Tag: Reviews

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 22 – “Gray Phantom”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience.

Native Dancer was an American thoroughbred racehorse. Without getting so into the nitty-gritty that this turns into a column on actual horseracing, the very short version is that he was one of the best. It’s hard to beat 21 victories in a 22-race career (although some have done so). To list just one accolade, the AP’s list of the best racehorses of the 20th century places him at third, behind only Man O’ War and Secretariat. For our purposes, though, his actual career is less important than two other things you need to keep in mind about Dancer. The first is that he had a nickname, the Gray Ghost. The second is that one of his children was Dancing Cap, a horse who, himself, we are primarily interested in here because of one of his children. You’re reading a column about him right now: Oguri Cap.

There is little reason to suspect that any version of Native Dancer ever existed in Umamusume. In general, lineage plays far less of a role in Umamusume than it does in actual horse racing, and the closest Umamusume has ever come to acknowledging any of the legendary racers who fill in the strange, fuzzy area outside of its immediate characters of focus is the vague insinuation that Manhattan Cafe’s mysterious “friend” might be the metaphorical or literal ghost of Sunday Silence. (As always, I recommend IronicLark’s blog if you want Umamusume analysis from someone who really knows their horseracing as opposed to someone with a mere passing interest in it like myself.) Nonetheless, watching this episode today, I thought about Native Dancer and his nickname. I have absolutely no way of proving this, but I think one of the most important aspects of this episode, and indeed the episode itself, takes its name from that epithet. In doing so, Cinderella Gray asks broader questions about what Umamusume actually is. Not as a franchise but as a story.

First, though, let’s pick up where we left off last week. The back half of the Arima Kinen is, to put it as simply as possible, nuts. After entering her Zone and blitzing past most of the playing field, Tamamo Cross duels it out with Oguri Cap for first place in the final leg. I repeat myself, but it’s worth repeating, it’s not merely that there are impressive action scenes here—though there definitely are—it’s that the raw emotion on display here is a very rare thing.

In literal terms, what happens here is the race’s four strongest competitors angling for the lead. Super Creek puts up a surprisingly strong performance, banking on pure stamina as opposed to anything flashier. Dicta Striker’s shotgun final spurt is a spectacle to behold as well, earning her probably the single most impressive cut of animation in the entire episode and deservedly putting her name in the conversation with the other greats here. Between the fierce showdown between rivals and the fireworks animation, I fall back on my old standby comparison: this is essentially a battle shonen anime, and the earlier half of this episode comes complete with plenty of “oh my god, the ultimate technique!”-style commentary from characters like Symboli Rudolf and Sensuke Fujii. This stuff is fantastic on even its worst day, and if that were all the episode was, it would still be great.

But, let’s be serious here. One of two umamusume are going to win this race. It’s either going to be Tamamo Cross or Oguri Cap. One of Cinderella Gray‘s favorite storytelling techniques is to dot an important race episode with little dollops of backstory or reflection from the runners. Previously, this has been used to characterize Oguri’s rivals. In the penultimate episode of the first cour, Tamamo Cross got that treatment, where the show strongly suggested that despite a thwarted crossing of the paths when they were both children, Tama and Oguri were, in some sense, always meant to run together. This episode reinforces that connection, but also reminds us of something else.

We see flashbacks to Oguri Cap’s childhood, a tiny gray puffball of a kidlin enraptured with the lightning-fast running she sees on TV. Her own legs, though, are weak, and her mother1 bandages them as she tries to stand and move around. The young Oguri asks her mother if she’ll ever run like the girls on TV, and her mother hugs her tight.

Of course she will.

And as Oguri’s mind turns to her gratitude toward her mother, it flows to everyone who’s helped get her where she is. The Kasamatsu gang, Fujimasa March, Belno, Jo, Musaka, every one of her rivals, all of whom have asked her, why do you run? Who are you aiming for?

And the answer, of course, is that Oguri isn’t trying to surpass anyone but herself. To whom running at all is a miracle, something fought for rather than given. She’s doing it because she loves it.

As soon as she realizes this, it all clicks into place, and we get to the episode’s namesake. The payoff, the gleefully cool-as-hell ultimate technique, Oguri Cap’s very own Zone.

A ghost, one might say.

Oguri and Tama continue running the final stretch neck to neck. But we actually see only relatively little of the literal events of the race from here on out. Instead, we’re transported to an emotion-driven image space, where the two talk. They reminisce, Tamamo Cross speaks of races come and gone and races that will never come, wistfully talking about how she owes Obey Your Master a beating at the next Japan Cup. But, she knows this won’t ever happen. Together, still in the shared mind space, Oguri and Tama begin running again. Tamamo Cross complains about how short the race is, even here, the finish line is in sight.

Nothing, not in sports, not in life, lasts forever. Every story has an end. There are no perpetual dawns, and any time the Sun rotates around our humble planet, it’s one day closer to going out forever. Here, in what they both know is their last dance together, Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap bond for one final time over what keeps them going in spite of that, their love of life. Running more specifically, sure, but it is worth seriously understanding that finity and transience are two of Cinderella Gray‘s main thematic ideas.2 This, which is also what I was alluding to at the top of this column, is the first time we see those themes really underscored in a major way. It will not be the last.

Tamamo Cross’s story ends in defeat. Oguri Cap, reborn within the Gray Phantom, manages to edge over the finish line by just the slightest bit. This is not a sad ending, the victory and defeat are less important, perhaps, than who they are experienced alongside.

After the race, they have a talk that is heart-achingly sweet, and they embrace each other. To paraphrase the great Miko Iino, I am someone who enjoys hugs probably 50-70% more than the average person, this one here is one of the best anime hugs ever. I’m honestly jealous. Put it on the accolade board.

The end of the Arima Kinen is not a happy story for everybody. Dicta Striker gets properly fired up when she notices Oguri entering her Zone, but, the combined blood loss from her injury last episode and perhaps just general fatigue mean her body betrays her, and her legs give out as she attempts another shotgun surge. She still takes third, with Super Creek behind her taking fourth. Or at least, she would have taken fourth were she not ruled to be obstructing another racer’s movements after the fact, disqualifying her. It’s sneaky as hell to slip in the start of Creek’s upcoming arc here. But the nature of how Umamusume is written means it’s also a necessity, and it’s handled pretty well, juxtaposing as it does Creek’s embarrassment and loss with the overwhelming warmth of the rest of the episode’s final third.

(There are some other, smaller good bits as well, such as Symboli Rudolf heaping praise on Oguri, a really nice followup from that conversation she and Maruzensky had back in the first cour.)

That warmth truly is the dominant feeling. In what is by now a relative rarity for the series, we get an actual winning concert performance in place of the episode’s usual credits. Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and Dicta Striker—patched up after her injuries, including breaking a tooth! which is perhaps why the concert seems to take place that night instead of immediately after the race—perform “Next Frontier”, one of Umamusume‘s standards, and a swelling, triumphant note to close out the episode.

Except there’s actually one more thing. After the concert, Oguri Cap takes the time to thank everyone who’s inspired her, who made her the racer she is today. She thanks her trainers, her rivals, and the crowd. That includes us.

Overall, “Gray Phantom” probably surpasses “Wild Joker” as Cinderella Gray’s best episode, and it’s one of the best in Umamusume on the whole. It also got me thinking, though, about the series’ overall nature. For a while now, I’ve been workshopping an as-yet unpublished article about a different piece of the Umamusume franchise. In that article, as I am about to here, I propose that despite its ostensibly “silly” or “very anime” premise, Umamusume is actually part of a very long lineage of work that seeks to anthropomorphize the minds and lives of non-human animals. I don’t have an answer as to whether that instinct is selfish, a bad habit of seeing all things as reflections of ourselves, or selfless, a genuine desire to connect with minds very different from our own.

Regardless of which side you fall on, it is fascinating to me that Oguri Cap, in some form or another, continues to inspire people 33 years after the end of his career and 15 after his death. (To float another conspiracy theory, I have wondered if the real Oguri’s epithet of “The Idol Horse” is how the premise of Umamusume was come up with in the first place.) If I can show my hand a little, I do think there’s something beautiful about the ideas that Cinderella Gray puts forward here, even the sad ones. Ultimately, though, these questions are a bit beyond the scope of this column, and I’ll save any harder arguments for another day. Tamamo Cross’s story is over, and while Oguri Cap’s will not last forever either, we still have a good, long time with her, assuming the anime gets renewed for another proper season (here’s hoping).

