Tag: Roshidere

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/22/24]

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

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

Anime

Mayonaka Punch – Episode 2

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

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

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

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 3

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

Wistoria: Wand & Sword

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

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

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

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

Code Geass: Rozé of The Recapture

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

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

Bye, Bye Earth – Episode 2

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

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

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

SHOSHIMIN: How to Become Ordinary

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

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

My Deer Friend Nokotan – Episode 2

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

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

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

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

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! – Episode 2

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

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

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

2.5 Dimensional Seduction – Episode 3

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

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

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

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

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

Wonderful Precure – Episode 25

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

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

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

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

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

With the bustle of premiere week firmly behind us, I’d like to again ask for you to consider making a small donation if you enjoy what I do here on the site. I don’t have a traditional job, so every penny helps.

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

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

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/15/24]

Hello, anime fans! Premiere season is finally over here at Magic Planet Anime, which means I can finally get back into the regular groove of things after mostly covering premieres for the last two weeks. There’s still one more article in the pipe—you guys should be seeing it tomorrow, unless something’s gone wrong—but for the most part we’re back in our regular schedule.

Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture – Episode 3

This was a pretty good episode, although Rozé is visibly straining against the limits of the 12-episode format at this point, cramming in tons of major twists and more lighthearted subplots into the 24 minute space of a single episode that can make the series feel a little claustrophobic.

The end result is that this episode feels very diced-up and fragmented, like a dozen little shards of stories are being laid all in a row.

That said, the effect works surprisingly well! Not having the original Code Geass‘ space to laze about and really revel in its contradictions is definitely hurting the show a bit, but I don’t think it’s to the point where it’s a major problem, at least not yet. Also, there were rare amounts of Gender in this episode; Sakuya lounging about in bed, dressing up as a maid, using her real voice while boymoding, etc. All very good. I’m also interested about the new knights we’re very briefly introduced to in the episode’s start.

As for the main thing; the child-emperor of Britannia is dead, and it seems like Sakura is going to be placed on the throne as a puppet for our local Char knockoff, Lord Noland [Yasumoto Hiroki]. This implies to me that he probably knows she’s not the real Sakuya, which makes things interesting. It’s fun to see how Rozé tries to skirt around the limitations of its runtime with regard to this kind of thing specifically. Norland’s plan to kill Callis and replace him with Sakuya would’ve been given several episodes of buildup in the original Code Geass. Here it’s all left to implication, making the entire thing feel all the more sudden.

All of this pales to the real revelation in this episode: LELOUCH IS HERE AND THEY GAVE HIM LINES AND EVERYTHING AND IT WAS JUST A FLASHBACK BUT I DON’T CARE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA MY FUCKIN BOY!

That is the least formal writing you will ever read on this blog. Please revel in it.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 2

This episode clarifies for us that Suou, who we met last week, is actually Kuze’s sister, and is also significantly less prim and proper than we might’ve been initially led to believe.

She’s an incorrigible faux-(or is it even faux?)-brocon and arguably even more of an otaku than her brother. I am Not Really Into This, suffice to say, but on the flip side, any texture is good for a romcom that’s working this tightly within a formula. Suou does not seem to be a particularly complex character (maybe that will change as the show goes on) but her sheer meanness is funny enough. She really delights in teasing Alya over her closeness to Kuze. Alya has no idea of course, that the source of this closeness is that they’re siblings, and she in fact assumes that they’re dating. (This is less unbelievable than it might seem given that the two use different surnames and don’t seem to be living together. My guess is that their parents are separated.)

This flows nicely into the main setting of the episode, a mall, where Alya runs into the siblings while they’re out shopping and gets roped into visiting a novelty spicy ramen restaurant. An admirable amount of visual polish goes into conveying how unpalatably hot the ramen is, but I will admit that this whole scene was a bit of a shrug for me.

I can’t help but notice that Alya’s Russian has already been relegated to a plot device. Alya mutters in Russian about wanting him to be her running mate in the student council election, and it really seems like he eventually will. Other than this it’s mostly relegated to a couple basic jokes during the ramen scene.

