Posted on June 8, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 10 – “The Peak”

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!

Following last week’s big fakeout, we have a more transitional and low-key turn for Cinderella Gray this week. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we were to have another big important race here, it would risk making the show repetitive (a trap its predecessor, the third season of no-subtitle Uma Musume, sometimes fell into). When we open, we find Oguri Cap in a funk, saddened that she was disqualified from what she was directly told were the “best” and most important races, she feels aimless and demotivated despite sticking religiously to her training.

There are a few factors that get her out of that malaise. One is the relatively brief race that is in this episode, and Oguri’s not actually in this one, not even in anyone’s mind. Instead, Roppei takes her to watch the Takarazuka Kinen. A plot point in some prior seasons, the Takarazuka’s lineup is determined by fan vote. The favorite is a one-off character, one Akitsu Teio. But the one who actually wins is Tamamo Cross.

Cross, the streak of blue lightning first introduced to us way, way back near the start of the season, has nonetheless been largely a background presence up until this point. She and Oguri still have not directly spoken, and seeing Cross win in person is the first time Oguri Cap seems truly aware of just what she’s up against. Despite its brevity, her from-behind win here is truly spectacular, and very much reminiscent of Oguri’s own victories.

This isn’t the only thing that puts some zip back in Oguri’s step. She also gets a phone call from her former rival Fujimasa March, making her first appearance of any real length in the series since her departure from it in episode six. Unsurprisingly, March has kept racing. What’s maybe a little moreso is that March is actually the one calling Oguri for reassurance. March is lost and without motivation too. We learn here that her dream of winning the Tokai Derby didn’t come true; she failed to even make the podium, coming in fourth, and as she calls Cap she’s on the verge of quitting entirely.

Of course, our protagonist, with her head of silver and heart of gold, is not having that from her first rival, someone who clearly still means a lot to her. In convincing March to continue racing, Oguri does the same to herself. The specific situations are fairly different of course—Oguri, if anything, is having too much success, whereas March’s anxiety is caused by her finally hitting a wall—but the emotional connection between the two makes it all make sense. Both will continue racing, even with their first dreams out of reach, March whips up a cute metaphor about moving on to the next mountain, and for a show—a whole series, really—that’s in part about staying determined in the face of whatever life throws at you, it absolutely works. (There’s also a cute sequence of cameos by Norn Ace and friends, and it’s good to know that they’re all still getting on well.)

We also get a rare sequence from Tamamo Cross’s camp. Her trainer thinks Tamamo will probably be competing with Oguri for the first time in the coming Fall Tenno Sho, a G1 race (reinforced when, later in the episode, we learn Oguri is going to be running an important qualifying race for the fall G1s). Just as important to the scene, though, arguably, is that somebody clearly really wanted to draw Tamamo Cross working out. Live your truth, buddy.

^{My understanding is that this workout sequence}^is^{in the manga, but is not nearly as involved. I can only reiterate what I’ve already said.}

The remainder of the episode is fairly lighthearted. Roppei puts Oguri and Belno on “summer vacation,” giving them a break after Oguri’s constant racing and training since arriving at Tracen. Oguri being Oguri, when given free reign to explore Tokyo, she mostly does so as a foodie, spending much of the episode’s second half on a date with Belno, in a blissful heaven of hamburgers, tornado fries, crepes, rolled ice cream, and so on. She’s in disguise during this whole outing, though her modest disguise of “a hat and some glasses” doesn’t really work, perhaps given the relative scarcity of silver-haired horse girls in Tokyo, and Oguri and Belno attract a decently-sized crowd regardless, to which Oguri Cap reacts this way.

^{I didn’t edit that. That’s really what she says, or at least it’s really how the subs translate it.}

The crowd alerts Sensuke that Oguri is nearby, and the two have their first face to face conversation here, where he lets slip who all Oguri is going to be facing in her upcoming qualifying race. (It’s loosely implied by the framing that he shouldn’t really be sharing this information, but Sensuke is nothing if not unscrupulous.) The episode ends with that race just about to start, and as usual, we won’t know the results until next week. Still, with Oguri’s inner competitive fire newly set alight, it’s hard to imagine her losing. We’ll see how things go, won’t we?

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 May 18, 2025July 1, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 7 – “Tracen Academy”

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!

“Eclipse first, the rest nowhere.”

Tracen Academy is, to any Uma Musume fan who got onboard before Cinderella Gray, synonymous with the series itself. Tracen is the main setting for seasons 1-3, as well as Road To The Top and the New Era film. It is Uma Musume. So it’s unsurprising that, just past the halfway point of its first cour, Cinderella Gray is also shifting setting to the storied racing academy. I admit I only barely fall into the category of “Uma Musume fan who got into it before Cinderella Gray” myself, having started with the aforementioned Road To The Top OVA near the top of the year. Still, Tracen is an already immensely nostalgic setting for me, and it’s lovely to see it again. Also worth looking at are the contrasts between this episode and episode 1, instructive and fascinating as they are. We began this story in what is, comparatively speaking, a backwater for Uma Musume racing. (The “boonies,” as one character puts it.) We begin this second part of it here, in Japan’s racing capitol. Make sure to keep up, things don’t seem like they’re going to slow down any time soon.

It’s worth also briefly touching on the contrast between Tracen as depicted here and its own past appearances in Uma Musume anime. While always portrayed as a prestigious and sprawling school, here it somehow feels even more enormous, as though it’s been blown up to truly massive proportions. This feeling of massiveness serves to amplify the fish-out-of-water effect; Oguri Cap takes the sights and sounds of Tracen in stride (although Belno super doesn’t), but the point remains; they’re not in Kasamatsu anymore.

Their first few days also don’t go smoothly, why would they? In fact, quite a lot happens in this episode. Basically everything short of an actual race.

Firstly, there’s the school itself. As mentioned, sprawling, enormous, not what either Oguri nor Belno are used to. Helping them get adjusted is Roppei (it’s Musaka), subbing in as Oguri’s trainer while Kitahara gets his national license. The pair briefly meet, ad hoc, with Symboli Rudolf, who takes the time to explain the ostensible meaning behind their school’s motto.

We’ve already talked about “Eclipse first, the rest nowhere,” since it came up in episode four. Here, the phrase is framed as a command to aim for the ace, to never be content with second best, to stand alone at the top of the mountain. Interestingly, what I did not know at the time—and what you already know, if you clicked that link I put in the header—is that that’s not what it means. It actually refers to the dominance of a single, specific historical horse; that’s who Eclipse is, or rather was. This isn’t a criticism of course, Uma Musume has a long-standing habit of attempting to imbue artifacts of real horseracing with some additional meaning, (the example that comes to mind is Satono Diamond explicitly comparing her unbreakability to her namesake in season three) and the transmutation of “Eclipse” referring to a specific individual to meaning the verb “eclipse” is just another instance of that, and a pretty slick one. It’s also relevant to the episode on the whole. Oguri Cap being such a goofball can obscure the fact that she’s very, very good at what she does, and is about as strong-willed. She does not, and will not, settle for second place, literal or figurative, in anything.

This brings us to the topic of Oguri’s actual classroom. When Oguri attends her new homeroom for the first time, we meet an absolute smorgasbord of new faces. I assume each will be relevant in their turn as this arc goes on, but worth immediately mentioning are Yaeno Muteki [Hinohara Ayumi], who meets her as a new comrade and challenger with respect, and Black Ale [Mori Nanako], who absolutely does not do either of those things.

Black Ale is incredibly arrogant and is vocally unimpressed by Oguri. She has the race record to back that arrogance up, so one can kind of see where she’s coming from in not necessarily thinking Oguri is all that based on her wins back home. Still, she doesn’t actually have a good measure of who she’s messing with. And indeed this doesn’t really faze Oguri Cap at all, at first, and she responds to that little “sandboxes” insult with the kind of dry remark where you can tell she doesn’t even realize she’s just punked Ale in front of their entire class.

Much later, toward the end of the episode. Ale confronts Oguri Cap again, this time directly insulting Kasamatsu, its racers, and Oguri herself, and that Oguri does not stand for. As is tradition with this kind of thing, the two make a bet. When they meet in the upcoming Pegasus Stakes, if Black Ale wins, Oguri Cap will return home. If Cap wins, Ale has to watch her language. It’s true that Black Ale has probably the mouthiest lines of any Uma Musume in the anime so far, but implicitly what Oguri Cap is really saying is more along the lines of telling her to watch her mouth, a subtly different thing. Cap is a hometown hero in the making now, something she’s clearly aware of.

We need to back up, though. Because Black Ale is not the only horse girl Oguri tells off in this episode, and she is by far not the most prominent one.

To rewind a bit, it’s mentioned, not long after the classroom scene, that in order to enter the G1 classics and attempt to obtain the Triple Crown—that’s the Satsuki Sho, the Japanese Derby, and the Kikuka Sho—you have to, you know, register to do that. Kitahara seemingly never considered that Oguri Cap would want to do this immediately (or just didn’t know about all this paperwork in the first place), and as such Oguri has none of the relevant forms. If it’s possible, seeing Oguri Cap live one of my recurring nightmares that’s haunted me since middle school has made me love the character even more.

Still, it’s hard not to feel for her, here, and it says a lot about Cinderella Gray‘s range that it can capture both this extremely relatable exasperation and confusion and the fiery feelings of a competition stoked in the same episode. In fact, it draws a connection between the two. Because Oguri Cap, who really wants to win the Japanese Derby for Kitahara (since she can’t win the Tokai Derby now, but since they’re both called the Something Derby they must be basically the same, right?), gets it in her head that surely, there’s at least one person she can talk to to work out some kind of exception.