This isn’t the end of this season just yet, however. See you next week, umadacchi.

Now where have I heard that before?

1: It’s interesting that what little we know about Oguri Cap’s mother in Cinderella Gray doesn’t really fit the profile of either of the real Oguri Cap’s parents. Nonetheless, I usually refer to her as Narubi in my notes on the rare occasion she shows up, since it’s shorter than writing “Oguri Cap’s mom” every time.

2: There is a reason that, despite being “just” the last time we will see these two specific characters compete, this whole scene feels an awful lot like a depiction of some kind of afterlife. Tamamo Cross thus joins the storied ranks of sports anime characters who are being treated vaguely as though they’ve died when they’ve actually just retired or graduated or what have you. Sempai will be furthering her education, no doubt.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 19 – “A Zone Yet Unknown”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

Hello, Umadacchi. This week’s column arrives to you several days late. In my defense, I spent most of the past weekend being jabbed full of about a thousand vaccines I was behind on, and have been a real mess in the days since. I’m still not fully recovered, but I figure I’m well enough to do a little light writing. Luckily, this is a fairly light episode. There’s some important character work done here, to be sure. I also want to touch on the visual aspects since the first half of this episode is brilliantly-directed, but compared to the adrenaline burn of an actual race episode, we can afford to relax a little here.

Someone else who could maybe stand to relax is Oguri Cap herself. Stuck with the bronze medal in last week’s episode, the Gray Monster has entered a period of genuine burnout and self-doubt. While her chibi slumping about is pretty funny to witness, it is also genuinely sad to see our protagonist lose her confidence in such a major way.

It’s not subtle, either. Her classmates pick up on it pretty easily, since she’s been doing things like walking into walls and whatnot. The concerned include Mejiro Ardan, Sakura Chiyono O, and Dicta Striker, who Oguri is slated to race against in the upcoming Arima Kinen. Black Ale, still evidently a bit bitter over her loss to Oguri a whole anime season ago, is less sympathetic, but perhaps describing her as a baby or what-have-you is just the unruly horsegirl’s way of showing concern. (Probably not, but hey.)

I would love to know how many of you thought Black Ale would ever come up in this column again.

Oguri’s problem is that she feels that the two rivals who have bested her, Tamamo Cross and Obey Your Master, have something she doesn’t. Worse, she feels like she almost knows what that is, but not quite. Oguri isn’t the only one frustrated by her failure, either. Belno Light blames herself and, indeed, this is the most Belno-heavy episode in a good while, as she spends a large chunk of it trying to figure out what she can do to help Oguri train for the Arima Kinen. When Oguri meets Belno and Musaka to discuss the race, she seems almost disgusted with herself for what she says, but she’s honest nonetheless: she doesn’t think she can win.

We get a nice bit of scene interweaving here as Oguri’s rivals prepare for the clash at the Arima Kinen in their own ways. Dicta Striker runs, Super Creek boldly proclaims that with her trainer beside her, she can’t lose no matter who she’s running against, and Tamamo Cross….seems oddly reticent about the entire thing. She asks to talk to her trainer, it’s clearly serious, but what exactly is said is left as a mystery this week.

It’s Tamamo Cross who’s clearly on Oguri’s mind as she explains that, without that something that she and Obey have but Oguri doesn’t, she can’t imagine winning. This is more serious, even, than it might sound. Umamusume has a long history of dialing in on the mental state of its athletes as an indicator—maybe the indicator—of their performance. If Oguri Cap can’t conceive of herself winning, it’s difficult to believe she actually will. She’d hardly be the first character in this series to be psyched out by her own regrets.

Talking with Belno, Musaka ponders the intricacies of the Zone, in a very nicely-directed conversation that takes a SHAFT-y visualized-dialogue approach to keep things interesting. The result is some of the nicest looking moments in the entire series, and also a very telling one.

Musaka doesn’t entirely understand the Zone either—it’s been all but said that nobody really does—but what’s certain is that it’s the rarified territory of the racers who define their times. If Oguri Cap is shut out from this exclusive group, what can she really do?

Well, she can train. Musaka, who hilariously comments that this “isn’t an anime”, rejects the notion that the Zone is some kind of cheat or sure-shot victory card. Indeed, over the course of the rest of the episode it’s clear that his main strategy here is reigniting Oguri’s passion for the sport in the first place. If she can remember why she’s running at all, maybe all of this will seem less insurmountable.

To that end, this is the obligatory “everyone from Kasamatsu shows up” episode of the cour. And it’s genuinely great to see all of these characters again, especially Fujimasa March, last seen in the adaptation of “The Mermaid Left Behind” that was the first episode of this cour, and Kitahara Jo, fresh off from flunking the URA national trainer exams. (Better luck next year, Jo.) Musaka’s strategy seems, by the end of the episode, like it’s more or less worked. Oguri’s back in good spirits because she’s been reunited with and training with her hometown friends. There’s even a terribly cute moment where March and Oguri challenge each other in the exact same way they did back toward the start of the first cour, with Oguri directly calling back to her pose and “I won’t lose to you!” declaration. But there’s a lingering question over the entire thing: does that actually mean she can win the Arima Kinen?

We’ll find out on Sunday, I suppose.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – EPISODE 17 – “THE JAPAN CUP”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

We open with Oguri on the practice track, remembering the sting of defeat at the Tenno Sho. Today, she swears to herself, is the day she closes that distance. Is it really? Can our ash-haired champion make a comeback?

One of the lovely things about the relatively curt episode titles that Cinderella Gray has used so far is that they point out certain reflections and repetitions within the story. Each of the episodes we’ve had which are directly named after a race—of which this is the third—have marked major inflection points in the series. “The Japanese Derby” showed us Oguri at her most dominant, a competitor so good that her absence overshadowed the race that was actually run. “The Fall Tenno Sho” focused on Tamamo Cross, Oguri’s strongest rival thus far and the first since her transfer to actually defeat her. This episode, then, seems to promise at least the possibility of a comeback story for Oguri.

In typical Oguri fashion, she’s not content to simply run. She wants to try something new and a bit daring. Specifically, she asks Musaka if she can run in the pace chaser style as opposed to staying farther back as she usually does. Her idea here being that Tamamo Cross mainly won due to being able to spurt farther ahead on the last leg of the Tenno Sho. If she’s in a better position, Oguri reasons, she’ll have a better shot at actually outpacing her. It’s a pretty sizable switchup, but Roppei agrees. Again, the elements for a comeback are all here.

Except, of course, the fact that Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap are not the only two people running in this race. A walkout sequence quickly brings in all the competitors we met or met again last week, saving two in particular for last: Tamamo Cross herself, and Obey Your Master, who meet for the first time on their way out to the field.

Obey, apparently not above taking the low road, makes a psychological play. We know from earlier in the series that Tamtam is normally pretty nervous before a race, but, as with the Tenno Sho, she seems calm here. (We don’t know who exactly, but Tamamo Cross was on the phone with someone, evidently someone important to her, earlier in the episode. Perhaps these two things are related.) So it certainly seems like she’s in great shape both physically and mentally, until Obey tries getting under her skin. It’s not hard to conclude, following on from last week, that Obey is deliberately attempting to psyche her biggest competitor out. She’s surprisingly good at it, too, initially leading with a bit of fake buddy-buddy talk that Tama immediately catches on to, only to hit her with this.

Mood down?

This doesn’t seem to properly rattle Tamamo Cross, but it definitely at least ticks her off. A more stabilizing presence though is, unsurprisingly, Oguri Cap herself, and it’s cute to see the two of them do the whole “I won’t lose to you!” rival bit.

Once the race starts, Oguri actually seems to be doing rather well right up until she finds herself next to Michelle My Baby. Michelle, being American, does not have the sense of decorum most of the Japanese racers—Oguri included—are necessarily used to. What I mean by this is that when Oguri finds herself in a spot Michelle wants, Michelle has no problem attempting to take it by literally elbowing her out of the way. (Similar things play out up and down the pack, including between Ellerslie Pride and Gold City towards its back half. Noteworthy, as the two got a bit of banter in before the start of the race.)

