 minutes isn’t that long for a rock tune! I listened to the song a number of times while writing this piece and I was always astounded by how brief it is. Because in the moment, in the context of the show, it feels monumental and eternal. It’s not, though. When Nina hits that last note, the song ends, and in fact episode 11 on the whole ends. We are left with the feeling that we’ve just witnessed something rare and special. I wonder if the crowd that TogeToge attract during the show feel the same.

The rest of the show, really, is denouement. Falling action, of a sort, something that single cour anime have largely forgotten how to do. Episode 11 is the show’s peak both emotionally and qualitatively, but the miniature drama that follows, where TogeToge are briefly part of a real label, have their first single flop hard, and then quit to return to the indie grind, is compelling on its own. It’s a full extension of the show’s passion-driven spirit, and it also allows Nina to reconnect with an old friend.

Hina [Kondou Reina], the vocalist for the incarnation of Diamond Dust that TogeToge spend the entire show in the shadow of, was a classmate of Nina’s. She was there during the whole bullying thing, and she told Nina not to get involved. Nina, as we know, did get involved, and this led to a rift between the two that still doesn’t fully heal even by the end of the series. Honestly, in her sole on-screen appearance of any length, Hina comes across as a pretty nasty piece of work! Some of this is clearly affect, and the show’s final minutes state outright that she was deliberately pushing Nina’s buttons during their one meetup, but still! I would say that Hina would be the main character if this were an idol anime, but frankly I don’t think most idol anime have it in them to portray their characters with this much honesty. (Shinepost did, which is why Shinepost rules.)

The charitable read is that she’s a realist. Someone who knows how to play the game, someone who is actually interested in the monetary side of the whole industry, someone who wants to be famous. In pretty much every sense, she’s Nina’s complete opposite. Their meeting is enough to convince Nina that she was in the right back then, and she’s in the right now. This also concludes an entire plot about a dual Diamond Dust / Togenashi Togeari concert, that ends with TogeToge amicably leaving their label. Momoka, in one of her last lines in the entire series, gently teases Nina by suggesting that this whole thing was Hina trying to extend the Diamond Dust / TogeToge rivalry, partly because she enjoys playing the part, but also partly because Hina really loved Diamond Dust’s music too! Maybe not in the same way, maybe not to the same extent, but she did, and this is a commonality that connects the two similarly-named vocalists permanently, whether they like it or not.

This, then, is how the series ends, with Togenashi Togeari back on the indie circuit, a cult phenomenon at most. We will never know if they achieve success beyond this, although we do know they’ll keep trying. Either way, at the end of the day, part of the very point of this show is that success is secondary to being able to look yourself in the mirror. Nina is ridiculously, astoundingly, monstrously stubborn, but she sticks to her principles. In one of the flashbacks that dots the finale, Hina tells her that Nina’s intense “spikes” of justice make her feel like the bad guy. The thing is, in those flashbacks, Hina is the bad guy. She seems to even know this, on some level, given how she does everything she does in the last episode specifically to prod Nina into sticking to her guns. Arguably, that’s a pretty cold mercenary move too—after all, TogeToge and Diamond Dust are direct competition—but I choose to take it both ways. Yes, Hina is conveniently knocking a rival band down a peg, but she really does seem to care about Nina, too, in her own way. (Implicitly, there’s also some reason to wonder how happy Hina really is about having basically sold out, despite her own claims in the finale about how important success is. We may never know for sure.)