She’s wrong about this, or at least, wrong for the time being (it seems odd to me that the Triple Crown would be brought up at all if Oguri isn’t going to somehow at least attempt it eventually), but you really have to give her credit for trying, because the person she has in mind is Symboli Rudolf.

Symboli Rudolf is a fascinating character in the history of Uma Musume. Throughout the previous episodes of Cinderella Gray and, indeed, throughout most of the history of the franchise, she’s been largely a background presence. Season 2’s protagonist, Tokai Teoi, admired her deeply, and Rudolf has been present, usually as a somewhat remote voice of reason, throughout all three of the Uma Musume TV seasons. She’s a franchise-wide bedrock, and her immaculate race record backs up the often-made claim that she’s the strongest Uma Musume ever, but we know surprisingly little about her as a character.

What this episode suggests is that Symboli Rudolf’s air of authority is derived not only from her strength—although certainly that, too—but also the deadly seriousness with which she takes the sport. Oguri Cap explains her predicament, and for what is to my recollection the first time ever, we see Symboli Rudolf get angry about something.

^{The show is clearly very proud of this shot, because there’s a flash back to it not long later.}

If anything, Rudolf is offended that Oguri Cap thinks she can waltz in and simply upend the proper order of things because she wants to. I really can only give it up for the character visuals here once again, that is a mean-looking horse right up there. In fact, her anger is overwhelming enough that Belno, also there while Oguri is asking about all this, actually falls to her knees in fear. I do get it! It’s not just Rudolf herself, it’s the gravity with which she treats this subject. There is no better illustration than this, the visual of a nameless Triple Crown winner standing atop a mountain of broken bodies, which fades into view with a grim grandiosity.

But of course, Oguri Cap is Oguri Cap. This is where we come back to that competitive mindset, typified by the motto which, remember, Rudolf herself expounded on earlier in this same episode. Oguri Cap will take these rules and traditions, and she will break them with her legs; her words, not mine. Arrogant! Arrogant, but really fucking cool! How does that even work? Is she going to just win so much that they’ll have no choice but to bump her up? I don’t know! I’m excited to find out!

^{One gets the sense from this single exchange that Rudolf is so used to most other people buckling in her presence that someone actively defying her is a bit of a shock. Am I reading too much into it? Maybe. But I’ve never met an anime I couldn’t over-analyze.}

This article has already gotten super long, so I won’t go over every other little detail of the episode. But Oguri does meet her teammates, the other girls in Roppei’s stable; the preppy Meikun Tsukasa [Kazama Mayuko], the somber and shy Kraft Univer [Tanaka Takako], and–

[Kaiden Michiko]

It’s hard to say if these characters will be super relevant going forward or if they’ll mostly serve to help Oguri out with her training. Still, God Hannibal. What a name. I’m speechless.

In any case, the last scene of the episode cuts to the Pegasus Stakes, Oguri’s race against Black Ale. The race itself is territory for next episode, but one of the last scenes here is Oguri standing beneath the huge, open sky, drinking in the roar of the crowd, and being absolutely stoked out of her mind. It’s maybe the best possible way to tee up this particular cliffhanger; a reminder of why we love this absolute freak in the first place.

….Oh, and there’s a really cute post-credits scene where we check back in on Fujimasa March and company while they’re at what’s essentially a Denny’s. Norn gets called down bad, which I’m taking as validation of my ship, and Fujimarch ponders cutting her hair. It’s brief, but I’m very glad to see those characters even in passing.

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

Posted on May 11, 2025May 11, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 6 – “The Beast”

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!

Oguri Cap enters this episode devastated and conflicted. She leaves it a hometown hero. That’s how legends are born.

The previous episode of Cinderella Gray was a masterfully-crafted, coiling mechanism of tension. This episode is where that tension is released, and in that process we get to see some sides to our favorite characters that we haven’t seen before. But the true crux of the episode is the Gold Junior, an epic, psychological struggle on the racetrack. It ends with a huge, overwhelming moment of pure catharsis, one of the best of its kind in recent years. Remember; “Cap” meaning “peak.”

Getting there is another story. The episode opens with Oguri Cap furious, angrier than we’ve ever seen her, at Kitahara’s decision to transfer her to the nationals and stay behind. (Not to once again devote space on this site to my own thirsting, but there is a frightful beauty to Oguri’s angry faces, they’re very well-drawn and the fact that they’re such a stark contrast to how she normally acts really enhances the effect.) Her fury is easy to understand; she and Kitahara promised to take on the Tokai Derby together, and from her point of view he’s now breaking that promise. This is a recurring theme across the episode, the letters and spirit of these promises, and what breaking them means.

For Oguri, it makes it difficult for her to concentrate on the race, both in the training leading up to it and, eventually, for the race itself. For Kitahara, it’s the apex of his plague of self-doubt. No less a figure than once again, Symboli Rudolf, calls him out for his foolishness. Making either choice would’ve been better than trying to make none of them, and hinging the transfer on Oguri’s race results puts the horse girl in a truly unenviable situation.

The morning of the race is filled with contrast. Merch stalls sell adorable plushies of the rising local hero, and excitement is in the air from the audience at least, who clearly understand that they’re about to see Oguri build her legend up with another victory. But the track itself is bogged-down with mud after thudding, pounding rain from the previous night. Kitahara is in low spirits, and Oguri, now conflicted that her running is making others sad and without the confident support of her trainer, is in even lower ones.

Complicating things even further is the presence of Oguri’s rival up to this point, Fujimasa March. March, of course, is also furious. Word has by now spread that Oguri is going to be transferring to the nationals if she wins. Fujimasa demands to know why. They promised to race in the Tokai Derby together, and that promise is now falling apart before March’s eyes. Again, it’s easy to see why she’s upset, and moreover, why she’s hurt.

But she gets no sympathy from Cap herself. Deadened by having lost her reason to run, Oguri reminds her that all March has to do to keep her from transferring is to win. The presentation is immaculate here, with sweeping, low, buried-in-the-floor camera angles and easily the meanest face we’ve ever gotten from Oguri. The tension is palpable, and it says a lot that the slap across the face that Fujimarch opens the conversation with is not the highlight of this scene.

Nonetheless, the race waits for no one.

And indeed, the race itself is a struggle less between Oguri Cap and Fujimasa March, and more between Oguri Cap and herself. She’s out of form for much of the race, and imagines her legs bound by heavy iron chains dragging her down. For a while, it really does seem like Cap might actually lose, and it’s to the show’s credit that it keeps anyone who doesn’t have the real Oguri Cap’s racing history memorized guessing.

She’s so out of sorts that she doesn’t even make use of her trademark burst of speed, something which Fujimasa March notes with some incredulity, offended that her rival isn’t even trying. As it often does in these sorts of situations, it takes an external force to jostle Oguri Cap back into proper form.

That force is Kitahara, who, like Oguri, spends most of the race struggling with himself. His own doubts are quieter and get less direct attention (since he isn’t the protagonist, naturally), but he spends most of the Gold Junior sulking and not even actually looking at the race track. It takes Roppei, also in attendance, to snap him out of it, physically forcing him to look at Oguri Cap’s performance. Seeing his trainee obviously out of form and distraught is enough to spur Kitahara back to action, and he begins running too, fumbling through the crowd, bloodying his nose—that seems to happen to him a lot—and finally reaching a spot where he can cheer loud enough for Oguri to hear him. Just as Roppei shook Kitahara out of his stupor, Kitahara shakes Oguri out of hers by doing this.

For Oguri, his cheers, and the cheers from the others watching—Belno, the bully trio who have remained an important part of the supporting cast up to this point—are a reminder of why she’s running; to make herself happy, to make others happy.¹ Regaining her confidence is enough: Oguri Cap takes the day.

In a beautiful touch, her hair comes undone as she crosses the finish line, leaving her final mark on the locals a wave of flowing, cloudy gray as she streaks into first place. The victory is immensely cathartic. The series makes a point here that Oguri Cap inspires her supporters; it’s obviously talking about Kitahara, Belno, Norn Ace, and so on, but it’s also talking about the people in the crowd, and thus, implicitly, us as well. The swell of joy is very real with this one, it’s perhaps one of the best-orchestrated victories in the whole franchise.

In the aftermath, Oguri’s stage show—which she rocks, by the way, and just generally looks great doing—becomes a platform for Kitahara to tell the crowd that, yes, the rumors are true. She’s moving on and up. The crowd is initially disappointed, but he reminds them—and anyone watching at home who might be sad to see this part of the story end—that there are higher dreams to aim for. This story isn’t over yet, and there are more mountains to climb.

The reason all of this works so well is that big dreams and stories of triumph are why we’re here in the first place. As Kitahara notes, it’s a Cinderella story! It’s right in the title! It’s also a testament to how ungodly well Cinderella Gray has been written so far that I’m genuinely going to miss every single character Oguri has to leave behind now that she’s transferring to Tracen! Norn Ace’s idea to take a commemorative picture (somehow framed as a polaroid photo despite her taking it on a smartphone, just one more drop of that trademark Uma Musume time weirdness) had me full-on crying.

I am aware I keep comparing Uma Musume to some kind of long-running battle shonen anime, which is, of course, not actually what it is. But I do have to bring that comparison out again, because this episode really does feel like the end of a long, long first season where there’s a notable changing of the guard and it’s all very bittersweet. I can only really again credit the writing for evoking that feeling over a scant six episodes (of a confirmed thirteen and a rumored 23). Perhaps the toughest departure is that of Fujimasa March, who vows to continue running despite her initial plan to quit if she lost to Oguri again. It doesn’t seem like they’ll meet again, at least not as competitors, as Oguri is going somewhere that March can’t reach. Nonetheless, their mutual respect for each other is genuinely touching, an excellent last note to their rivalry.