Aside from being pretty borderline in terms of whether or not it’s actually allowed, this is also terrible news for Oguri in general. Already lower on stamina than she’d like to be given that she’s pace chasing (and thus having to run harder to stay near the top of the pack), Michelle’s rough tactics sap her of most of her strength entirely, and she falls back to the second half of the pack in the last few minutes of the episode.

It’s a pretty disheartening showing for our protagonist, and it’s hard to imagine her coming back from it. Though, as Musaka points out, the race isn’t over ’til it’s over.

At around this point, Toni Bianca, the favorite of the overseas racers and, as we established last week, really the smart money to win this thing in general, stops playing around. Bianca has up to this point been biding her time in the dead middle of the pack, so this is her going for the win. As she does so, she remarks that Tamamo Cross—coming in from the outside to avoid the physical contact stuff from the foreign racers—must be very arrogant to think that that kind of recklessness is going to help her against someone like Toni.

Here’s the thing though, it absolutely does help her against Toni. For the second time, we see lightning strike the racecourse.

About “the Zone” (almost always written in quotation marks, from what I’ve seen): it’s a natural question to ask whether what we’re seeing is “real” within the context of the fiction—regardless of whether anyone who’s not an elite racer can actually see it—or if this is visual metaphor presented for the sake of us, the audience. I think, though, it’s an imperfect and incorrect question. Umamusume likes to play coy with whether or not “magic” (or at least something sufficiently close to it) exists in its universe beyond the obvious conceit of the horsegirls themselves. I think the honest answer is that leaving it open to interpretation actually makes these scenes more compelling. Is this merely Tamamo Cross breathing rarified air, giving it 110% with whatever powerful but still mundane techniques she’s learned, or is there actually some kind of Horsegirl Domain Expansion thing that she has access to? I personally lean more toward the former, since I think it’s largely more interesting. But I also admit that there’s part of me that practically vibrates in my seat at the thought of umamusume with superpowers, so it’s not a clear-cut case of one being better than the other. Hitting both sides of that internal divide is one more stylistic thing that makes Cinderella Gray so great.

Everything, then, seems primed for Tamamo Cross to take another G1, which would put her at a ridiculous seven such wins in a row. Here’s a question though, about the “Zone” and about Cinderella Gray in general; is there any reason at all to believe Tamamo Cross is the only umamusume who can do that?

And that’s the note we end the episode on! Tamamo Cross a streak of lightning across the track, suddenly staked to the ground by a sinister, all-seeing eye. What the finale of the race holds, we can only guess. See you next week, umadacchi.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 16 – “The World’s Best”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

Hello, umadacchi. Your beloved blogger is a bit under the weather this week, but luckily, this particular episode of Cinderella Gray is mostly one of laying groundwork and doing some character introductions. As such, it’s pretty simple to cover.

Plainly, this episode serves to introduce (or reintroduce, in a few cases) Oguri Cap’s competition at the upcoming Japan Cup. The episode is actually structured as such that it largely introduces Oguri’s foreign rivals first—which makes sense, there’s more to cover there—but we’re going to flip that around and talk about her domestic competition to start with. There are just fewer umamusume in this category, and one of them, Tamamo Cross, is essentially the show’s defending champion. Tamtam gets a nice little practice vignette with her trainer, who warns her against pushing herself. A gentle reassurance from someone who cares, or foreshadowing of something greater? We can’t yet say, but it’s good to see Tamamo around, and it also gives us the delightful treat of seeing her with her head ornamentation removed. Cute!

Oguri’s other main competitor from Japan is Gold City, who actually practices with her at Musaka’s behest as they try to build Oguri’s stamina, given that the Japan Cup, at 2400 meters, is longer than any race Oguri’s yet run.

Oguri and Gold City, in a nice change of pace from some of Oguri’s more serious rivalries, hit it off pretty much immediately, and the episode’s penultimate scene is a funny exchange between the two of them wherein Oguri asks Gold how she keeps her hair so nice, leading to a whole bit about shampoo.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the international competition is given a bit more focus. Umamusume doesn’t get the chance to feature horsegirls from anywhere but Japan terribly often, so when they do, they tend to go all out. It is also worth noting that this is another case where the umamusume aren’t named directly after the real racehorses—rights issues, one imagines—and it’s fun to compare whose legally-distinct name is an upgrade and try to imagine how they might have gotten from one name to another.

Easily the most prominent of the umamusume featured here is Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko, based on the real horse Tony Bin], presented as a genuine menace. Enough so to merit an at least passing comparison to Symboli Rudolf (herself the last Japanese horsegirl to win the Japan Cup). She has an impressive record, too, most notably, she’s the most recent Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe champion.

Of the girls introduced here, Bianca is perhaps the most classically in the ‘arrogant rival’ mold. When our good friend the reporter Fuuji, a recurring presence throughout this episode, asks her what she intends to accomplish by running in the Japan Cup, Toni replies nothing. She intends to win, and she will win, and that’s that. Fuuji is impressed by this of course, but there’s the subtle implication of something more complex going on when later, on her own, she contemplates that the upcoming race will be her magnum opus. What that could mean, we don’t yet know, but it’s enough to raise some intrigue about a character who is otherwise a bit broad.

Even more so is the UK’s representative, Moonlight Lunacy [Sekine Akira, based on Moon Madness. I’m honestly not sure how they got away with that one].

She has a refined and elegant design, and some banter with Fuuji reveals that the two have at least some prior history together—she apparently competed in the last Japan Cup, only to come in fifth—and she kicks him for being tactless when he brings up her previous defeat in the race. Still, I’d say she’s firmly the least interesting of the umamusume introduced here.

Contrast, for example, Ellerslie Pride [Tomita Miyu, based on Bonecrusher, easily the biggest name downgrade here], the sole Japan Cup runner from the southern hemisphere and representing the hope of not just her home country New Zealand, but that entire half of the globe in general.

Her somewhat tough appearance (and the straight-up intimidating name of her inspiration) belie a horsegirl who is clearly a little desperate to put her country on the map. She actually visits a shrine as her first order of business in Japan, apparently praying for her own success. (Fuuji bothers her, too, and gets a giant shrine bell dropped on his head for the trouble.)

And of course, there are the Americans. Michelle My Baby [Takagaki Ayahi, based on My Big Boy] is incredibly tall compared to almost every other character we’ve seen in the series so far. We don’t learn terribly much about her—although on a fact-finding mission for Musaka, Belno Light describes her as having the strength of a bulldozer—but when you’re introduced by slam dunking a basketball from across the court, maybe you don’t need much in the way of complicated character motivation.

Which leaves us with one last character to meet. The other American umamusume is an apparently utterly unremarkable racer, no G1 wins, no record of really any note at all, and she’s also rather hard to get ahold of. Fuuji tries to find her but doesn’t succeed. Belno does, though, although one gets the sense it might be because she wanted to be found.

This is how we meet Obey Your Master

[Ishigami Shizuka, based on Pay The Butler].

When Belno finds her, Obey is literally face down, ass in the air, sniffing the grass. Why is she doing this? Who knows! Belno asks her, and her response is that it “smells amazing.” So at first, one might reasonably conclude that Obey is just weird. Weird girls are not new territory for Umamusume—see Gold Ship, a generational cryptid sort of girl, as just one example—but Belno, and indeed Oguri Cap, are not so lucky. Obey seems to immediately cotton on to what Belno is doing (and jokingly calls her “James Bond”). In fact, Obey knows all about Oguri Cap, starting from her career as a regional star in Kasamatsu up to the Fall Tenno Sho where she lost to Tamamo Cross. But actually, Obey even knows who Belno is, and it is with some sense of alarm that Belno Light processes that the last girl she’s been sent to find is not normal.

We can just say it. Obey is a freak. I fucking love her, she is one of my favorite charcters from Cinderella Gray in general, but she is an odd, odd character. The combination of everything we see here; her wild eccentricity, the star-shaped pupils, her encyclopedic knowledge of the competition, and of course the episode’s instantly-infamous final scene where she dances alone in the dark, Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross’ race playing on her television and her rivals’ photos plastered all over her walls, brings to mind nothing less specific than Kurokawa Akane from Oshi no Ko. In fact, despite some obvious differences, she comes off as an outright interpolation of the character into a radically different context. I can’t prove that the inspiration actually worked that way—if it did, mangaka Kuzumi Taiyou would have to have been pretty quick on the draw, as Cinderella Gray and OnK started serializing around the same time—so if that reference point seems improbable to you, we can also just say that Obey comes off as a bit serial killer-y in, especially, that final sequence. This is, of course, fantastic, and it implicitly suggests that the true showdown in the Japan Cup will not be between Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and—as one could be fooled into thinking from the start of this episode—Toni Bianca, but between those two and Obey.