Alya herself remains a delight, though. At one point she and Kuze spend time clothes shopping and she gets hooked on him praising her outfits, only to collapse into an anxious ball when Suou shows up again.

Her walleyed expressions throughout this episode are also pretty endearing, and she’s the main character whose interiority here doesn’t come off as slightly forced. Contrast the siblings, who are here given an out of place melancholic flashback that I don’t think this show really has the weight to handle.

Roshidere still isn’t amazing or anything (and I could really do without the Single Egregious Ecchi Scene in each episode, they throw the whole vibe off) but I’m having fun with it, mostly off the strength of its cast, and I’m interested to see where this all goes.

This week’s ED theme is a sugary sweet cover of “Kawaii-te Gomen” (something like “Sorry I’m So Cute~”, apparently) by The HoneyWorks. I actually quite like this song, and Uesaka Sumire‘s cover of it here is a nice if straightforward take on the original.

Quality Assurance in Another World – Episode 2

This was not nearly as interesting as the first episode, but it was alright! Once it became clear that this is just a variant on Sword Art Online‘s setup I will admit that I lost some interest, but I’m going to stick with it a bit longer to see if it can gain that interest back. I liked this episode’s villain being a guy dressed up like Black-Iron Tarkus from Dark Souls, and he and his skinny friend do a bit to establish that most of Haga’s fellow QA people are pretty twisted this far into their being abandoned / purposely left in the game / whatever is going on.

I will say I think Haga’s insistence that if he just keeps doing his job he’ll eventually get home is the one thing that I’m hanging onto, here, because it’s a good metaphor for how being stuck in a dead-end job can feel and I think that’s on purpose. So hopefully the series has more tricks up its sleeve to come.

Oshi No Ko Season 2 – Episode 2

One of the central ideas of Oshi no Ko is that being in a creative field can absolutely suck. Perhaps that it even does usually suck, as a rule. So it is with “Game of Telephone”, the second episode of the show’s second season. As revealed at the end of the last episode, Abiko [Sakura Ayane], the mangaka for Demon’s Blade, hates the play’s script.

There’s a fun duality to the comedic and tragic sides of this episode. On the one hand, the fact that Abiko, a very weird little woman who brushes her teeth with double toothbrushes when she needs to do it quickly and dresses in decidedly dated attire, has everyone running scared is pretty funny. On the other hand, Abiko, as the original creator of a very successful work, wields a lot of power over the play, which she uses to eventually dislodge the pseudonymous scriptwriter GOA [Ono Daisuke] from his position, threatening to pull the right to make the play in the first place if she’s not allowed to simply do the script all over again herself.

GOA is, of course, devastated, and he can’t even get his name taken off the play so he’s not being falsely credited. One of Oshi no Ko‘s simplest shots to date is just him, sitting in his dimly lit apartment by himself, clearly doing fine financially but creatively deeply unfulfilled. It’s sad stuff.

And yet, Abiko isn’t entirely unsympathetic here either despite how she absolutely lays into GOA. Her passion that her work be translated accurately to other media is clearly genuine, and there is, of course, the little fact that Oshi no Ko itself was originally a manga. So there is some amount of sympathy for her point of view built into the series just inherently. (I’ve seen it suggested that Abiko is supposed to be a skewering of a certain kind of entitled mangaka or even some mangaka in particular, but I just don’t see it, especially considering that Akasaka Aka is pretty opinionated about his work in his own right.)

All told, this is a compelling episode in its own right and a solid twist to what was set up last episode. We end on Akane taking Aquamarine—who has professed to be disinterested in theater—out to see a 2.5D play of the type they’ll be putting on. I cannot wait to see what that looks like.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

This was fun! Despite the way Magic Knight Rayearth is often described as a mix of magical girl, mecha, and isekai genres, it most strongly comes off as a fairly straightforward heroic fantasy thing, at least so far. It’s such an old-school fantasy thing that Acquiring Legendary Weapons and Getting Out of The Monster Forest are whole-episode quests in of themselves.