But we can’t dwell on who’s leaving, because two very important characters actually aren’t. Firstly, Kitahara vows to get a national trainer license—we aren’t explicitly told why he didn’t try to do this in the first place, but given some of the allusions to Kitahara’s still-murky past, we can make some educated guesses—and Belno Light, who is not just Oguri’s close friend but also her personal outfitter at this point, has quietly gotten acceptance into Tracen via its sports science program. This all ends the episode on a warm glow, bittersweet but with emphasis on the sweet. The main trio are going to Tracen, and the real race has yet to be run.

^{1: In this way, she isn’t actually terribly dissimilar to the protagonist of Uma Musume‘s third season, Kitasan Black. For a plethora of reasons, I think the approach works much better here.}

Posted on April 13, 2025April 13, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Be Aware of MONO

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

In 2017’s extremely metafictional club comedy anime Anime-Gataris, there is a scene where the main characters, all members of their school’s anime club, debate what makes a “classic anime.” The gag here being that they all just list off certain tropes or canned setups and scenarios rather than anything particularly deep (at one point someone ventures that if a main character vomits on screen? Well, that’s a classic anime). If I could put forward a candidate for that list, it would be this: any slice of life / comedy anime in which an older character is shown to be an absolutely terrible driver is an instant classic. Call it the Azumanga Daioh Principle.

mono, stylized in no-caps, is the latest member of that particular club, and it’s fairly meta in of itself. Consider that this is a slice of life comedy about two girls who take pictures, but one of the other characters is a mangaka who, by the end of this first episode, is writing a yonkoma about two girls who take pictures.

Her first idea for a manga, from earlier in the episode, isn’t bad either. She’s right that everyone likes comics about cats.

Unlike Anime-Gataris, that metafictionality (much lighter here than in that series) is not the point in of itself, but rather an underline that this is a show that understands its genre, and why people like and connect to that genre, very well. mono isn’t the first series like this we’ve had in a while, but it’s definitely the best in a while. To find something with a comparably great first episode you have to reach at least as far back as 2022’s Do It Yourself!!, maybe farther.

The actual plot, such as it is, is nothing terribly complicated. (Such stories rarely are.) Amamiya Satsuki [Mikawa Haruna] joins a photography club at her high school in her first year, implicitly because of a crush on her upperclassman who’s the head of the club. (That’s Satsuki at the top of this article in the banner image, looking like she’s offering you something.) Fast forward a year later, and said upperclassman has graduated, leaving Satsuki and her friend Kiriyama An [Koga Aoi] as its sole members, and Satsuki herself listless and lacking in motivation. An, who herself feels such a way about Satsuki that she describes “sitting together with her in the garden in [their] elder years” as a “dream,” is worried that the club might dissolve with just the two of them, and that Satsuki might remain a proverbial lump on a log forever.

After a motivating speech, Satsuki regains some amount of motivation, deciding to finally get a proper camera after a full year of exclusively taking photographs on her phone (most of which were of her sempai, and most of which were taken pictures of, in turn, by An). She buys a wide-angle camera off of an online auction, but oops! It doesn’t actually arrive. Thankfully, the seller actually lives in their city, making it relatively easy for Satsuki and An to track them down.

Which, if I’m the one being asked, is where the episode really takes off. I have a passing interest in photography (and a mostly-defunct phone photography blog over on tumblr), but it’s not a deep-seated passion, so it alone is not enough to sell me on a series. What puts me onto mono is its sheer joie de vivre. Every inch of it is stuffed with expressive animation and vibrant color, and it’s also just really damn funny. This is all crucial, since even if you, like me, are not super “into photography,” mono needs to convey its love of the world as a subject of art.

The camera seller turns out to be aforementioned mangaka Akiyama Haruno [Toono Hikaru]. She, and a gaggle of young kids who stop by her grandmother’s shop, where she also lives, completes the character dynamic of the series, being an older character who is decidedly not really a mentor in any way. Her spacey demeanor provides a nice contrast to the more high-energy dynamics between An and Satsuki. More importantly, she’s also a good (and literal) driver of plot, in as much as a series like this has plots. It’s she who provides Satsuki and An with that wide-angle camera, and, later, she drives them to a nearby landmark to take nightscape photos. For my money, she’s the best character, and her lackadaiscal and laid-back attitude instantly endeared her to me. That she coincidentally looks kind of like my VTuber rig certainly doesn’t hurt either. I am not biased in any way, I promise.

In any case, those nightscape photos cap off the first episode, otherwise quite zany and comedic, with a more contemplative tone. I don’t know if the “mono” in mono is “mono” as in the term mono no aware, as this would on the surface contradict the show’s comedic incliniations. But if it is, that’s a pretty solid allusion. The idea of photographs as permanent, fixed records of memories that are themselves inherently transient isn’t a new one, but I would love to see the show explore it regardless, and it provides a nice counterweight to the fast pace and upbeat tone of the rest of the series.

Brilliantly, one of the last scenes in the episode is a timelapse the girls took. The sequence lasts only a few seconds, but as the sun sets and the city lights glitter to life, the impression it leaves is forever.

Posted on April 10, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Checking in to the APOCALYPSE HOTEL

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

It has been entirely too long since I got weirdly, uncomfortably personal on this blog (a few months, at least), so let’s fix that.

I have been thinking about my own mortality a lot lately. I won’t go into why, but suffice to say this dwelling is neither wholly rational nor entirely unfounded. I mention my own recent fixation here to give some context for why I’m checking out Apocalypse Hotel, and why I was initially reluctant to check it out. Stories like this, stories of mankind’s extinction or departure and what we may leave behind in our wake, stories that inherently deal with loss and finality as themes, are incredibly aggravating when done poorly. I won’t name names, but there have been some unimpressive examples in recent years, and I have somewhat burned out on this genre of post-apocalyptic iyashikei as a result. (The less said about its mutant cousin, the isekai slow life genre, the better.) All this in mind, I planned to pass on Apocalypse Hotel. Surely it would not become one of the most instantly-beloved premieres of the season, right?

If that’s overselling it, it’s only just so. Within my circles at least, Apocalypse Hotel has become something of a surprise standout among the season’s premieres. Enough of one to cover it over GQuuuuuuX? I’m not sure about that, but the praise eventually got to me and I was inspired to give it a whirl. I’m glad I did, because this is a series that not only understands the fundamentals of its parent genre very well, it’s also a bit of casual leg-stretching for Cygames Pictures, who have established themselves as one of the more reliable studios around in recent years. (For reference, Apocalypse Hotel is a follow-on from last year’s Uma Musume film and Brave Bang Bravern. This year, they’re doing Cinderella Gray, also from this season, and an adaptation of acclaimed manga The Summer Hikaru Died in just a few months. Going back a bit farther, you might also know them from Princess Connect Re:Dive.)

As for the actual plot here, there honestly isn’t terribly much. We begin with a truly spine-chilling opening, in which an advertisement for the titular Ginza Hotel, then brand-new, is intercut with news reports of a deadly, plantborne virus that is rapidly rendering the Earth’s atmosphere hostile to human life. Just five years out from the COVID pandemic, this sort of imagery is still very pointed, and the uncomfortable contrast between the luxury of the hotel and the violence we see as the world becomes less and less habitable, culminating with a lucky few escaping to the stars in an “ark” (supposedly for just a few years while Earth’s ecosystem sorts itself out), is of course very intentional. It is equally so that most of the rest of the episode doesn’t directly deal with that discomfort. Instead, the series dances around it in a deliberate, careful way, only drawing attention to it directly at key moments.

Most of the episode is fairly comedic, in fact. We meet our cast of characters, a group of robots maintaining the Ginza Hotel. The most prominent of these, and the only one in the group that could conceivably pass as a human, is Yachiyo [Shirasu Saho], the “acting acting” head of reception and thus the one in charge of the hotel in a general sense. Yachiyo spends her days keeping her crew on-task as they make sure the hotel is kept clean and orderly, in preparation for humanity’s eventual return.

A return that, at this point, they have waited on for a hundred years and counting.

I don’t want to make Apocalypse Hotel seem darker than it actually is, because most of this episode genuinely is pretty upbeat. Gags like Yachiyo absolutely losing her cool because a single shampoo hat goes missing from one of the hotel’s bathrooms, or the bulky, extremely serious Doorman Robot [Touchi Hiroki] and his sheer dedication to his simple job of opening the front doors for any prospective guests, are a genuine delight.

Get Door Robo

Even the music is pretty upbeat while the crew go about their daily routine of keeping things clean and sparkling. But the undertone of massive loss is always there. Firstly from the simple fact that the thing they’re keeping so pristine is a giant hotel with nobody in it, and secondly from the more general post-apocalyptic trappings. A century is more than enough time for plants to have grown over much of the world outside the hotel, and these gorgeous wide shots instill a solid sense of longing and emptiness.

In other words, this show is quite clearly picking up the thread left by seminal works such as Yokohama Shopping Log. Being that good would be, frankly, too much to ask—Yokohama is arguably the definitive work of its genre—but that the two can even be in the same conversation is a good sign. There is one point in the episode in particular in which this influence is extremely evident, and that is when one “Driller Robot” does not report to the morning roll call at the hotel. Yachiyo goes out to find him, only to see that he’s been killed; massive metal spikes have been driven through him, and he’s completely motionless. Clearly saddened in a way she either can’t or won’t entirely express, Yachiyo solemnly places him on “indefinite leave,” and consigns him to a storeroom full of other similarly broken-down robots. An earlier gag draws attention to the fact that the Doorman no longer has any coolant in his systems, and one has to wonder how long it’ll be before he, too, joins that pile. We have already seen, via flashbacks, that Yachiyo’s crew used to be much larger.