Obey explicitly identifies Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap as her “enemies” for the Japan Cup. And they both, it seems, will have to be careful to not be her next victim.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Deep Space Wolves at The Door in GNOSIA

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.

Everyone who knows anything about GNOSIA has made essentially the same joke about it. Finally, an Among Us anime! It’s the kind of essentially-obligatory reference that can quickly get old, but, honestly, in the case of GNOSIA it’s not really a bad place to start in terms of describing the thing. And the series itself directly invokes Among Us‘ public-domain, lycanthropic predecessor werewolf.

GNOSIA is set aboard a space ship en route from one planet to another. On the planet they departed from, they were attacked by something called a gnosia, and now the gnosia is one of the people on board. What’s a gnosia? How does it spread from one person to another? We don’t really know that, yet! Things are kept in deliberately broad terms in this first episode. From what little we do know, it seems like some kind of virus that….turns people into? Replaces them with? Alien shapeshifters. Again! It’s all a bit vague.

But that’s part of the point, as it turns out. Because our viewpoint character is Yuri [Anzai Chika], an amnesiac freshly woken from suspended animation by Setsu [Hasegawa Ikumi], a non-binary soldier who seems to be the unofficial semi-leader of the proceedings. Setsu explains the entire wolf-among-us situation to Yuri, and Yuri’s drafted into the process of voting on which of the crew will be placed back into suspended animation. There are a few key points to absorb here, and the bulk of the episode is devoted to fleshing these out.

Here’s what we—along with Yuri—learn over the course of the first episode. One, this voting-out-the-impostor situation is mandatory, because the ship’s controlling AI, LeVi, will enable the self-destruct sequence if the passengers don’t attempt to get rid of the gnosia themselves. Two, the ship periodically jumps into hyperspace. Humans can’t stay awake during these jumps, but the gnosia can, giving them an opportunity to attack. Three, the fact that one person is placed back into cold sleep “per round” means that if the gnosia isn’t caught by a certain point, it will be down to just one human and the gnosia, at which point the human “loses.”

If all of this sounds very video game-y, that’s because GNOSIA is a relatively rare anime that’s actually adapted from a video game, in this case originally a Vita title that’s been ported several times over the years. (Hilariously, dating from 2019, it actually predates Among Us‘ explosion in popularity.) Usually, when an anime is said to feel “gamey” that’s a bad thing. But, for the second time this season, I’m going to suggest that something that’s usually a negative is not necessarily one. The gaminess lets us, the viewers, feel involved as Yuri learns about the setting and the cast of characters.

Speaking of, in addition to Yuri and Setsu themselves, the first episode also introduces a quiet, reserved woman named Jina [Seto Asami], a blunt enby who’s so straightforward that it’s to their own detriment who goes by Racio [Nanami Hiroki], and a flirtatious, charming, deeply suspicious, and radioactively hot woman with the somewhat cryptic moniker of SQ [Kitou Akari].

I have my favorites already, but in general this is a really strong group of characters, enough so that I didn’t want any of them to be the gnosia. (Another way my own point of view sympathized with Yuri. As they, naïve to the world, want to trust everyone here equally.) Of course, after two rounds of voting, we learn that, nonetheless, one of them is.

The second round ends with Yuri and SQ, who’s managed to sway Yuri to her side of things, locking Setsu in cold storage, after having lost Racio to the previous round and Jina to a gnosia attack during a hyperjump. This turns out to be the wrong decision, as SQ—the one who’s been acting very suspicious the entire episode—is, in fact, the gnosia. The good news for Yuri is that now that they’re equipped with knowledge of how the gnosia operates, they can do a better job next time around. But, ah, SQ attacks and kills them, right, since she’s the gnosia? So how could there be a “next time” for Yuri?

Well, before entering cryosleep, Setsu hands Yuri a mysterious cube which promptly breaks when Yuri tries handling it. This, they explain, will let them go beyond death.

Yes, on top of its main premise, GNOSIA is also a time loop anime. This takes things from merely interesting to absolutely fascinating. Introducing as it does two interlocking rings of mystery that must somehow be related, each of which raises more questions about the other than it answers. There’s a lot to like here, and with the anime slated for a full two cours there’s a lot of time for it to bend and twist our expectations in myriad ways. All this in mind, it might be the season’s easiest recommend, I could see almost any anime fan getting something out of this.

I should mention at least in passing that the show looks and sounds good, too. In particular, there are some really great cuts of SQ emoting in the premiere here that make me very optimistic about how much fun this show is going to be long-term, and the cold, sealed-off atmosphere of the ship itself is hard to beat.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The All-Consuming Love of THIS MONSTER WANTS TO EAT ME

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.

“Until the day that beautiful monster grants my wish with her own two hands….”

The first thing is the pacing, and the second is the sound design. I’m late to this one, I know, but upon watching the first two episodes of This Monster Wants To Eat Me, the latest in a growing number of decent-to-great yuri adaptations from up and down this year, those were the two elements that stuck out to me the most. Normally, when one brings up an anime’s pacing, it’s to complain. It is all too easy to fuck up the sequencing of events when adapting a manga to animation; by rearranging them illogically, by sticking so close to the source material that you sap the life out of the thing (the more common of those two scenarios these days), or simply by pacing them wrong. Events that are snappy on paper aren’t necessarily so in motion, timing is a key consideration when it comes to picking an approach for adapting this material.

Keep all this in mind as I say, usually, when an anime feels slow, that’s said as a bad thing. Especially if it was based on a manga. Watatabe—as This Monster is more commonly known—proves that it’s not necessarily so. This is an anime that creeps, lurches, and crawls. What it lacks in traditional production polish it more than compensates with in deploying its sense of timing and its audio to create atmosphere. Despite being set in the dead of summer, this is an anime that most makes sense as a Fall series. Mermaids should get to trick or treat, too.

As for what this is all actually about? Well, our main character, Hinako [Ueda Reina], is depressed. We don’t have the details yet, but it seems that she lost her family to some tragic accident some time ago. She wants to die, but she either doesn’t want to or can’t bring herself to end her own life, so she spends a lot of time gazing into the sea and waiting for her time to come. Early in the first episode she runs into a mysterious girl, Shiori [Ishikawa Yui], who warns her that leaning over the railing by the coast isn’t safe. She could fall in, after all! Nonetheless, when she returns to the same spot to do more or less exactly that later that day, strands of thick, dark hair creep out of the water like animate seaweed. Our heroine is thus attacked by an iso-onna, who drags her into the water to consume her.

In its way, this isn’t so bad, Hinako thinks. Sure, it was out of the blue, but this is what she’s been looking for, isn’t it? And nothing, not even the attempts of her best friend (the rowdy Yashiro Miko, played by Fairouz Ai), has really helped. But, in an even more surprising turn of events, the girl from earlier intervenes, sprouting fishscales and a long, sickle-wicked claw to drive the water ghost away.

This isn’t anything as simple as a rescue, though. Shiori wants to eat Hinako, too. She’s just not quite tender enough, yet. So begins a particular flavor of twisted love story.

These first two episodes, especially the second, largely take us through the paces of Hinako’s daily life, and how it changes in the presence of Shiori. Hinako technically never straight up says she’s infatuated with Shiori, but lines like the one quoted at the top of this article make it pretty clear how she feels. The dynamic Watatabe is building here is an interesting one. Hinako wants Shiori to kill and eat her. Shiori is explicitly interested in keeping Hinako alive until her flavor reaches its peak. She explicitly compares Hinako to livestock, in fact.

The important bit here is that Shiori is going to eat her eventually, but not right now. This actually bothers Hinako, not because she’s afraid or repulsed, but because if she’s going to be eaten she’d really rather it be soon. Despite the grim tone and the slow, creaking nature of the storytelling, there’s also an almost bratty overtone to the whole thing, as though Hinako is a needy submissive and Shiori, her domme, is teasingly avoiding giving her what she wants most.