The pacing of these early episodes is surprisingly hyperactive for the vintage of the show, which I find interesting. Also, the character animation is really bouncy and I like the amount of chibi cuts.

I also must confess to loving the evil sorceress Alcyone [Amano Yuri]. Her design is like 50% purple spheres by volume, it’s fantastic.

All three main girls are a lot of fun. So far Fuu [Kasahara Hiroko] has gotten the most focus and I like her fairly analytical personality, although it’s funny that even 30 years ago isekai protagonists were comparing the world they end up in against video games they’ve played. (There are a lot of differences obviously, but this similarity struck me and a friend1 who I was watching with as funny.) Episode 3 is a focus episode for her, wherein our main group meets the chronic liar / wandering swordsman Ferio [Yamazaki Takumi]. Despite initial skepticism she ends up falling for him, it’s cute, and believable! It also involves Fuu shooting one of her magic arrows into a big rock that turns things into monsters, so that’s pretty great too.

Going back a bit, episode 2 features a pretty involved scene where our girls take down a mud golem. I really liked it, as the way they lead it into a small pond where it dissolves. I think a lesser show would just take it for granted that our girls could defeat these things and not really bother showing us any details.

I was decidedly not a fan of the racial humor in the second episode, though, which caught me very off-guard. (It consists of the smith character fantasizing about capturing her enemies and doing so with some stereotypical Native American / boiling pot imagery, admittedly iconography nicked from old, racist American cartoons most likely, but still. Eugh.) and I’m hoping that’s the end of that.

Anyway, it’s a solid show overall! Excited to watch more whenever the aforementioned friend and I end up having the time.

That’s all for this week. I leave you with the following Bonus Thought. I’ve been forgetting to do these lately, shame on me!

1: Hi Josh

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

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

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Being There For Roshidere in ALYA SOMETIMES HIDES HER FEELINGS IN RUSSIAN

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

The girl-with-a-gimmick romcom is a staple of the modern seasonal anime environment. Several times a year, we are given the opportunity to watch an earnest but somewhat emotionally dim boy attempt to win the affections of a girl who has some standout quirky trait. Some of these traits are quirkier than others.

Being honest, I rarely touch this kind of thing. Occasionally, as in the case of My Dress-Up Darling, I will develop an affection for them because the characters work well together. Sometimes, as in The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, they are simply strange in a way that is only tangentially connected to their setup. A lot of the time, though, as in the case of say, Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, I just find them vaguely grating, usually because the quirk isn’t actually that interesting. To go back to that comic we just mentioned, Shikimori, which began life as a Twitter comic, tried to hitch its entire series to the fact that Shikimori herself was nebulously masculine in some way, which mostly just meant that she was athletic and nominally good at keeping her extremely feminine boyfriend out of danger. The best parts of the series had nothing to do with her.

Since Shikimori, I’ve mostly avoided actually talking about these shows on this blog (again, with the exception of Glasses Girl, may it rest in Hell), because more than most anime, I’m keenly aware that I am way out of the target demographic of these things, which is teenage boys who are just discovering love and attraction for the first time. Most other popular genres of anime are also aimed at teenage boys, but most of these; battle shonen, for example, have a sizable peripheral demographic that also enjoy them, because things like “people with cool powers fight” transcend experience somewhat. In those cases, I’m at least somewhat a part of that periphery. That isn’t the case with gimmick romcoms. I’ve just never been able to get there.

Nonetheless, I’ve made an active effort this season toward pushing myself to write about things I’d normally pass over, and Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian, alias Roshidere, is part of that. Ultimately, all of what I’ve called gimmicks when discussing these anime are actually aspects of some kind of romantic (and/or sexual) fantasy. You want an otaku girlfriend, you tune in to Dress-Up Darling. You want a cool girlfriend who’s more assertive than you, you put on Shikimori. You want a weird baby-creature that looks like she was drawn by an alien, you watch The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses. All of this is pretty straightforward, and Roshidere centers a trope that’s so obvious that I’m a little shocked I’ve never seen one of these anime use it as their main thing before; the fantasy of dating the hot foreign chick in your class. Most classes in my experience do not actually have hot foreign chicks, but having been a boy up to a certain point, I can attest that unfortunately, teenage boys will make do by being exoticizing weirdos about almost anyone who looks different from them. Thankfully for the basic palatability of this show, Kuze Masachika [Amasaki Kouhei] does not have to be an exoticizing weirdo. He is our lead character, and, quite unlike every teenage boy I personally knew growing up, the hot foreign girl in his class is actually interested in him. (The Hot Foreign Girl In My Class is Actually Interested in Me?! would be a workable alternate title for this anime. I’m glad it’s not called that because its real title is better, but in a nearby reality that’s just slightly worse than ours, that’s the name of the show I’m writing about today.)