Yachiyo’s behavior, as well, seems to indicate that she’s not as together as she’d like to put on. It’s mostly played as a joke here, but she has an angry outburst near the end of the episode, and she’s also been keeping detailed logs of operations every day since the hotel’s owner left. She tells herself that new guests will be coming soon, but it doesn’t really seem like she believes it.

Which makes the end of the episode all the more surprising. I can’t bring myself to spoil what, exactly, happens there, but I do think it points Apocalypse Hotel in an interesting direction going forward. Does all of this relate, that much, at the end of the day, to the fears I discussed opening this article? Eh, yes and no. Apocalypse Hotel is clearly a part of this cozy apocalypse genre—it’s right there in the name, after all—but it’s much more lighthearted, even whimsical, than I first assumed. Yet, that sense of loss and transience still very much does color everything about the series, and it’s difficult to say what it will end up leaning more into as it goes on. In other words, it’s hard make many long-term predictions. But, regardless of what happens on this particular after-the-end vacation, I’m planning on at least a short-term stay. Hopefully you are, too.

Posted on March 29, 2025March 29, 2025 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Reviews

AVE MUJICA at the Edge of the World

This article contains spoilers for the reviewed material, and assumes familiarity with it.

Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.

This is going to be a mess, so let’s start it with a question, so we at least have something to work off of.

Is a tragedy deferred a happy ending? Ave Mujica is at least willing to entertain the idea, but it’s never a clear-cut thing. Nothing about Ave Mujica is clear-cut, and the thinkpieces that will roll out over the coming weeks and months about this series might obscure how much of a rollercoaster ride it was, week to week, start to finish, in the moment. They might also obscure how wild it will keep being, as we now know—we’ll get back to this—that this isn’t the end.

To trot out the neatest and tidiest labels possible for a show that is the neither of those things, Ave Mujica is a series that deals with, among other topics; familial violence, how generational wealth drains the humanity from those that hold it, a number of different expressions of trauma and self-loathing, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and incest. All of this from a series that—despite some misguided English marketing trying to downplay this fact—is part of the BanG Dream! franchise. It, thus, is also still an anime about guitar music, at heart, a cousin of other recent genre entries like Girls Band Cry and Bocchi the Rock! (not to mention the other entries in its own series), in that it does still very much deal with a group of young girls using that music to process their traumas. The methodology is very different, and if Ave Mujica is the best of these (and I’d be willing to say that it is, even if the competition is very close), it’s not because its approach is inherently “just better”, or because more serious subject matter automatically leads to better content, but rather because it’s a logical outgrowth of what this genre was already doing. People will make their little jokes, of course: you can call it the dollposting anime, Perfect Blue for zoomers, etc. But none of these really capture Ave Mujica‘s fundamental observations and themes, and none of them can dent a show that’s this bulletproof.

All this to say, the walk from the earliest days of the BanG Dream! project to here is less extreme than it might appear at first glance. Poppin’ Party never went through most of this stuff, that’s true, but they’d absolutely be willing to throw horns at one of Ave Mujica’s concerts. The music, even when it’s not actively being heard—and it’s not heard for long stretches of this series—is both a connective tissue and a useful metaphor. If you can’t say something, maybe you can sing it.

That was the main thesis, too, of Ave Mujica‘s immediate predecessor and sister series, It’s MyGO!!!!!, effectively the first season of what becomes a two-parter here. AveMuji puts that theory to the toughest stress tests it can think of, and for a while, it seems like it might break under them. Consider that this is a band anime, and then recall that there is a gap from episode 2 to episode 7—almost half the season!—where there are absolutely zero in-show performances. Consider that this seemed at the time, given everything else going on in the narrative, more like a disband anime, an argument that Ave Mujica the group were not a good thing for anyone involved and maybe they’d all be better off apart.

It’s tempting to run through the absolute basics one more time. High school girl and neurodivergent icon Takamatsu Tomori [Youmiya Hina], and her first real friend Togawa Sakiko [Takao Kanon] form a band. This band, CRYCHIC, collapses not long after their first concert for a plethora of interpersonal reasons that are not really anyone’s fault in particular. It’s MyGO!!!!!, the first season of this show, focused on Tomori healing from this fallout with the help of both some of her old CRYCHIC bandmates and new friends alike. That group formed MyGO, title band of that season, pledging to build the rest of their lives, moment by moment, together as a band and as friends. So far, so girl band.

Ave Mujica—both the band and the show—run in the opposite direction, Sakiko attempts to put on a cold, merciless persona, and gathers a band based not on shared experiences or even particularly liking each other, but by a cynical rundown of what each member can add to the group. Sakiko’s childhood friend Mutsumi [Watase Yuzuki], another former CRYCHIC member, is added because of her guitar skills and her famous parents. Nyamu [Yonezawa Akane], the band’s drummer, is recruited as much for her looks and the flashiness of her ambidexterity as her actual chops, etc. If you’re reading this, you know all this already, so I won’t get too much farther into the nitty-gritty.

The result of all this? Probably the most seismic anime event of the 2020s thusfar. If not that, at least one that has exerted a deep and powerful pull on a certain kind of person. If you’re active on certain corners of tumblr or BlueSky you already know who I’m talking about. If not, we’ll just say: queer, gender-nonconformant, neurodivergent sorts. Which is a more formal and less fun way to say: the girlies. Ave Mujica takes the already intense emotional palette of MyGO and freezes it solid, erecting gothic cathedrals around the sharp, jagged pieces of pain and trauma that inform who we are, with a particular focus on the inherent violence of the family unit. Do you have bad parents? Mutsumi has the worst parent, a controlling, cruel stage mom who sees her daughter as competition instead of family. Furthermore, she’s plural, hosting, among others, a rambunctious protector alter who adopts the name Mortis from her stage name. From what we see, her mother treats this as a frightening burden, a sadly true-to-life read on how many singlet parents treat their plural children.

Uika [Sasaki Rico], the band’s singer, might be even worse off, the daughter of an illicit relationship between Sakiko’s grandfather and a house servant who has lived much of her life isolated from society. If this all seems rather melodramatic, I can only reiterate that that’s exactly the point, and anyone who writes the show—and honestly, much of this genre—off on those grounds is missing the most interesting artistic movement in the medium to happen this decade. More specifically, that heightened, arch theatricality has been present in the Ave Mujica project since we first knew it existed. This is a group of girls who were introduced to us as masked dolls, and who here leave us again as knights of a forgotten god. It feels a little ridiculous to criticize the series for a lack of “realism,” whether we’re referring to its literal events or its emotional palette. (And anyone who calls Nyamu and Umiri’s problems minor, even by comparison, is missing the very fact that by show’s end they’ve still willingly thrown their lot in with everyone else in the band.)

That tense, coiled sense of façade is also why it hits so hard when, in its very last episode, Ave Mujica finally lets all of that tension out. No one would walk away from this series thinking everything is neatly solved, but the finale is more concert than anime episode: 5 songs, two from MyGO, three from AveMuji themselves, all fantastic, and importantly, both bands are clearly having a blast. MyGO have the simpler story, but their sound has genuinely developed in some interesting directions, and centering a new song around Tomori’s jumbled, Jenga Tower-block poetry is never going to be a bad call.

Ave Mujica, meanwhile, have somehow gone stadium-level yet again (the episode’s lack of a traditional narrative leaves us in the dark about how that happened. Season three material, most likely). Their doll motifs replaced with a warped Round Table-style knightly mythos, Uika-Doloris as an amnesiac who finds herself returning to the embrace of Oblivionis, god of forgetfulness, over and over. Sakiko literally portraying herself as a deity within the world of the scripts is sure to have ramifications going forward as a plot point, but, consider that outside of the series itself, it also easily cements her as one of the most interesting and iconic characters of her generation. It has been way, way too long since we had someone to add to the Anime Girl Pantheon, and if Sakiko needs to actively force herself up alongside older legends like Lain, Haruhi, and Madoka, that’s all the better. It fits.

(Also, let’s just be honest here. Sakiko’s god complex is probably not great for her, mental health-wise, but if it’s making her write stuff like this, well, at some point you can’t argue with the music.)

As for the literalities of the last story arc, episodes eleven, twelve, and so on, it seems impossible that this won’t all fall down around them someday, possibly even someday soon.

So again, to ask the question, can tragedy deferred really be considered a happy ending? Even a bittersweet one?

Maybe we should reframe that, and turn it back on ourselves; can you be happy, knowing you will one day die? If Ave Mujica are a fleeting dream, that’s at least partly because everything is a fleeting dream. Any comparison between MyGO‘s “a series of moments adds up to a lifetime” and Ave Mujica‘s embrace of an illusory eternity needs to understand that, despite the obvious differences between these groups of people, these are fundamentally two ways to say the same thing. Something lasts forever until it doesn’t. You take things day by day, and one day is eventually the last one. (I don’t have much to say about this series, as I’ve made clear from how I’m framing this article, but I am a little surprised how rarely I’ve seen discussion of death in relation with Ave Mujica; Sakiko’s late mother is a shadow who looms over much of the series, and there is a broad implication that Uika’s sister, the actual Uika, is no longer with us either.)