This is, of course, the point. Watatabe’s premise is a take on the whole “domestic girlfriend” fantasy—found more often in heteroromantic romance manga, but it can be seen in yuri as well—wherein a depressed character is lifted to life and warmth by someone who insists on taking care of them. (There is in fact an entire style of romance manga and light novels built on this premise. If you’ve ever seen anything tagged “Rehabilitation” on Anilist or MyAnimeList, that’s what that means.) The roles of the nurturer and romantic partner are rolled into one in these scenarios, and Watatabe‘s playful skewering of them involves giving the caretaker/partner character an explicitly malicious overtone. Remember, within the world of the story itself this isn’t actually a metaphor: Shiori literally wants to kill Hinako and eat her, head to toe. But Hinako, depressed and longing to be reunited with her family, either figuratively in death or literally in the hereafter, is fine with that, and in fact wants that. In its way, Watatabe‘s story is quite a wicked little thing.

I don’t think it would work nearly so well without the audio component. The music here is straightforward but devastatingly effective, an arsenal of simple piano and string pieces that hammer home the oppressive summer that Hinako has been living for so long, and remind us that there is a final, sharp end to her relationship with Shiori. The voice acting here is excellent, too. Ishikawa Yui lends a breathy, ethereal tone to Shiori that really sells the idea of her as some otherworldly creature. She can also make Shiori sound forceful, which is helpful when the character needs to project ferocity (as at the end of the first episode), or make clear to Hinako that she doesn’t get to make all of her own decisions anymore (as at the end of the second). Ueda Reina makes Hinako sound exactly the right amount of withdrawn and closed-off. For an example, visually speaking, her daydreams about ocean life intruding into her everyday existence are reasonably effective but hardly flashy. It’s really the flat, deep-sighing tone of voice Ueda brings to the role that ties it all together.

Having the aural advantage is good. The elephant in the room here is that the show doesn’t look fantastic. It doesn’t look bad, I wouldn’t say—although its frequent use of frame-blending pushes things—but it’s definitely a shoestring production and looks the part, and doesn’t hit the visual heights of, say, the best episodes of the similarly-abbreviated Watanare. (Although that had its lesser moments, too.) Similarly, the actual shot composition is effective but largely unspectacular except for a few particularly striking moments. None of this is all that surprising for a low-resource anime at this stage in the medium’s history, but it is at least worth knowing going into it, and if it pushes people toward the manga instead, I don’t think that’s necessarily such a bad thing, even if they are missing out on the lovely sound design here. It is, in any case, a minor weakness. Or at least it is if I’m the one being asked.

The second episode ends set against the interesting love triangle building between Hinako, Shiori, and Miko, who spends much of the episode being jealous of the mysterious relationship that Hinako and Shiori seem to have suddenly developed.

She, in fact, asks Hinako to a festival. Hinako turns her down—it would seem that the accident that caused the deaths of her family is somehow related to this very same festival—but Shiori, not content to let her prized pig simply sit and girlrot, forces her to go. We don’t know how that’s going to work out for either of them, yet. (Or for Miko, for that matter.) But I certainly plan on tuning in to find out.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [9/22/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) 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 at least some familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hi folks, I missed last week, and as I alluded to the week before that, I’m experiencing a bit of end-of-season burnout. Still, I wanted to try to get an at least mostly complete Weekly Orbit to you today. We have some season finales and a few less permanent things. I hope you enjoy.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of The Night – Season 2, Episode 12 (Finale)

A really sweet sendoff for Call of The Night, here.

I really like that we’re not just abandoning Anko as a character now that her arc is “over,” and I will be honest, while it’s not for nearly as grandiose reasons, her comments about feeling like you’ve gotten older but not really grown up, and about wasting the last decade of her life, really hit home very hard for me. Not to be dramatic, but as I’ve sometimes discussed elsewhere on this site I sometimes feel the same way due to my disabilities. Accordingly, I think this is maybe the most I’ve ever liked the character.

As for Nazuna and Ko, I am happy to see their relationship developing as it has. Ending the season by cutting to black on the chomp (because bites are their private thing, now, you see) followed by the “Call of The Night” needle drop was just brilliantly classy. Good episode, good season, good show.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episode 12 (Season Finale)

Another example of that with Dandadan here. A great finale from what’s just been a pretty consistently great season of a great show. A robot vs. kaiju showdown just makes sense as a way to end an arc for something as rambunctious as Dandadan. I particularly like how the robot goes from very toku-esque (and a bit goofy looking) to a very Daicon-y thing with a flaming head by the end of the battle. And of course we end on the introduction of another new character to the anime, who I am excited to get more spotlight next time around.

Admittedly! The upcoming arc is maybe my least favorite of the manga? It’s….an odd one, to say the least. But it has its high points, too, so I’m sure Dandadan will be reliable with delivering bangers for many seasons to come.

My Dress-Up Darling – Season 2, Episode 12 (Season Finale)

And bringing up the third spot on the tic tac toe board, Dress-Up Darling also delivers a lovely end to a lovely season. I don’t have a ton to say about the finale, I’m happy that the two character arcs here resolved the way they did though. I think Akira actually just being a huge lesbian is a pretty unsurprising plot twist, but I was still really delighted with how they handled it. The Coffin cosplay scenes were also really great, I think this is easily the most blood I’ve ever seen in a gentle romcom!

Overall just a fantastic season of television. I’m hoping the third season, should they make more, isn’t too far off. We’ll see!

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 12 (Series Finale)

This was the first full-length TV anime of the season to end, at least as far as stuff I was watching. My verdict? This was fine! Not great, not awful. It was fine.

When the show started I said something to the effect of, if you can’t pull off “good,” “weird” is a solid second thing to aim for. I think maybe more than I expected, Necronomico is a great example of that. This is a show that has much less to say than it thinks it does, has generally messy and unfocused characterization, and its core conceits are all just generally kind of stupid. But it was largely entertaining week to week just off of novelty and audacity, and I think that’s worth something. This is a truly textbook Seasonal Anime, capital S, capital A. I cannot imagine anyone remembering this aired by this time next year, except maybe because of the ChatGPT subs controversy when the first episode dropped.

About the final episode, I can’t say I have a ton to comment on. I will say that I think any finale in which the main character gets to pilot her girlfriend, grown to kaiju size for the sake of a fighting game match, is an at least solid finale. I also like that, perhaps intentionally but perhaps not, the game Nyarlathotep—sorry, Tick Tock Man—comes up with seems kind of shitty. Everyone loves fighting games where you have to button mash so hard your fingers bleed, right? I also really appreciated the gag where Miko somehow magics up a proper fight stick after being frustrated with the gamepad. Also the symbol sealing thing felt like a missed opportunity to incorporate the Yellow Sign into the show. That would’ve been a fun gag.

The epilogue was honestly a little much. I appreciated seeing Miko reunited with her girlfriend, and the hints that Cthulu might still be in there (and a similar hint with Gua’s host streamer) are fun and tantalizing if they ever decide they want to follow this show up. (Frankly, it seems very unlikely that this show did well enough to warrant that, but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong. I think the actual IP is owned by Cygames, so maybe they don’t care about that.) But I really had no desire to see most of the other characters again; the mangaka, the actress, etc. are just not memorable and I think if we really felt the need to establish that they were still alive, a simple montage of a couple seconds, tops, would’ve sufficed just fine. I’m also a little mad they never killed Eita, he really seemed like he was asking for it and if they do make more of this, I simply refuse to buy into any attempted redemption arc. Try harder, man.

In any case, yeah, that’s Necronomico. A solidly decent show that I will probably think about only very occasionally for the remainder of my life. Hardly the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but definitely in the bottom third or so of anime I’ve seen this year. I really liked Cthulu, and that’s probably the most credit I can give it.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 12

I know I’m overusing the word here, but this is another lovely episode from Ruri. Here, Ruri comes across an old crystal radio owned by her grandfather while snooping around her attic. This is a bit of a shift for the show in that this episode is as much about radio as it is about mineralogy, but I think it ties the two fields together very nicely. In addition to exploring the overlap between these fields, this is also the first time Aoi (Ruri’s gyaru-looking friend from school) gets to be much of a character, which is also nice.

I also think that the scene at the end, where Ruri finally gets the radio working again out near a shrine, is a very nice summation of the “point” of Ruri Rocks as an overall work.

What we do today can connect us, however fleetingly, to the endless yesterdays before us, whether that time scale is across human lifetimes or across aeons.