By design, we don’t see the rest of Togenashi Togeari’s story. We could write it ourselves, we could choose to extend the show’s text into the real world and keep an eye on how the inevitable actual touring version of the band do. You could argue, well, hey, Diamond Dust aren’t the ones with a Spotify ad or the goddamn branded earbuds. You could even argue there’s room for a hypothetical second season (there is, but I think people get way too caught up in that particular discussion). Ultimately all of that, all of the money and fame and success and legacy and popularity and on and on, is less important than the show’s overall dedication to sticking to the spirit of rock n’ roll in a time when that is a fast-fading phenomenon in even the most vestigial sense. These girls appreciate music as art, as life. They’d die without it. Even if TogeToge are never bigger than they are in episode 11, I have no trouble at all believing they will play together for the rest of their lives. In their very last concert of the series, in the middle of a charmingly awkward monologue, Nina declares her audience rebels and misfits, and while that’s true of TogeToge in a very different way than it was for rock and roll’s originators many years ago, it is still true, and it’s true of Girls Band Cry itself, too. In one very specific sense, TogeToge have a luxury that real bands don’t have. They get to ride off into the sunset and into our memories forever. The ED is something of a very short postscript, and it seems to suggest that TogeToge will soldier on together, living that indie rocker life, into eternity. That’s a bit ironic for a series that’s also in decent part about seizing life while you still can, but hey, it’s one of the perks of being an anime character instead of a flesh and blood human being.

All this said and there is so, so much I haven’t touched on. I think time might risk forgetting how funny Girls Band Cry is (seriously, it’s borderline a slapstick series in some spots). The girls have incredible costuming both in their day to day life and especially on stage. I didn’t talk at all about Subaru’s character arc, nearly as important to the show as Nina and Momoka’s. I didn’t talk about Tomo or Rupa that much even though they’re probably my favorite characters (one of the very few criticisms I could make of the show is that I wish it were just a bit longer so Rupa could’ve gotten an episode). I didn’t talk about Tomo’s pet snake or the fact that her outfit for the festival concert is an extended reference to Undertale. I didn’t talk about Rupa’s legion of gay fangirls, a real, canonical thing that we are shown in the series. Even in the parts of the plot I did go over, I skipped a lot of details. Hell, if I’m honest, I could write a whole other article about the sleazy indie rocker sex appeal of Momoka’s stupid fucking trucker hat that she wears while piss-drunk and acting like a jackass in one of the episodes. Like any good rock band, TogeToge have way more to them than any single writeup, video, whatever, could reasonably cover. The list is endless! But this review is not, and I need to stop somewhere, even if any point is ultimately going to feel arbitrary.

If this is the end of the series the fact remains that we were all here to see this, together. The moments themselves are more important than any lofty discussions of success or legacy, and if the show does find a long tail, which I really hope it will, it will be because it feels so huge and fiery in the moment. If you’re going to make an impact, make it electric. Connect with people, find your voice, live your life. Everything else is fluff.

1: Source: I’m Gay And I Can Fucking Tell, OK?

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Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Pop Music is an Ocean: JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT and the Rough Waters of The Girl Band Genre

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

We aren’t there yet, so it’s an educated guess at most, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spring 2024 season is remembered in hindsight as that of the yuri-inflected girl band series. You had the return of Hibike Euphonium, you had Girls Band Cry, you had Whisper Me A Love Song, for what little it contributed, but Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night was, we’ll remember, there as well. For its first half dozen or so episodes, you could easily have argued that it was in fact the most beloved of all of the new entries here, as Girls Band Cry‘s anglosphere cult following had not yet reached fever pitch. In an even broader view, I wouldn’t be surprised if the long view of history lumps Jellyfish together with an even wider circle of anime; Bocchi the Rock!, It’s MyGO, whatever becomes of the Ave Mujica anime slated for next year, etc. Grouping all of these anime together is, of course, ultimately reductive, but something I’ve learned over the several years that I’ve been writing about anime is this; nothing escapes the context in which it is created.

This is particularly unfair to Jellyfish for a number of reasons, but one of them is that on a basic premise level, Jellyfish differs a bit from its contemporaries. JELEE, the “band” in Jellyfish, is really more of an arts collective centered around a pseudonymous vocalist. My immediate point of comparison was ZUTOMAYO, but really, any of the night scene bands that followed in their wake are a decent point of reference. Like some of those (but unlike ZTMY itself), JELEE’s membership is fairly small, consisting of vocalist Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie], composer and keyboardist Takanashi Kim Anouk Mei [Shimabukuro Miyuri], visual artist Kouzuki Mahiru, who also goes by Yoru [Itou Miku], and social media wizard Watase Kiui, who is also a VTuber under the name Nox Ryugasaki [Tomita Miyu].