I have spoken before in my work about hating the term “messy” and how it’s often used to paper over the flaws in works that a certain stripe of critic, myself very much included, like. Something is messy if it induces strong emotion but has some kind of missed shot or some kind of frustrating loose end. To that, I refuse to apply the term to Ave Mujica, even though I’m sure many other people will. Every time I had a doubt about this show, it proved me wrong. Mortis disappearing for much of the show’s final act? She shows up in the finale to wink at the mirror and reassure us she’s fine. Umiri “not getting” a proper character arc? Her tragic backstory is presented in a funny way, sure, but it’s as legitimate a reason for trauma as anything else, this stuff isn’t a competition. Not enough songs? The last episode has fucking five of them. The fact that Hatsune is down awful for her niece? That makes their relationship more interesting, and sure, more troubling. I won’t entertain any suggestion otherwise. You can’t catch Ave Mujica off guard.

Even if you could, the curious thing about something as arresting as Ave Mujica is that after a while one’s emotional attachment stops being to the work itself so much and more the general orbit of it. The characters make such an impression on screen that they will live in our hearts forever. There is also the actual band, of course, who are fantastic, and a small spiderweb of ancillary media that enhances and sharpens the show in a number of interesting ways. None of this softens the point that the show itself is excellent, of course, one of the best I’ve ever seen, but it is worth keeping in mind.

And if you don’t agree….well honestly that’s fine? Why is talking about anime expected to be didactic like this anyway?

Isn’t all of this sort of silly? Another thing Ave Mujica has made me realize is that, despite the fact that I enjoy writing about anime, I also kind of hate doing it. (A love-hate relationship that I am all too aware is ironically somewhat reflective of what I’m reviewing.) Not because I’ve lost any love of prose or any love of analyzing fiction, but because there is this constant unending pressure to be correct about everything. (Or at least, I feel that there is. Maybe this feeling says more about me than it does anything else.) I had an inkling of this back when I reviewed Wonder Egg Priority years ago, which is why the two are somewhat connected in my mind even though the reception to AveMuji has been much more positive overall. Most of my really fulfilling engagement with Ave Mujica has not stemmed from my collective efforts of reviewing it. (Longtime readers will probably remember that we are a system ourselves, and if you didn’t know, well, surprise.) I—Ediva—have gotten much more out of talking about it with others, making of it a living discourse as opposed to a series of endlessly prolix pages where I try to prove that my opinion is the right one, man!, than almost anything else I’ve ever seen. I, Opal, have written fucking fanfiction for this series, weird and outlandish fanfiction—fanfiction I would never in a million years link here, mind you!—that has made me feel so much more connected to its world and its characters than laying them down on a table to cut them open ever could. And I, Ollie, have simply reveled in the fact that I got to feel seen. It’s very rare for popular fiction to touch on systems. I am not going to quit writing about anime—this is not my version of Brent DiCrescenzo’s To the 5 Boroughs review—but Ave Mujica has once again made me reevaluate how I really think about this stuff. How I feel about this stuff. In a way, that’s a higher compliment than anything I could actually say about it could ever be. Here’s something that sounds like a joke but isn’t: in the previews for one of the later episodes, 10 I want to say, Sakiko was shown reading Hermann Hesse’s Demian. We decided to read it too—why not, right?—and loved it. Some shows are bigger than just what’s on the screen.

None of me are saying that any of this makes analysis of the series wrong. But it does, increasingly, feel wrong for us. This is a world to be lived in, an atmosphere to be breathed, and a dream to set drift upon. I can’t pin the butterfly to the board like that. If you can, I’m not going to tell you you’re doing something wrong, but it’s not the right fit for how we feel about this show. Hence this instead of a “proper” review. Hence leaving it all up in the air.

That’s a temporary solution, but this, too, is the beautiful paradox of Ave Mujica: we can stay asleep in this dream forever—Until we wake up.

Posted on February 24, 2025February 24, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [2/24/25]

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

Hello folks. It’s been two weeks, and if that makes you think “wow, you must have a ton of Girlies Being Dramatic stuff to catch up on”, you’d be absolutely correct.

Ave Mujica – Episode 7 – 8

Two weeks ago, in my long catch-up of the series, I pointed out that a number of people have asked the question: is Ave Mujica even actually a music anime? Generally speaking, that term implies some amount of actual musical performance within the body of the show itself, whatever form that may take. Ave Mujica has been very short on that up to this point, and now that we’re halfway through the series, some viewers have begun to lose their patience with AveMuji’s lack of adherence to those genre norms.

I am not one of those viewers. Nor am I particularly surprised or upset by the fact that we do get a performance in this episode. It just isn’t from Ave Mujica. Nor even from MyGO!!!!!, their counterparts and protagonists of the series’ first season. The band that sing a song—two songs, actually—in this episode are CRYCHIC. This isn’t some kind of formal reunion and it’s certainly not a flashback episode. It’s a very brief, fleeting moment shared on a stage with almost no one at all watching. It’s more group therapy than the traditional music video-esque band anime insert song.

Very, very few people ever get to eulogize the passing of their own adolescence as it occurs. Teenagers, real teenagers anyway, do not usually have the presence of mind to capture those moments in amber before they disappear forever. Sometimes, though, both in reality and fiction, it does happen, even if the people involved don’t necessarily know that they’re doing that. Here, in the seventh episode of Ave Mujica, CRYCHIC’s story comes to its conclusion. CRYCHIC are able to, for a fleeting moment, recognize that even over just the relatively short amount of time since their breakup, their lives have changed permanently. They mattered to each other, and maybe still can, in different ways, but there is no returning to that brief time together. You can, they all seem to understand, revisit that moment as many times as you want in your own head, but you can’t ever return to it. CRYCHIC is thus, in a way, actually torn down as the romantic ideal it’s spent most of the past two seasons being: it was, per the show’s own words, an ordinary band like any other. In reckoning with that, its former members can finally take the first steps to truly moving on.

How we get to that point is a long and winding road that involves Sakiko being tackled to the ground, spending long periods just sort of standing outside of Mutsumi’s house after Mortis refuses to see her, and a non-zero amount of various characters performing the MyGO Special (roughly shoving their way into someone’s current goings-on, and sometimes literally their home, to resolve an emotional conflict). In terms of overall plotting this is honestly one of the messier episodes in this subseries, but that’s not really a problem when every individual scene is this compelling. In addition to the aforementioned reunion performance there’s a lot of great tension between Mortis, Mutsumi, Sakiko, and Soyo, in various combinations throughout the episode.

The insert songs themselves are the highlight of course. To such an extent that, in a bold bit of fanservice-in-the-old-sense-of-the-term, an actual, real version of CRYCHIC, recorded a performance for The First Take, being sandwiched in between legendary art-rockers Shinsei Kamattechan and “You Broke Me First” singer/songwriter Tate McRae, a truly insane three-artist stretch that is emblematic of The First Take’s eclectic nature.

This makes any complaint about a relative (and it would be relative) lack of technical precision in the episode’s performance twice as absurd, of course. Not only do we hear MyGO practicing near the start of the episode where they sound as tight as ever, but CRYCHIC are playing for nobody but themselves. Aside from a tiny group of bystanders; Anon, Raana, and Umiri, who sneaks in midway, there’s no audience that they’re aware of, this is a purely cathartic exercise between them, and we are witness to it purely as viewers of a television program. No one is being performed for, and as if to emphasize the point, Tomori spends most of both songs singing not out from the stage but toward the rest of the band. “Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where CRYCHIC Never Broke Up” this is not.

In any case, while this is pretty clearly the brightest episode of Ave Mujica so far, and perhaps a true turnaround point where healing can begin, it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. Umiri’s sneaking in to the performance is not a mistake, and the jealous snarl of a grimace she makes while watching CRYCHIC work their baggage with each other out must truly be seen to be believed. That’s not to even mention Uika, following there in the footsteps of the show itself, which she has spent two weeks conspicuously absent from, and very nearly makes it a third in episode eight.

Episode 8, by the by, is not quite the event that episode seven was, but it’s nonetheless another excellent one. And, here’s a distinction I didn’t think I’d bother making for any episode of this show: it’s probably the funniest Ave Mujica has ever been. This matters, since most of that comedy comes from Umiri, finally getting some proper focus here that really peels back the layer of her cool-girl façade. Watching the CRYCHIC temp reunion in episode seven evidently really got to her, as she spends most of this episode coping with her jealousy in comically bad ways. Being given this much time to follow her also puts the lie to any notion of her being “the normal one” of Ave Mujica, given that we here learn that she almost exclusively drinks protein shakes for her meals and is Soulja Boy levels of terrible with her money. (I really cannot believe that this show features someone buying out an entire jewelry case. Retail therapy isn’t the answer, Umiri!)

She also tries to sets out on her personal goal of reforming Ave Mujica, starting with Nyamu of all people, to whom she relays her “tragic backstory” after struggling to down a single ginger ale.

Said backstory scans as more of a parody of this kind of flashback sequence than anything. All we get is that Umiri was in a band when she was a bit younger but was bossy enough that everyone was put off by it and left her stranded on stage during what was supposed to be an important concert. That’s why she’s like that: burned once for being too pushy, she went to the opposite extreme of far too hands-off, to the point of seeming untrustworthy (something Taki points out to her, early in her half of the episode). It tracks, but the droll undercutting of what’s rapidly become a trope in this relatively young genre is pretty funny, and shows that Ave Mujica isn’t all doom and gloom. (Nyamu is similarly unimpressed, and reacts to the story with a dry “wow, how sad” while inspecting her nails.)

All of this is relative, of course, because the “funniest” episode of this series does nonetheless open with a dramatic headspace sequence in which Mortis screams that she doesn’t want to die. The whole first half of the episode is actually pretty fucking dire, with all of Umiri’s stuff being in the latter half. Things start out decently enough, after the OP at least, but we’re reminded of the screaming Mortis pretty quickly when a nostalgic karaoke outing for Sakiko and Mutsumi turns into—well, it turns into something.