On a more grounded level, it is also nice to see Ruri working through her insecurities: after saying in last week’s episode that what she doesn’t isn’t research because that’s something only “smart people” do, she here opts to take geology as an elective at school. I should also commend the use of the ending theme as diagetic music. That was brilliant.

Turkey! Time to Strike – Episode 11

Have you ever played bowling with your life on the line?

This is truly just a delightful show. I think something that’s largely gone unsaid about it is that despite the very different literal events than most other anime in this broad girls’ drama genre, it is fundamentally wired the same way. The characters have similar arcs and the bonds between them are not unlike what we would have in a much more traditional show in this genre. The main difference is in the stakes, which are outright fatal here as opposed to the much lower ones present in what would otherwise be Turkey‘s peers.

A decade ago—to the month, in fact—SCHOOL-LIVE!, Gakkou Gurashi as it’s also known, pulled off a similar trick. That anime similarly borrows language from outright horror material to obfuscate the fact that it is, fundamentally, still a story about friendship and caring for the people close to you. The difference, of course, is that in most anime where girls compete in sports tournaments, their lives are not literally at stake if they lose.

The latter is what leads to Turkey’s second biggest tonal pivot, coming in behind only the initial switchup in the first episode. Just when things seem like they might be resolved a bit too conveniently by all of our heroes getting strikes in this tournament that the enemy feudal lord has agreed to, he changes the rules and puts them at a marked disadvantage, betraying their trust and any notion that he’s someone that could be seen as respectable.

I am pretty damn sure this is all a fakeout, of course. The finale will end with our heroines battered but not beaten, and they will tearfully depart to their own time. (There is always a second throw, recall.) But if I’m wrong, that’s actually even more interesting, so barring some generational last-episode fumble, I am still deeply interested in what Turkey will do in its last moments.

I mentioned Gakkou Gurashi. That anime is a classic, and I don’t think Turkey! is quite that good, but it’s definitely one of the more interesting things to air this year. I don’t think it’s out of the question to say it’s one of the better ones, too.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [9/01/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) 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 at least some familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hey there, friends! Another pretty light week this week, but one in which I’ve got some interesting stuff outside of the usual Seasonal Anime bracket to share as well. Enjoy.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of the Night – Episode 9

Bear with me here. I’ve always found the co-opting of the “arcs” system that shonen anime fans tend to use a little frustrating. Admittedly, I don’t know if this is actually true, but my impression at least has always been that things are sliced up into arcs as a fan-led convention. So when an anime’s English marketing actually refers to something as an “arc,” I roll my eyes a little. All storylines are arcs when you get down to it, so what are we saying here, right?

Well, Call of the Night makes the argument that this part of its story should be called The Halloween Arc because it takes place entirely on Halloween. You know what? Fair enough. I’ll let them have this one.

This is all tangential of course to the fact that this is probably the best Call of the Night has been since its return. (If it’s not, its main competition is episode four. Throughout its second season, Call of The Night has proven to be surprisingly adept at tragic yuri. I would love Kotoyama to attempt a full series in the genre at some point.) Anko springs her plan into motion on the night of a Halloween festival, but we’re still in the dark about what that plan actually is. Thus, most of Anko’s actions throughout this episode—and we see enough of them that she’s basically the second protagonist here—seem engineered to make you, the viewer, wonder what in the utter fuck she’s trying to accomplish. This is more entertaining than it may sound on paper.

It’s been established that a vampire’s main weakness is memorabilia from their human days. With most of the vampiric side of the cast having gone out of their way to dispose of those, Anko begins enacting a strange plan where she actually shoots two of the vampires—Niko and Seri—in full public view. (The public in question, being about as smart as any fictional audience, assume a movie is being filmed Or Something.) They recover, of course. You can’t kill a vampire with something as simple as a revolver. But the provocation has had its intended effect, and by episode’s end Anko is running from Seri’s boyfriend (Takkun, also a vampire) and the rest of the vampires. We end on a confrontation in her and Nazuna’s old classroom, where the two reunite and stare each other down.

It’s a hell of a cliffhanger, and it promises even better things ahead, but what I really need to emphasize here is just how wildly entertaining Anko is during all this? I was a bit slower to warm to the character than a lot of people in my age bracket, but she’s an utter riot here. Sure, she’s the antagonist, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be silly with it. Particular highlights include threatening to shoot some random guy after he hits on a girl half is age only to reveal that that gun is actually just a gun-shaped cigarette lighter, and a sequence near the end of the episode where she just runs like hell after tossing Takkun into a trashcan.

CITY THE ANIMATION – Episode 8

I think I should mention that I’ve been watching the dub of CITY. That’s very relevant in this episode because it ends with a musical number! And to my (pleasant) surprise they actually dubbed it! That’s not always a given in anime dubs.

Now, the number itself was some kind of bizarre Hamilton-meets-Japanese folk tales-meets The Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week” kind of thing, but it’s the thought that counts.

Oh yeah and the rest of the episode was pretty funny, too. The “Bon Jovi” joke in the band names segment got me so hard that I had to pause the video to collect myself. Episode nine is pretty great, too, for the record! I’m hitting my limit for how much writing I can do about anime in a given week here, I think (this is the last bit of writing I’m doing other than the closer before this article goes up), but episode nine is a giant, wacky race. In the vein of something like….well, Wacky Races. The episode sprinkles in some backstory for the characters we’ve gotten to know over CITY’s run and is pretty sweet in addition to the usual humor as a result. This is especially true of our goofball schoolgirl lesbians Matsuri and Eri, who, soon to be parted, enter the race to make some final memories together and end up winning the whole thing. It’s cute!

Dandadan – Episode 9

Despite an absolutely fireworks fight scene at the start of it, episode nine is mostly a slower and more comedic break between the previous and upcoming arcs of Dandadan. This makes sense, and a decision to slow down a little and focus on the series’ character strengths is a good one on the heels of so much fighting.

That’s not to say this episode is devoid of important developments, though. Having finally become strong enough to take him on, Okarun manages to convince Evil Eye to not constantly attempt to slaughter all humans in his vicinity. Instead, the two of them will fight once a week. Like gentlemen. (More or less.) This paves the way for Jiji to return to school, which sets up the often hilarious second half of the episode, wherein Evil Eye emerges at school and Jiji’s classmates have to wonder why he’s suddenly talking about butchering all who stand before him, and why he suddenly looks so goth. It’s basically just one joke iterated upon for several minutes, but it’s a pretty good joke.

in between these things, Mantisian and some of his friends—including the Minecraft Steve-esque Mr. Ludris—rebuild the Ayase household’s home, with the help of an alien wonder-material called nanoskin. While this seems like just a cute way to wave away the whole “no longer having a house” situation that Momo and her grandmother would otherwise be in, it’s actually about to be rather important as a plot device. In the interest of not spoiling the rest of this season, I’ll say no more on that, but overall, yeah, this was a very fun episode. I’m excited to see where we head next.

Necronomico and The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 9

As I assumed would be the case last week, Episode eight of Necronomico sets us up with what seems to be the structure we’ll be working with for the remainder of the series.

Our four remaining heroes have to tackle the four Old Ones, and they end up splitting up and doing each trial alone. This means that the first half of this episode is actually a focus story about Hastur on the villains’ side, and, on the heroes’ side, Sano Seishirou. Given that the latter’s characterization so far has amounted to a pedophile joke about 5 episodes ago, which even the show itself seems to have forgotten about, this is a good chance to give him some actual characterization.

And you know what? He acquits himself pretty nicely here. Hastur’s game is in of itself not terribly interesting, being essentially the card game War with a smaller deck and some extra steps, but it’s nice to see Seishirou actually fit into the “heroic teacher that goes down fighting” archetype, even as Hastur taunts him all the while. (The drawling, low growl that Okitsu Kazuyuki delivers for how Hastur mockingly calls Seishirou “senseeiii” is one of the best pieces of voice acting in this whole show so far.)

The card game does manage to have some legitimate emotional stakes, especially when Hastur conjures up mental recreations of Seishirou’s family for the final hand. Pretty impressive considering that it just boils down to a coin flip, essentially, but Seishirou ekes out a win by psychoanalyzing his opponent and is free to be reunited with his family.

Except he isn’t, because SURPRISE! HE DOESN’T ACTUALLY HAVE A FAMILY!