The show is divided roughly into two parts, with the former half focused on JELEE coming together and then attempting to make a name for themselves, and the latter with the emotional fallout of Kano’s former career as an idol under the emotionally abusive management of her mother. Bluntly, the former works a lot better, and while there are a number of threads and subplots here, the ones that are successful share a certain verisimilitude. They focus more on things that seem like actual issues a contemporary pop group would encounter while trying to find a foothold in the uncaring ocean of the modern internet. These are generally simple. Some are pragmatic questions of how to get your music out there, others are more abstract and deal with things like finding artistic drive within yourself, being unashamed to express yourself for who you truly are, etc. The common element is pursuing your passions in a world that may be apathetic or even actively hostile to your doing so.

This takes different forms depending on the character. For Mahiru, who is perhaps the show’s “main protagonist” in as much as it really has one, it’s as simple as a lack of self-esteem and a tall order of impostor syndrome. For Kano, it’s significantly more complicated; she struggles to be noticed as an utaite1, making cover songs in the aftermath of her failed idol career, there with a group called the Sunflower Dolls that she left under decidedly acrimonious terms after slugging one of the other members in the face. Mei and Kiui2 have it hard, too. We meet the former after years of burying herself in fandom for “Nonoka,” Kano’s old idol persona, as a coping method for dealing with the bullying she endured in school for being “weird” (read: neurodivergent) and for being biracial. We meet the latter, Mahiru’s childhood friend, constantly lying their ass off through the other side of a computer screen. Kiui spends most of the early show immersed in their VTuber persona and telling tall tales about how popular they are at school and such. (They aren’t.)

Jellyfish splits its time unevenly between these characters—not inherently an issue—with most of the early show focusing on Mahiru and most of the latter half of the series focusing on Kano. It’s not a clean split, as episodes primarily about Kiui are sprinkled throughout. Mei gets the short end of the stick, with only her introductory episode and a handful of stray scenes later on really focusing on her as a person.

For the first part of the show, the main thrust of the plot is the formation of JELEE itself, the arts collective that the girls create as a vehicle for Kano’s singing, Mei’s composition, and Mahiru’s visual art. JELEE finds a fair amount of early success, and this early phase of the show hits its peak during one of Mahiru’s bouts of self-doubt. Admitting that she resents that other artists can draw JELEE-chan—the jellyfish-themed mascot she created for the group—better than she can, she and Kano have a heart to heart in the snow, and Kano kisses Mahiru on the cheek. (Followups to that particular development are indirect, manifesting in such forms as Mahiru gently teasing her about it an episode or two later.)

Throughout all of this, the traumatic fallout from Kano’s previous career as an idol remains a lurking background element, but it’s only when her mother, Yukine [Kaida Yuuko], is properly introduced as a character, a fair ways into the anime, that it really becomes a central focus, and the anime shifts gears to reorient around this. It’s hard to call this change in direction a mistake, exactly, since it leads to some of the anime’s best scenes, and probably its overall best episode in its ninth, but it’s definitely a stark change, and the show handles it unevenly.

Throughout the ninth episode, we get flashbacks of how Kano came to be the original center for the Sunflower Dolls and how she was eventually kicked out of the group. Here, Kano becomes “Nonoka.” Her mother controls her style and manipulates her talents for her own ends in a plainly vile way that paints a very clear picture of her as an old-school slimeball record exec. Really, the moment that seals the deal in hindsight is when she lays out her goals to Kano. “I want to one day nurture an artist who sings to 50,000 people.” (Jellyfish floats a lot of numbers around over the course of its runtime, but that one, the 50,000 associated with the maximum seating capacity of the Tokyo Dome, is the one it runs back most frequently.) Unfortunately, Kano’s time with the Sunflower Dolls comes to an unceremonious end when she discovers that Mero, one of the other girls in the group, has been running a Youtube page that spreads gossip and inflames scandals about rival acts. Enraged, Kano punches her—the incident we’ve known about for the whole show, but only then get the full context for—and her career in the traditional idol industry ends in an instant. She’s so overcome with shame and emotion that the show actually switches art styles. In a compelling, lightly experimental touch, the visuals seem to turn into something like a burning oil painting, as though Kano is physically igniting under the harsh, dispassionate glare of her mother.