Intercut with that scene is one where Nyamu runs into Minami Mori, Mutsumi’s mother. Minami is, if it were not already obvious from prior episodes, a real piece of work. She describes her own child as a monster, “acting without realizing it,” but so talented she could outshine Minami herself if she put her mind to it. The Mutsumi-Mortis System’s expressiveness is not in question, but, just to put the tiger on the table here, it is pretty appalling for someone to be saying all of this about her own child. Worse, Mutsumi and co. have clearly internalized all of this, because the scene keeps cutting back to Mutsumi, Mortis, and Sakiko, arguing over whether CRYCHIC or Ave Mujica should reform. At some point, we’re locked out of seeing the objective events of the conflict entirely, Mortis’ desire to get Ave Mujica back together so she’ll have some reason to continue to exist is batted aside by Mutsumi’s unwillingness to let go of CRYCHIC. Sakiko just wants her friend to stop hurting, and she promises a lot to make that happen, but Mortis raises the idea that Sakiko doesn’t really even know who her friend actually is. She claims that the entire system has been a revolving cast of personalities who emerge and dissolve to fit the ongoing situation this entire time. Mortis and Mutsumi are exceptions to this rule, not the norm. We have some reason to be a bit skeptical of Mortis’ specific narration of events, but certainly, whatever good intentions might sit at the heart of that narration are discarded when Mutsumi seems to do to her what she did to Mutsumi back in episode three. There is a lot of internal strife here, and it’s hard not to feel for the both of them.

We do not see the results of the argument, the next time “Mortis” shows up, it’s toward the end of the episode, and the two halves thereof unite here. You may have noticed that, terrifyingly enough, Umiri and Mortis are actually aligned in goals at this point. After Nyamu half-heartedly promises to get back with AveMuji if and only if Umiri can get Mutsumi as well, Mortis is the first person to jump at the call. (Or is she? I’ve seen some theorizing that this last scene actually features Mutsumi pretending to be Mortis. Something to keep in mind as you read on.)

Mortis, you may recall, can’t actually play guitar. Thus, the episode ends with Umiri teaching her, delivering—in an episode where she’s otherwise a complete goofball and impossible to take seriously—probably her best line in the entire show so far, one that’s heavy with connotation and charge, given the whole doll motif this series has been almost obsessively fixated on since its opening minutes.

^{What is it with the girls in this show pulling out the exact kind of raw line that works as an armor-penetrating seduction bullet on other queer girls with mental problems?}

She is, furthermore, rebuked by narration: from Uika, her first lines of any substantial length in three whole episodes. A doll, she says, will always be just that. Cue “Georgette Me, Georgette You.”

I’ve seen some concern about Ave Mujica potentially not having enough time to tie up all these loose ends, but even accounting for the fact that there are the live shows, band stories in the gacha game, and so on to look forward to, there are still five more episodes of this anime, two-ish hours of footage that could contain just about anything. Ironically, I think about the only danger the show is actually in is simply being misunderstood. Not many anime so much as approach the studied character dynamics at play here, especially those within the Mutsumi-Mortis system. As for the rest, the stage is open with possibility, and it is not over until the curtain drops. Episode 9 is called “If you leave, I shall not live.” Terrifying! I can’t wait.

Flower and Asura – Episode 6 – 7

Episode 6 sees Hana choose her selection for the NHK Cup. This is a bigger deal than it might sound, since doing so requires convincing her teacher of the passage she wants to read. Still, with everything considered, she finds one that she enjoys and which suits her. On her side of the story, everything is honestly going pretty well at the moment. Similarly, while Natsue is having more trouble than her, she’s still at least making progress on her script. It’s actually pretty incredible how much air the show can put into her script reading, given that her script is just a food ad. (It also gives us this, which, as a writer I must say I deeply relate to.)

The other end of the episode is the more interesting one here. For the first time we focus on following Matsuyuki [Yamashita Seiichirou], who we learn has a difficult home life with overbearing parents that expect him to follow in their footsteps as a doctor. He doesn’t actually seem terribly interested in doing that, and there is thus a clear central tension there, but from what we see here, he mostly acquiesces to their wishes at least face to face. Similarly, when Shuudai asks him to pen a drama script—not a small task!—he accepts with no apparent hesitation. It’s not wholly clear what Matsuyuki actually wants, although his appreciation for Hana’s readings to children and the possibly covert contact he keeps with his siblings in spite of his parents’ opinion that they’re “failures” provide some clues. There’s a clear good parent / bad parent contrast too, with Matsuyuki’s father caring for him mostly as a successor and nothing more, whereas Hana’s mother is openly proud that her daughter has made friends and found a passion.

Episode 7 spells Matsuyuki’s situation out more clearly. His older sister, a poet, left home and left him behind. This is something that clearly rests heavy on his mind, and it influences the script he’s agreed to write very heavily. It’s very interesting to me that within the drama, he writes three characters, one of whom is a girl whose parents expect her to become a doctor, but who wants to be a poet. He’s merged himself and his sister into one person. Any eggy questions this raises aside, it’s also a pretty solid bit of character building on the show’s part. He clearly admires his sister for walking away, and that admiration creeps out of him in a way that’s so unsubtle that even the other characters pick up on it by episode’s end. We also get to learn that Hana is a surprisingly fantastic actor when she plays the poet in the script. The show is cheating a little more than in the recitations here—a lot of the subtler visual characterization—that Hana has is replaced when she gets into character—but still, it’s great overall, and Hana’s performance in the climactic beach scene of the drama would be worth the price of admission for episode seven all on its own.

I like this show overall. Quite a lot, actually. But if it’s been missing one thing, it’s much in the way of stakes, aside from the looming promise of the NHK Cup. We get some of them here for the first time when it’s revealed that a meeting of Broadcast Clubs from across the country is on the horizon. Described as a “joint practice” session, this provides the show with an excuse to rejoin our main cast with Shura Saionji, the then-child actress whose recitation so inspired Hana as a child herself. The path we’re on here is obvious, in that Shura Saionji is being set up as essentially the villain of the piece. Any kvetching about the lack of stakes is admittedly partly a circumstantial complaint—anything would seem lacking in stakes airing in the same season as Ave Mujica, which manages to make its source material feel like genuine life or death—but I want Hana’s talent to be truly tested, and I want it to mean something if she’s to come out on top. To that end, the introduction of an antagonistic figure of some sort might just be exactly what the show needed. We’ll have to see.

A bit light on images this week, but hopefully that’s fine with everyone. Once again, I do ask that if you liked the article, consider dropping me a donation. Every penny helps.

To help compensate the lack of images in this article, go grab a drink from the oeosi machine as your Bonus Thought of the week.

Posted on February 11, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [2/11/25]

Another week, another batch of girlies being absolutely dramatic. I’ll be honest, between the seasonals and the manga I read for this column, this might have the highest “girlies being dramatic” ratio of anything I’ve written in a long long while. I’d say in this respect at least, I’m living my best life. I hope you are too.

Anime – Seasonal

Ave Mujica – Episode 6

Every week I walk in to the torment nexus and walk out with my heart broken in three places. What a show.

Some interesting play with structure and framing this episode. At last week’s conclusion Soyo was shown discovering Mortis, and the whole scene was framed in slasher movie tones. Here, now that she has a better idea of Mortis’ whole, you know, thing, Mortis is instead framed as the angry, lost girl that she really is. I really enjoyed (and did not at all expect) Soyo actually playing along with Mortis’ whole ‘calling the doctor’ bit, it shows a pretty deep empathy that I don’t really know if we’ve seen the character express before? (It’s been a while since I watched MyGO, so I may be forgetting something.) Also, she apparently spends 3 whole days sleeping over there trying to patch things up, which, while there’s definitely a selfish aspect to her motive (she misses CRYCHiC too, after all), I still think deserves serious real one points. I don’t think I’d have the emotional stamina to spend 3 whole days consoling anyone about anything.

Full credit to Rana also, who can just intuit what’s going on with Mortis and Mutsumi without even actually being told. (She doesn’t actually go out of her way to help, though, and spends a decent amount of time this episode playing with cats. Rana remains this subseries’ most mysterious character.) Mortis actually seems to develop a bit of a crush on her, and is that a twinge of jealousy I detect from Soyo about that fact? In the tumblr version of this post I made a joke about the relationship chart this series must have, and then they just actually published one. Way to undercut my quips, Bushiroad.

I like Umiri’s brief scene in this episode. Forever the eternal mercenary, she describes the breakup of Ave Mujica as though it happened around her and not to her. And yet when ~~Ricky~~ Taki calls her on this, she gets annoyed. Truly the “fake ass IDGF’er” meme in human form.

The first half of this episode, I must stress, is actually pretty light by this show’s standards. So of course, there needs to be a breaking point somewhere. Here, that breaking point is between Mortis and Mutsumi, who stirs for the first time in a solid month only to find how awry things have gone in her absence. This isn’t what she wanted, and Mortis is appalled to learn so. The two have an argument in headspace, which of course to anyone outside of the Mutsumi-Mortis system’s own head just looks like an argument with herself, and she actually carries on so bad that she ends up tripping and falling in front of Live House Ring and making a huge scene, which of course a throng of anonymous busybodies are nearby to witness. It’s SO much that it would come off as contrived if the show weren’t so set on showing us how badly this is fucking over Mutsumi and Mortis. It’s hard to watch.

There is something admirable about the show’s complete lack of handholding with this kind of thing. This episode alone depicts multiple conflicts within a fully-realized mental space, a tug-of-war between Mortis and Mutsumi for their collective fate that is just profoundly sad to witness. I do wonder how legible this is to audiences who aren’t plural. Part of me is worried this series might actually be too ahead of its time for most audiences to properly appreciate.