In the sort of beautifully brick-stupid twist you only get in this kind of show, it is revealed that Seishirou’s family, who we only met a few minutes prior, are in fact completely imaginary! Surprise! It’s the most hilariously awful system rep of all time!

Suffice to say, I think this is so dumb that it kind of comes back out the other side and becomes funny. How can you hate dialogue like this?

Others will feel differently I’m sure, and Seishirou’s victory over Hastur is pyrrhic anyway: he collapses and dies shortly after Hastur’s disposed of, leaving the remining three Old Ones (and possibly also Tick Tock Man? I wouldn’t put that past this show) for the anime’s final few episodes.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 9

Another complete delight from the slice-of-substrate anime this week. This marks a return to what we might call Ruri Rocks’ usual formula, but the expressiveness of the animation is at an all-time high here, and there are a lot of gorgeous moments throughout the episode. I’m particularly fond of Ruri’s dream of infinite fields of opal and how it eventually reflects itself in reality toward the end of the episode. This is also another episode that deals with a manmade object—this time a massive dam—and its impact on mineralogy, which is a theme the show seems to want to return to again and again. I admit I find it pretty compelling stuff, so I can’t complain. Also, Nagi tries on a bunch of different outfits in this episode and looks gorgeous in all of them, god bless.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 8

I really enjoy that Satsuki’s evil plan to break Mai’s spirit consists of….telling an embarrassingly sweet story, so she’ll be distracted, so she can headshot her in a video game. Truly, a woman after my own heart (and of course the evil chiptune music makes a return to compliment it).

I find myself short on actual commentary for Watanare, which is a little frustrating because it’s honestly an absolutely fascinating show. In this episode we have a series of amusingly janky Red vs. Blue-ass 3DCGI segments, of our characters playing this video game they’ve agreed to compete at, juxtaposed against sincere emotional stakes, which are themselves complicated by the series’ overall messiness. (A term I normally hate and try to avoid, but I really can’t think of a better adjective to describe the relationships on display here.) If someone handed you just the script for this episode, you might think it was some kind of very bizarre sports anime, given how well the game and the emotional development are woven together.

Turkey! – Episode 8

Turkey has juggled an impressive amount of moods and tones over the course of its run thus far. Episode eight largely sits on the “quiet melancholy” end of the spectrum, before a sudden swerve—a fakeout, I am guessing—into horror at the episode’s end.

This isn’t my favorite episode of the series, and what we learn here is not anything we couldn’t have guessed from context. Still, the reveal of Mai’s backstory is well done, and I like the way everyone is connecting with their feudal counterparts. Also, I’m not sure what it was, but Nanase’s line about liking (or at least acclimating to) living in the past because she “feels useful” there really hit me. There is something immensely sad about that.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Key The Metal Idol – Episodes 3 & 4

The main thing that has interested me about this show so far is its sheer, overwhelming atmosphere. That’s still true; there’s a real hypnagogic feeling to much of the plot. Key—who may not really be a robot after all? It’s still unclear—suddenly develops psychic powers, which she seems to unintentionally use to kill an idol singer (herself a remote-controlled PPOR android) mid-concert. The sleazy gravure idol manager from episode one hangs on to the lip of a rooftop for dear life. A tech CEO protests that robots don’t need self-awareness, damn it! All the while picking apart the gears of his own robotic “son.” These strange and haunting images, combined with the forceful sheets of pulsing, heavy synthesizer, give the entire thing the energy of a jumbled-up nightmare. I know people compare these two all the time, but it really does feel quite similar to Serial Experiments Lain. The emotional beats are arranged very differently, though, and in general Key the Metal Idol, at least so far, feels in some sense more raw and primitive. Time will tell if that impression holds.

22/7 – Ano Hi no Kanojotachi: day09: Miu Takigawa – Short

It has been five years since early lockdown-era idol anime 22/7 tried, and failed, to reinvent its genre.

22/7 the idol group, though, have ticked on. They still exist, and have persisted through a variety of lineup changes, a notably rocky history that has resulted in a lot of changes in direction for their sound and, admittedly, given them more of a fanbase than you might assume if you don’t follow idol stuff very closely. Takigawa Miu, the group’s center, was one of two remaining original members. She has now left. “Graduated,” as it is somewhat-euphemistically referred to among idol fans.

This short is ostensibly a sendoff. It’s not even narratively related to the 22/7 TV series (it has more in common with, and is presented as, an episode of the 2018 slice of life shorts that were created in the early lifespan of the projects), but it marks the end of something, so it’s still significant, as both a point to reflect on what 22/7 was and is and what its existence can tell us in general about the circles of art and media it is a part of.

Miu’s vocal performances—both voice acting and singing—were provided by Saijou Nagomi. (She technically reprises the role here, but doesn’t speak, contributing only a few soft sobs at one point. These could easily have been provided by a fill-in or pulled from archive audio, but I’m choosing to assume some amount of professionalism here.) Five years is a long time in the entertainment industry, and watching this short, and its quiet melancholy, I cannot help but wonder how she must’ve felt to have it playing behind her during her farewell concert, as that is the context for which it was originally produced.

It is worth noting that Miu is Ms. Saijou’s only voice acting credit of any note, and if she’s ever released any other music, I was not able to find it by doing a cursory search. Still, a glance at her Twitter page indicates she was keeping it professional up until her very last day in the group. There is lots of talk over there of cherishing every moment she spent with her fans and so on. As of the time of this writing, the most recent post is a handful of images from the farewell concert.

The short itself, portrays Miu in transit; first coming home on a bus, and then, after quietly crying to herself in bed, going somewhere that looks an awful lot like a college or new school of some other sort, in what is either a dream sequence or a flash-forward. It’s definitely playing into these sorts of thoughts; where is she going from here? Is she happy? Does she have regrets? On some level, all of that is as much an emotional manipulation as any of the more obvious work done by any number of more traditional idol anime—before or since—that 22/7 sought to surpass. (And we have to give credit to Wonder Egg Priority director Wakabayashi Shin that this is imbued with such emotion in the first place. The short has no dialogue, as mentioned.) Still, it’s overall a surprisingly moving piece of work, and one that feels ever so slightly out of step with where the medium’s sensibilities currently are, with its vibrant and shiny lighting that feels so tied to the visual aesthetics of the last decade as opposed to this one. I said it’s a long time in the entertainment industry, but honestly, five years is a long time for anyone. The short is a potent, if brief, reminder of this.

The last scene of the short shows us Miu, on a bus, looking back at the camera. We don’t know where she’s going, but she is going. It’s hard not to feel happy for her. And as strange as it may be to say, that shot, as it fades out for the final time, is probably the most 22/7 has ever affected me. Perhaps tellingly, it did it without subverting, reinventing, or deconstructing anything.

Manga

Dear Flowers That Bloom in Days of Yore – Chapters 1-10

I think, in a world where there are already a lot of yuri manga doing this, there is a danger that the whole “subversively playing with Class S tropes” setup would start to feel hoary and cliched in its own right. This has not happened broadly, and it certainly hasn’t happened with Dear Flowers That Bloom in Days of Yore. Protagonist Kasumi begins a letter writing relationship with an anonymous “onee-sama” after discovering a note from her in a copy of foundational Class S text Hana Monogatari. In doing so Kasumi and her “onee-sama”, who she eventually meets in person, discovering her to actually be an older middle-schooler named Haruyo. The two wrap themselves in these roles, roles that are heavier, bigger, and older than either of them. Heavier, bigger, and older, but not necessarily more real. And that tension is threatening to tear Kasumi apart.

Were the manga merely playing with Class S tropes, I would think it was clever but not terribly ambitious. Where it clearly excels is in its ability to use this framework to subtly but definitively expose Kasumi’s own internalized homophobia. Something happened to her. We don’t yet know what, but we know it involved a now deceased friend. In the most recent chapters, Kasumi has met another girl who also met her own “special one” through a letter slipped into the copy of Hana Monogatari. I won’t spoil the specifics, but the most recent chapter seems to certainly imply that the girls who meet via this method are doomed to tragedy. The book, in other words, is cursed. Literally or metaphorically? Who knows? The distinction isn’t relevant except for fiddly questions of what genres this manga technically belongs to.