All of this portrays Kano as a victim in an industry that is certainly no stranger to victimizing even its youngest performers, and paints Yukine as, at best, deeply callous about her daughter’s suffering, and at worst, an outright abusive figure, a gender-flipped version of the archetypal sinister record executive-patriarch. It’ll make you want to scream “leave Kano alone!” at your TV, if you’re anything like me.

It’s worth noting that all of these flashbacks are broadly from Kano’s own point of view, but there’s relatively little evidence of some kind of unreliable narrator thing going on, and the trauma Kano endures from all of these events is obviously very real. This is unfortunate in its own way, because it feeling so raw and so emotionally resonant means that when the show tries to tie Kano and Yukine’s relationship up with minimal fuss in the last episode it really doesn’t work, as we’ll come back to. And as a further side note; we have no reason to directly suspect that Yukine was encouraging Mero’s little side activity in running the Youtube channel, but it so clearly seems like the kind of thing she’d do, given what little we have to go on, that I have a hard time imagining at least some of the story here isn’t trying to imply that.

Back in the show’s present, Yukine approaches Mahiru with an offer to do some visual work for the current incarnation of the Sunflower Dolls. (One with Mero as the center, mind you.) Yukine certainly seems to have ulterior motives for doing this, and when Mahiru tells Kano about her plans to take the job offer—pushing back a release of one of JELEE’s own songs in the process—Kano absolutely blows up at her, calling Mahiru a liar and ranting about how she’s the only reason anyone knows Mahiru’s art in the first place. It is legitimately hard to watch, and in the moment, it made quite the strong impression on me. (Especially when coupled with the absolutely diabolical editing decision to have that episode’s outro mostly be a montage of the two calling each other’s names.) With hindsight though, I actually think this is where Jellyfish starts to fall apart. Kano and Mahiru don’t really get many scenes together in the episodes after this, and those that do are brief and feel unsatisfying. Is that realistic? Sure, maybe, and if the series wanted to lean in to the emotional hurt there, and make it seem like these two would never be close again, that would also be a valid artistic decision. The problem is that it doesn’t really do either of these things, as we’ll circle back to.

Not every plot the show tries is derailed in this manner, of course. Kiui gets a great arc wherein they manage to overcome some of their severe social anxiety. The work with JELEE brings them out of their shell somewhat, but they really begin to undergo some proper character development during a small arc where they’re attempting to get a motorcycle license, staying at a driving school for a time, with Kano, in pursuit of that goal. There, they meet an older woman named Koharu [Seto Asami]. Koharu is an interesting, if minor figure in Jellyfish, an all-but-outright-stated-to-be-trans woman who’s an implied former yakuza and who hits on Kiui basically as soon as they show up. The two hit it off, and their budding romance is a very small but legitimately sweet part of the show, and the few conversations they have over the course of the series feel very lived-in, especially when they get into nerdy areas of discussion like denpa visual novels and the like. (Even this isn’t perfect and I might rewrite some of Koharu’s dialogue, to put it mildly, but you take what you can get with these things.)

Kiui even gets what is probably the last great moment in the series. In episode 11, they and Mahiru are at an arcade and run into some former classmates of theirs. Jellyfish takes a moment to get extremely real here, as the kids hate Kiui not just for how they’re generally “weird” but also for their apparent lack of conforming to the gender binary.

Kiui, in a minor moment of triumph, gathers the inner conviction to tell them off by tapping into her own VTuber persona, which, they seem to realize in doing so, is in some ways more “real” than their outward physical self. That kind of thing, with a constructed persona that feels more in tune with “who you really are” than your actual body does, is extremely common among a certain kind of internet-native queer person. I’m speaking from experience here, and I think this plot is probably the best single thing that Jellyfish pulls off. Making people feel seen is valuable.

Mahiru and Kano’s ongoing tension, meanwhile, goes largely unaddressed during all of this, and they appear to forgive each other in the final episode—after the big, emotional finale, which, with a few days of hindsight behind me, feels quite flat—based on….vibes, I suppose? They don’t really talk anything out! And I’m not the sort of person to demand lengthy on-screen Healthy Emotional Communication, but something a bit more substantial than the little we get here would be nice, and that really is my central problem with Jellyfish. It has all of these moments that are good to great, but they don’t cohere, because the show either can’t make them fit together in a way that feels holistic or it simply drops them entirely.