(I’ve barely talked about Sakiko here and she is absolutely going through it up and down this entire episode. From the horrible, obviously untrue claims she makes about not caring about either band or even about Mutsumi, to the folder of sticky notes she’s gotten from Tomori over the years, to the fact that she sadly looks for another one despite telling Tomori off for them last week. To. This fucking expression, just, god.)

There’s a mostly-lighthearted interlude with Nyamu (it remains really funny that her dark secret, compared to everyone else’s, seems to just be that she’s from the sticks), but even that is twinged with her finding out about Mortis and Mutsumi’s public breakdown. The episode then ends with MyGO finding out about Sakiko’s whole extremely fucking complicated family situation. Episode 7 is entitled “Post nubila Phoebus,” “after the clouds, the Sun.” In most other contexts that would be a shining beam of hope, and maybe it is here too, but I’m fairly sure things will get worse before they get better. (Recall, we still have no idea what’s going on with Uika, just as one example, and she’s the only character from either band who doesn’t put in even a cursory appearance in this episode. Where is she!)

Flower and Asura – Episodes 2-5

I don’t usually try to predict how an anime will end before it gets there. But, by the same token, I tend to usually have at least a broad idea of what something “is doing” for most of its run. A first episode or so might need some room to establish itself, but by the halfway point of a series, one can usually figure out its whole deal with relative ease, especially if you’ve been watching anime for a while. All this is the long way around to say; I don’t get caught out by an anime very often. When I’m surprised it’s usually the addition of some new element, as opposed to something I had just outright been misunderstanding. Flower and Asura thus gets to join a pretty exclusive club with its fifth episode, and I am left to consider if I’ve maybe been underrating the show a little. (And by the time you’re reading this another episode will have aired, sigh! The unrelenting march of time.)

The gist is this: so far, Flower and Asura has largely been presented through the eyes of its main character, Hana. Hana’s insecurities and need to find a way to express herself defined the first episode or two of the series, and—perhaps this is the show’s fault, but I’m more inclined to blame myself—because of that, I had not really given terribly much consideration to the interiority of the show’s other characters. Natsue An, the snippy girl with the twin-tails, is a direct challenge to this, in her interactions with Hana she essentially addresses the viewer directly. This is the case with the rest of the cast, but the other two members’ inner lives we’ve explored to any extent are those of Mizuki, the free-spirited upperclassman that recruited Hana in the first place, and Ryouko, who, while not exactly a one-note character, has a deep interest in classic literature that aligns her nicely with Hana and Mizuki’s philosophy that recitation is primarily an art. The NHK Cup, the tournament looming in the show’s background, is to them secondary to reading what they want to be reading, and Ryouko says as much directly. Winning is not hugely important to either of them. (Certainly not to Ryouko, whose gleeful joy at the ancient drama frozen in glass by the Japanese Classics is outright described in-show as fetishistic. I feel very strongly I would get along with this character.)

Natsue is an irregularity here. She actually wants to win the Cup. As such, she’s not performing literary recitations like the characters we’ve discussed so far but rather a technical program, an altogether different thing that relies on a different skillset. Despite their different paths, Natsue is clearly at least appreciative of Hana’s talent, and, in her particularly brusque way, urges her to choose Kafka’s The Metamorphosis from among the available works to read a selection from. This is in contrast to Hana’s own desire to read from a contemporary work. (A work which in fact appears to be about a romance between two girls. Subtle.) If we’re just judging on taste, Natsue is clearly completely right; Hana’s particular timbre, especially the lower and more menacing end of her arsenal, which we know of from episode one, would lend itself very well to something as dark as The Metamorphosis. But this just isn’t what Hana wants to do, and it’s easy to read Natsue’s insistence that she do it as jealousy. It makes almost too much sense, right? Natsue, clearly someone who has very strong opinions on literature from her insistence on Hana’s selection and her denigration of the book Hana actually wants to read as shallow, would rather be doing recitation, right? I certainly read things that way. But we should stop ourselves here, because what that assumption actually is, I am a little embarrassed to say, is probably just projection.

Natsue, after an entire episode of Hana bugging her about it (including a magnetic—and also kind of embarrassing!—scene where Hana actually recites from the book she is planning to read from. In public, where the whole student body can see it), eventually explains that no, the real reason she’s so set on winning the tournament is nothing this complicated. She relates an anecdote from middle school where, in that school’s broadcasting club, an enthusiastic friend was selected to go to the nationals over her. Despite that friend’s insistence that Natsue was actually better at recitation than she was, the condescension—intentional or not—stung more than the actual failure. It has nothing to do with her specific talents and everything to do with just wanting to win in the first place.

Hana is left with the figurative egg on her face, although it’s not so bad, given that this causes the two to actually roughly get along for the first time in the entire show. Still, there’s an important point in there about not just assuming motives for this sort of thing. A point well made to both high school girls and, it turns out, anime critics more than a decade removed from high school.

All this and I’ve barely mentioned how utterly gay Mizuki and Hana’s entire relationship is. How embarrassing!

You and Idol Precure – Episodes 1 & 2

Idol anime are dead, long live idol anime.

Really interesting stuff with this show these past two episodes. Very clearly this is trying to be an “old school” Precure season in that it’s very physical and has a certain kind of comedy that’s been absent for the past couple years. Some people have been a little down on this but to be honest I’m really enjoying it, especially the return of the fisticuffs after an absence in Wonderful. (Not that that show needed them, but it’s always good to have some punching.) Our lead, Uta, alias Cure Idol [Matsuoka Misato], is probably the goofiest main Cure we’ve had in a while. I’m here for it. (That said, it seems like the blue Cure is going to have A Somewhat Sad Backstory and if I know myself I’m going to probably like her most, but who knows.)

Manga

Black and White: Tough Love at the Office

In the best possible way: this is wretched.

What we have here is a yuri manga where the “girls love” is two women, Shirakawa Junko and Kuroda Kayo, attempting to just completely destroy each others’ professional and personal lives over the course of several months after they begin working together in the same department of a bank. There’s a lot of talk about “toxic yuri” in the air right now, moreso than ever before I think, but this is a pretty potent strain of the stuff. These two are bad for each other, they don’t like each other, they become psychologically obsessed with each other, and their “intimacy” consists of violent, questionably-consensual sexual encounters where they alternate between actually fucking and throwing punches and the like at each other. It’s violent! Very violent!

None of this is a complaint of course, the primal and twisted nature of these scenes—which there are really only a couple throughout the whole manga, and they’re all pretty brief—is a big part of the point. There’s an idea floated here that while these two women are both trapped within the financial system that employs them, they’re at each others’ throats. Junko is BY FAR the more vicious of the two, and once Kayo starts seeing another woman, she gets that woman, a fund manager, fired for financial fraud. And yet, when the manga ends, Junko finds herself a pawn of the shadiest parts of the company she works for, possibly for the rest of her life, despite being “successful” in the business sense (and having picked up a new partner along the way). It’s Kayo who gets off with the comparatively happy ending; she quits the company entirely, and leaves to pursue love and happiness, things more important than success and failure. It’s honestly a surprisingly romantic ending for something that’s otherwise so vicious. Of course, not for Junko, who in the final page of the manga literally vanishes into darkness to join the other behind-the-scenes power brokers who run the company and Japan’s finances in general. I guess who really “won” is a matter of perspective, but I know who I’d rather be. (And not just because I’d rather have Junko making all of those twisted, sadistic grimaces at me, but you didn’t hear me say that.)

And that’ll do us for the second week of February. As with last week, I’m going to directly request that you drop a donation if you like reading these columns. They’re my only source of income, and every penny really does help a lot.

See you next week, but before I go, allow me to leave you with this week’s Bonus Thought, a sacred legend from the old days.

Posted on January 11, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Pining For Those SAKAMOTO DAYS

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.

Picture a killer of legend. The kind of man whose very presence makes the blood of his foes freeze in their veins. Picture an unstoppable, elemental force of violence. Add gray hair and a pair of round spectacles, and you’ve got Taro Sakomoto [Sugita Tomokazu]. Now, picture what it would take to tame that man. Picture what could remove him from this life of ceaseless bloodshed. What could that be? What could possibly get him to hang up his gun?

Well, a pretty store clerk with a winning smile is probably a good start.

This, the tale of an ostensibly-retired uber-hitman, is Sakamoto Days. It’s a member of a particular genre that’s found increased purchase in recent years, a kind of post-Spy x Family melding of action anime with the domestic comedy. Usually involving a fundamentally good natured protagonist who can, nonetheless, throw down with the best of them. Spy x Family has the likable but duplicitous Loid Forger. Kindergarten Wars has its single woman—seeking good man—in Rita. And of course, Sakamoto Days has Sakamoto himself. Sakamoto Days has been a favorite among Jump readers in the know for a good while now, and thus this adaptation comes with a pretty weighty set of expectations placed upon it. For my purposes, I’m not super interested in engaging with that, although I will say this is the rare case of a shonen manga I actually follow somewhat regularly getting adapted into animation, so I’m happy for the series if nothing else. (It’ll be joined in this category by Witch Watch, also from Shonen Jump, later this year.)

Our story really begins when Shin [Shimazaki Nobunaga], formerly one of Sakamoto’s partners-in-crime, is tasked with killing the man. He left “the organization” which he and Shin both belonged to without permission and thus, he’s gotta die. Shin is initially perfectly willing to go along with this, and when he first sees the retired Sakamoto, he’s upset by what comes off to him as weakness. Most obviously, Sakamoto has put on quite a lot of weight in the five years since he retired, and we should take a quick detour to talk about this.