I have gone this whole writeup without mentioning that mangaka Igarashi Jun is….honestly a very rare talent in terms of presentation. Aside from being an absolute master of chiaroscuro—simple but striking contrasts of solid lights and darks recur throughout the manga. You would think this would be very common in a medium that’s solidly black and white, but it really isn’t.—they also employ, admittedly sparsely, a number of paneling techniques I just really don’t see in manga very often. They’re also an expert at conveying mood through visual metaphor; before meeting Haruyo, Kasumi imagines her as a thorned rose bush in the shape of a woman. When the two sink their most firmly into their roles, the scene is wintry and amberlike; beautiful but remote. I think one could recommend this manga alone on the strength of the fact that it’s clearly written by a master of their form, but the subtle and resonant details of the storytelling shouldn’t go unappreciated either.

That’ll be all for today’s column. Have a pleasant week, friends.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/25/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) 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 at least some familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hi folks, bit of a light week here, and also one with not very many pictures. Hopefully that’s fine, I’ve been going through it a little bit.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of The Night – Season 2, Episode 8

Call of The Night does not go full horror anime very often, but when it does….brr.

So, yeah, Kyouko Mejiro is Anko. We could probably have seen this coming, but this episode confirms it in a tragic, delirious fever dream of blood and violence. I honestly have very little to say here, other than to remark that this episode absolutely excelled at imparting just how tragic Kyouko and Nazuna’s falling out was. I also suspect that there’s more to Kyouko’s father suddenly becoming a blood-starved vampire than we were shown here. After all, how exactly he was turned is a bit up in the air.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episode 8

I don’t think I remember the fight featured throughout the bulk of episode eight here being as memorable as this in the manga.

Which is strange, because when considered on its own terms, it’s pretty unique even for Dandadan. What we have here is a strength-building throwdown against a cadre of ghosts, taking the form of classical musicians. Primarily, this fight serves to do two things; give Aira something to do in this storyline, since she’s been absent for much of season two so far, and, more importantly, build and her and Okarun’s sense of “rhythm” to make them better fighters.

The show accomplishes this in a delightfully literal way with the ghost musicians, and I have to say that the chalk-white look really works well for the surreality of this episode. At about the halfway mark, the ghost of Beethoven summons a quartet of singing giants, who break into “Ode to Joy”, one of the ancestral bangers of western music, and it was around then that I realized I was watching another casual triumph in an anime absolutely stuffed with them.

If you want pure hype, though, next week is looking to top even this, as Okarun finishes this episode by promising to use his newfound strength to throw down with Evil Eye. Predictably—though not in an unwelcome way—we end things on a cliffhanger.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 8

If we want to say that Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show has a main flaw, and I think we probably do, I would say it’s that it has a poor command of its own strengths.

What the show is good at: putting its characters into wacky (and life-threatening) situations, basic and broad character writing, effectively tying the death games’ stakes to the lives of its characters.

What Necronomico is not good at: social commentary, more complex character writing, anything with immediate (that is to say, visible to us) stakes outside the lives of its own characters.

This is a problem, because episode eight is mostly about the latter group of things. We zoom out here, taking a broad view of the world as seen in Necronomico. Our main heroines go on a TV show and the series attempts to recontextualize its own past writing, shaming its audience by having a sleazeball TV exec character refer to Kanna as a marketable tragic heroine. The problem there is that “marketable tragic heroine” is pretty much exactly what Kanna is. Her more complex traits—relatively speaking—mostly consist of being a bit rude sometimes. She’s not a perfect angel, but that’s hardly an actual character flaw. Puzzlingly, Necronomico seems to think it is.

Similarly, the attempt to drag and drop Eita into the role of a cult leader is just baffling. I’m not going to say it’s unrealistic—the rise of Elon Musk has proven that people will bleed and die even for the dorkiest and least charismatic leaders possible as long as they give them suitable permission to enact violence—but it’s not necessarily super compelling. He remains a dead spot in the series’ cast.

And there’s not really a lot that happens in this episode other than these two things? Sure, getting a proper introduction to our Vatican witch hunter type character, Joe, is nice, but beyond that it’s all setup. Thankfully, the final game seems suitably deranged, as our cast have been dropped in a freezing wasteland—Kadath, in fact—and have to somehow take down the four main Old God antagonists on their own. So I am hoping this episode is more of a speedbump than a sign that the show’s final third is going to suck. At bare minimum, I hope we at least get to see Cthulu show off at some point during this game, as she was mostly absent from this episode.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 8

We continue the theme of artificial minerals in this week’s Ruri Rocks. To be honest, most of this episode didn’t capture my imagination terribly much despite being perfectly fine, but I liked the scenes in the factory at the end. Ruri’s concern over whether she’s “allowed” to like Zincite reminds me, funnily enough, of some similar thoughts I’ve had about, say, Detroit agate.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 7

I’m not entirely sure what to think of this plot development, but the scene with Mai and Satsuki fighting over Renako is pretty great. I have to give a special nod to the, I’m not even sure what to call it, evil Super Nintendo music? It plays when Satsuki shows Mai the photo of her and Renako kissing. A great scene in an episode I thought was merely pretty good, which when the last several have been great is a slight step down.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Dominion Tank Police (OVA)

Well, this was just a bit puzzling. An interesting thing about these old OVAs is that they’re often baffling in ways that, on the surface, seem completely different from how a contemporary anime would be baffling, but taken in a broader view you end up with a lot of the same root causes.

For Dominion Tank Police, that’s basic incoherence. I can only guess here, but I think the two story arcs adapted for this four part OVA must be from quite far apart in the original manga, since that’s the only way I can think to account for this thing’s bizarre tone. We start with an extremely politically-charged argument between a mayor and a police chief about the role of police in society, wherein the chief advocates using nukes on criminals(!!), and from there it seems like the series is attempting to sort of hamfistedly parody buddy cop narratives. But this reading doesn’t really survive contact with episode two, which seems to take the cops’ side.

We ditch all this entirely for the second part of the series, consisting of episodes three and four, which exchange the over-the-top comedy action of the first half for something slower and more philosophical. I wouldn’t say the change in tone works to the show’s favor exactly, but it makes a kind of half-sense in the moment, even if it does leave almost the entire cast feeling like they’ve been replaced with different characters halfway through. I particularly like the weird explorations into conceptual sci fi toward the end; artificial humans, a winged environmental fairy named Greenpeace, blunt and unsubtle musings on the nature of man. Will any of this be elaborated upon to feel “satisfying” in the conventional sense? No, and given the, to put it lightly, troubling political sympathies of the series, I can’t cleanly recommend Dominion Tank Police. But I admit it’s entertaining on a moment to moment basis in a stoner-flick kind of way, and I appreciate that about it. Again, not something I’d show to just anyone, but it has its charms. Charms helped along, admittedly, by the across-the-board strong visual presentation. A sakuga-head watching this would find enough to enthuse over to keep their attention, and even if that’s not your specific focus, the show is sharply directed throughout and has a great use of strong color; lots of dark navy blues and purples, burnt oranges, and fluorescent blues and reds. (Like a police siren, you see.)

Even aside from everything else I’ve outlined here, the catgirl criminals are an excellent pair of characters (and so fashionable!) and the show’s music is unimpeachable.

Manga

Big Love From Ultra Deep Space – Chapters 1-5

This….is okay!

Only five chapters in, it’s hard to make many claims about Big Love From Ultra Deep Space. The manga is about an alien princesses being betrothed to an ordinary (if gloomy) high school girl. So far, my main takeaways are that the character designs are all lovely, and tonally it’s pretty cute, with a lot of nice domestic scenes between our leads as the princess settles into her life on Earth.

It does however try to tackle some more serious subject matter, too, with the pair’s classmates initially harboring some suspicion of the princess, the lead girl having a troubled past, and so on. Unfortunately the handling of these aspects has so far been a bit contrived. There’s definitely still time for the manga to improve in this regard, and the fifth and most recent chapter is definitely a bit better than the previous four, so it may be a case of the mangaka—Ashidaka Woz, no relation to Scott The, presumably—finding their narrative legs.

If the manga has a central theme, it’s this:

There’s something really beautiful in the sentiment expressed here, the idea that just inherently, we often need others to see the best parts of ourselves. That people mean different things to different other people. I think if it pursues this core theme, Deep Space could really put together something special.

As is, it’s mostly cute and not a lot else, but we’ll see how it develops as time goes on. If nothing else, the art is beautiful, so it’s not hard to recommend off the back of that alone.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.