If I had to guess, what Jellyfish wants to do is use this act of simply stopping at a certain point as a statement unto itself. In the last moments of the show there are clearly still some unaddressed problems. Kano, for instance, obsesses over her performance in the finale being seen by over 50,000 people—that magic number her mom planted in her head as a kid—and the rest of JELEE are rightly weirded out by the whole thing. But we’re clearly also supposed to feel that this is essentially a happy ending for them, as the show’s last real scene is JELEE banding together to paint over the jellyfish mural—an old piece of Mahiru’s art—that inspired their endeavor to begin with. It’s beautifully drawn and composed, and it tries so hard to sell these big emotions, but it feels almost perfunctory, regardless. As though Jellyfish is doing this because it can’t stomach showing us an actual unhappy ending, or because it thinks we’d be angry if it did so.

Whether one wants to see Jellyfish as an anime that is sabotaged by this flaw or one that manages to work in spite of it is largely a matter of perspective. Can you ignore Yukine’s abuse going unaddressed? Can you ignore that the show never circles back around to Mero torpedo’ing the careers of the Rainbow Girls? Can you ignore the unshakeable feeling that this whole thing really needed another six episodes or so to really breathe? That it really clearly does not have the space to do everything it wants to do? All of that is going to depend on the person. For some, this is going to come off as extreme nitpicking and I will seem very shrill. I must again stress however that I’m fine with these things not being solved on-screen, I just want the show to follow up on them, any of them, in some form.

For me, the clearly stitched-together nature of the writing in the show’s latter half kills much of the emotional resonance I felt in its best moments. Some anime are camp enough, strange enough, or challenging enough to get away with ending on what’s essentially a shrug. If it clicked enough with you, you can say “well, the show is messy” and declare its flaws ignorable. Unfortunately, the emotional math involved here just doesn’t work for me. The fact that the Rainbow Girls are not characters in this narrative because we’re just supposed to write them off after their single appearance does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mero never even really directly talk, but that we’re clearly supposed to assume they’ve somehow reconciled does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mahiru are, in fact, entirely kept apart for most of the show’s final third does not work for me. The fact that Kano’s lack of forgiveness to her mother is signified by nothing more than playfully brushing her off in the show’s closing minutes after she sends a goddamn limo to Kano’s school does not work for me. None of this works for me! That’s really frustrating!

Let’s circle back to the term “messy”, in fact. “Messy” is often used, as a descriptor, to smooth over the rough edges of art we love. A way to excuse conflict and problematica because the art resonates hard enough with us that we have cause to explain its uncomfortable aspects away. You could call Jellyfish “messy,” for certain, and there are parts of it I’d apply that label to (Koharu and Kiui’s relationship, perhaps), but for the most part there’s not a lot of what I’d call messiness in Jellyfish. All of these aspects that don’t work are not messy, they’re just some shit that happens that the show gets in over its head in trying to address. This is why it feels unsatisfying on the whole despite a number of strong moments. The actual tone the show is going for gets lost somewhere in the shuffle.

The show attempts to do right by its queer audience in spite of all this; mostly in terms of Kiui’s subplot, but I think people have been a little unfair in labeling the show ‘queerbaity’ in the fairly subtle way it handles Mahiru and Kano’s relationship, as well. This, and the other more general ways the series fails to come together, creates a situation that practically begs for baseless, conspiratorial thinking. Did some suit decide the show was Too Gay, prompting a last-minute rewrite? Was there some kind of cut in episode number that impacted the narrative? Did network censors object? There’s no actual reason to believe these things, but they are the sort of theorizing that tends to pop up in the wake of an anime ending like this, because it’s an explanation. An explanation, no matter how convoluted, seems to make more sense than what appears to be the actual case; the show just faceplanted in its final stretch without a single specific cause. It happens. My personal theory is that primary scriptwriter Yaku Yuki, best known as the novelist behind Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki, had trouble adapting to the switch in format. There’s not really any more evidence for this than any of these other theories, but it would make sense, and would account for the show’s sometimes cramped and overstuffed writing. (In fact, I have somehow gone this entire review without mentioning the weird little side plot of Miiko [Uesaka Sumire], the 30-something idol that JELEE butt heads with a few times and eventually become friends with. The whole plot is actually pretty much fine, if not necessarily a highlight of the show. But a longer anime could have things like that without it feeling so incongruous with the rest of the series.)