So! Fat jokes! There’s quite a few of them in Sakamoto Days. In the anglosphere, these have generally been considered in poor taste for a good 20 years now, but obviously, this isn’t the case everywhere. I reiterate all this basic-ass explanation of cultural differences just to say, as someone who’s also fairly big, I am not super upset by how Sakamoto Days handles its main character in this regard, even later on when we get into less-jokey but arguably dicier territory. I also think it helps that the character himself seems to have a good sense of humor about it (check the “Slim” shirt in the picture above). But if you are upset by it, I get that, and I’m also not going to tell you you Need To Get Over It or whatever other piece of canned finger-wagging rhetoric a certain kind of anime fan is sure to lean on when people want to discuss this subject. This is an area on which people will understandably be pretty polarized. So at the risk of making it seem more serious than it necessarily is, I think it’s important to just acknowledge that this specific subject gets under some peoples’ skin, and that’s fine. I have a very live and let live approach to arguably-problematic material in the arts, and this is no different a case than anything else, it’s just somewhat new territory for anime I’ve covered on this site specifically.

It is worth noting though, that Shin’s initial judgement of Sakamoto is wholly incorrect. He sees Sakamoto, now grown happy and fat and the proud proprietor of a small konbini with his wife [Aoi, played by Touyama Nao] and their adorable daughter [Hina, played by Kino Hina, no relation], and assumes he’s grown soft in a metaphorical sense, too. This is not so.

Despite some reluctance once he senses that Sakamoto’s killer instincts haven’t actually dulled terribly much—he’s an esper, and can read minds, and is thus treated to Sakamoto’s amusingly gory idle fantasies of stabbing him to death—Shin is eventually convinced to try taking him out. This goes poorly for him, and this is where we get to the anime’s biggest strength.

All told, it is simply just a solid, good translation of the manga’s inventive action scenes to animation. Sakamoto immediately gets to flex both his wits and his still-sharp combat skills here, deflecting a pistol bullet with a gumball and using various other random objects around his store to render Shin harmless. There’s too much slow-mo, and the presence of merely some traditional sakuga instead of wall to wall sakuga will leave some unhappy, but so far, there’s really not a lot to complain about. (I’ve seen some scuttlebutt about the color palette, too. But honestly I think the gritty, somewhat dingy look works well for this series.) The vibe is captured pretty much perfectly.

These setpieces are what Sakamoto Days is about. There is a story, to be sure, a decently interesting one at that, where various characters are torn between the sprawling assassin underworld and the call of a normal, quiet life. There’s comedy, which is amusing if rarely laugh-out-loud funny. And there are also some quite sweet domestic scenes, as well. But the real main concern of Sakamoto Days are these setpieces, wild everything-but-the-kitchen-sink affairs that grew only moreso as the manga went on, and which make a good first showing here. There’s an escalation in the first episode already, even, as Sakamoto opts to rescue Shin once his employers try to take him out for not fulfilling his contract. This second scene is even flashier, all glinting gunmetal, roundhouse kicks, and taser lightning as Sakamoto cuts through a warehouse of goons with ease.

The sell is simply this, if you liked those scenes, you’ll get a kick out of Sakamoto Days. If you like the scene afterward, where Sakamoto hires Shin as an employee at his store, since the esper has nowhere else to go, you’ll like Sakamoto Days a lot. What you see is what you get. I think what we see is pretty cool.

Posted on January 2, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Mysteries, Medicine, and Malpractice in AMEKU M.D.: DOCTOR DETECTIVE

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.

On a basic level, aside from the fact that I want to watch anime premieres for their own sake, the main question I’m seeking to answer with a lot of my first impression writeups is this: is this given show, provided you’re in to what it’s trying to do, worth your time? Admittedly a very straightforward and mercenary time-is-money way to look at things, but when so much anime is being made every season, it’s a necessity. Separating the wheat from the chaff is not always easy, but something that at least makes the case that a show might be interesting is a novel premise. Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective, awkward punctuation and all, has that. I’ll give it to you in one sentence; Ameku would like you to go into it thinking that it’s House, M.D., but with an anime girl. For some of you, that’s going to be enough of a sell that you’ve probably already tabbed away from this article to pull it up on Crunchyroll. I’m not sure if you’ll like what the show is actually doing, but godspeed and good luck.

For the rest of you who might be interested in the particulars, let me get this out of the way: unlike many other LGBTQ millennials I know, I’ve never really liked House. Not that I ever watched a ton of it, but it very much did not seem like my sort of mystery series from what little I did see. Also, while this is not the show’s fault, the whole thing with it “never being Lupus” hits a little differently when your mother suffers from chronic Lupus flare-ups. (Ameku M.D. actually makes reference to this little meme almost immediately, which soured me on the show right out the gate pretty hard.)

Suffice to say, the deck was stacked against this series from the very beginning, at least as far as I’m concerned. Still, something can be not for me but still be worthwhile, so I committed to watching the whole premiere regardless. Having now seen the first two episodes (they released in tandem), I’m still unsure if I’ll watch more, but I am glad I gave it a chance, because, as it turns out, this House influence is sort of a feint.

The first episode opens with our main character, Ameku Takao [Sakura Ayane], rapid-fire solving a pair of mysterious diagnoses in the hospital she works at, quickly deducing that a young boy’s mysterious nerve pain is caused by a Vitamin A overdose, and that an older gentleman’s agony of the stomach is the result of accidentally ingesting a fish parasite. In both cases, she makes the prognosis in a vaguely judgey way, and, going off of my admittedly very limited exposure to that series, this is the part that’s more or less “like House.” After this introductory segment though, the show promptly takes an abrupt swerve, and it’s here where we need to draw attention to the series’ English language subtitle, Doctor Detective. Because that is a much more honest indication of what this series is trying to be, as is the title of the first episode, the hilariously on-the-nose “Dr. Sherlock.”

Not long after Dr. Ameku solves these little mysteries, a much bigger one rears its head as a man is rushed to the emergency room, where he promptly dies. (My understanding is that House rarely if ever dealt with outright murders, so that’ll be another difference.) Two curious details make themselves immediately obvious; this man had his leg bitten off by a very large predator, and his blood is inexplicably a bright blue color. The victim and detective thus present, the stage is set for what’s actually a pretty typical murder mystery. An interesting one, at that. I won’t spoil the specifics of what precisely occurred (I’m not sure if the series is strictly fair-play, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were), but this mystery, and Dr. Ameku’s eventual unraveling of it, complete with the denouement-inducing catchphrase “let me give you my diagnosis”, and a very fun little sequence where she’s depicted “putting the clues together” by floating in a sphere of abstract math, is very much in the vein of of an orthodox whodunnit. It’s just that the detective is, again per the subtitle, also a doctor, and therefore there’s a bit of a medical focus.

She’s pretty entertaining as she does it, too. Dr. Ameku is the kind of smugly charismatic lead you want in something like this, she’s incredibly immature (said the anime blogger) but also extremely intelligent. The Sherlock comparisons make themselves obvious in the way she picks up on seemingly random details as vital clues. All of this is stuff that’s been done before, of course, but it’s well-executed here, and Takao is, overall, a very watchable protagonist. It helps that she’s got a solid supporting cast already as well. Mostly, this consists of her very own Watson, Takanashi Yuu [Ono Kenshou], also a medical professional—and an impressive karateka!—but much less of a detective, who asks just the right questions to set Dr. Ameku up to deliver her precision diagnoses. But there’s also Takao’s uncle, a different Dr. Ameku [Tachiki Fumihiko], who owns the hospital that she works at, and with whom she appears to have quite a lot of friction. (The elder Dr. Ameku, perhaps understandably, does not like one of his doctors playing Columbo in her off hours.) Speaking of Columbo-a-likes, Takao also has a contact in the police department, the trenchcoated detective Sakurai Kimiyasu [Hirata Hiroaki], who was in this case mostly cooperative, but who seems poised to evolve into an interesting foil later on.

Visually, the show goes for a restrained, mostly realistic look. Given the studio involved here, the somewhat infamous project no. 9, I’m a little surprised at how well they pull this off. The series is, for sure, visually unshowy, but it’s a clean, grounded look, heavy on greys and blues, that works well for a detective series, even one that has lines of dialogue like this in its very first case.

All told, despite my initial misgivings there’s some real promise here, and I’ll say the show is solidly worth checking out. A post-credits scene seems to indicate that the cases will only ramp up in stakes from here, which is good, since if we simmered back down to stuff like “a kid accidentally ate a ridiculous amount of blueberries and gave himself Vitamin A poisoning” I think we’d be in for a much less interesting show. I’ll say this much, this is the first 2025 anime I’ve watched anything of at all, and simply by virtue of having a novel premise that it does fairly well, Doctor Detective here is well ahead both of how I started last year’s anime and, honestly, much of the pack for this season, if what else has aired so far is any indication. I’m pleasantly surprised, given my initial bias against what I thought this series was going to be. As I said up at the top of this piece, I still don’t know if I’ll watch much more of this, but if I do, don’t be surprised to hear about Ameku M.D. here on Magic Planet Anime again.

The Magic Planet

Tag: Reviews

Let’s Watch UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 10 – “The Peak”

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 7 – “Tracen Academy”

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 6 – “The Beast”

Seasonal First Impressions: Be Aware of MONO

Seasonal First Impressions: Checking in to the APOCALYPSE HOTEL

AVE MUJICA at the Edge of the World

The Weekly Orbit [2/24/25]

The Weekly Orbit [2/11/25]

Seasonal First Impressions: Pining For Those SAKAMOTO DAYS

Seasonal First Impressions: Mysteries, Medicine, and Malpractice in AMEKU M.D.: DOCTOR DETECTIVE