I’ve spent a lot of time wracking my brain about what exactly my takeaway from Jellyfish has been without simply turning in basic qualitative assessments. It’s true that it’s probably always going to be considered in the broader “girl band anime” context, and that it isn’t the best series in that subgenre by any means. (I will also quickly make the point that, on the other hand, this is not a Metallic Rouge situation where hindsight makes it clear that the show never had any idea of what it was doing.) But putting it in those terms feels incredibly reductive! I’ve said a lot that’s negative about the show, but there is a lot to like as well! Visually, it’s pretty damn incredible! I’ve already mentioned its shift into a moving oil painting during one of Kano’s flashbacks, but it uses quite a few interesting tricks throughout, from video effects like a simulated VHS tape in the first episode, being drawn as though shot on a smartphone in the last, to rapid animation cuts to signify time passing quickly (often because Mei is enthusing over something), there’s a good amount to enjoy here in the visual dimension. The soundtrack is great, too! While I wasn’t enthused about JELEE’s music for the most part, the actual BGM is a weird, synth-heavy, analog-sounding thing that burbles and strains and hums expressively throughout essentially the whole show.

Generally speaking, the show is very stylish! The first episode in particular is a masterclass in visual storytelling! And even back on the writing end, the series’ portrayal of the suffocating smoke of having a controlling parent be absolutely furious with you is spot on! Kano pecking Mahiru on the cheek seriously does matter even if the followup isn’t as strong as we may have wanted it to be! Kiui’s complex gender identity is some of the best representation of its type I’ve ever seen in an anime! All of this is just as true as the show’s more frustrating aspects, and I think if the series develops a cult following in the years to come (and I would be unsurprised to see that happen) it will be off of these strengths. Those people will watch Jellyfish in a different way than I did. It’s true that nothing really escapes the context it’s created in, but we often only have a clear picture of that context in hindsight. Maybe, somewhere between all the aspects that frustrated me so much, is a better show that is only visible with some remove.

So that’s where we’re at. I wanted to like Jellyfish more than I did, and that’s admittedly an annoying position to be in. Because I simultaneously feel like I’m giving the show more of a pass than I should be and also being way too hard on it. But that’s the way things go sometimes! If any part of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is truly encapsulated by the term ‘messy,’ it might be that very relationship that I, and many other viewers, have to the series in of itself. It’s obvious, but, sometimes art is not strictly good or bad! Sometimes it gets in your head in a way that causes you to spout a gushing torrent of thoughts that only barely cohere and sometimes outright contradict each other. I have said things of this nature many times on this blog, and I’ll probably say them many times more. Maybe, if all Jellyfish wanted to do was leave an impression—to shine a little, to borrow Mahiru’s own words—then my big judgy opinion about whether it’s peak or mid, man, matters less than the fact that it made me think this much about it at all. Jellyfish can’t swim, night or day. But sometimes it’s nice to just drift in the currents of the ocean and let them take you where they will; you can’t complain too much about choppy waters.

1: A kind of internet-based singer, originally associated with NicoNicoDouga, now common on Youtube as well. Perhaps the most famous utaite-turned-professional in contemporary J-pop is Ado, apparently a deliberate influence, in the case of this anime.

2: I’ve mostly spelled it “Kiwi” up until this point on this site, but “Kiui” with a U is apparently the official romanization. As for my use of they/them pronouns for the character throughout this piece, it’s clear to me that Kiui is some sort of genderqueer or nonconforming. Since it is impossible to ask a fictional character their preferred pronouns, and we’re unlikely to get official word on the subject for a variety of reasons, I am being as general as possible.

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“Goodbye, sekai!“