Alisa Mikhailovna Kujou [major Russophile Uesaka Sumire, in what I must imagine is a dream role], nicknamed Alya, is our title character. She thinks Kuze, a complete nerd who spends his time playing gacha games and watching late-night anime, is pretty cute. It’s easy to be uncharitable about this kind of series, and I think I’ve been a bit hard on them so far, so I want to head an easy non-criticism off at the pass; this is not “proof that the writer has never talked to a woman” or whatever in of itself. I met my girlfriend on a message board because we were talking about Gundam 00, and our case is far from unique. Girls can like nerdy guys, and given who this series was written by and for, it makes complete sense that Alya is one such girl. To give her further credit, while Kuze does not have the most striking design in the world, he’s passingly handsome, fairly funny, and is considerate of others’ feelings. Together, the two have a nice, snarky repartee going. As the viewer, I can put myself enough in her shoes to understand what she sees in him.

Our basic premise is very simple here. These two sit next to each other in class. Alya is very straight-laced and is on the student council. Kuze is an otaku who doesn’t give much a damn about school. They have a lot of comedic back and forth. Kuze will do something foolish or nerdy; fall asleep during a chemistry lesson, start playing a gacha game during a between-class break, etc. Alya will chastise him, and they will have some mildly witty exchange. After which she will say something to herself in Russian that reveals her true feelings, hence the show’s title. So far, so simple, and even on this level the two do have a nice little rhythm going. But there’s a complication; unbeknownst to Alya, Kuze also speaks Russian. He can’t bring himself to actually admit this, because he assumes Alya would be deathly embarrassed that Kuze knows that she’s been calling him a cutie or what-have-you in another language this entire time. It’s a fun little dynamic, and it comes off as a bit of a lightly Kaguya-sama-inspired element in that it makes a sort of layered mind game thing (albeit one with very low stakes) part of the narrative. The two aren’t explicitly thinking of this as a race to make the other person confess their feelings first, but there’s something loosely like that happening as a result of this twist.

(Incidentally, I’ve decided this deserves an entire parenthetical aside. When Kuze is rolling on the gacha in something that’s clearly Fate Grand Order, he pulls the in-universe game’s version of Tsukuyomi, who looks basically identical to Alya aside from having fox ears. Alya questions the design, wondering why she has silver hair, and Kuze replies that it’s probably an allusion to the color of the Moon, but brushes the question off as unimportant because the fact that she’s cute matters more. Alya mutters to herself, in Russian, that she has silver hair too, and calls him a “cheater.” This matters to me because it’s a rather rare example of an anime explicitly calling attention to, and confirming the in-universe reality of, unconventional hair colors. This is maybe the most fascinating thing in the show, and I don’t say that as an insult. It’s especially odd because most of the other characters have very realistic hair tones. Before she said that line, I assumed her silver-white hair was intended to be a stylized blonde and didn’t really question it. A later scene even implies that this might actually be the case, so, what gives? It doesn’t ultimately matter, but it will distract me. Anime hair color is one of those things that is just endlessly interesting to me.)

A recurring thought I had while watching this is that both Kuze and Alya struggle to honestly express themselves, and in attempting to do so, lapse into extremely goofy behavior, hiding their feelings not so much in any specific language but in jokes, and just generally screwing around with each other. Sometimes this is cute, sometimes this sees the show lapse into shameless cliché. Something that very much teeters on the edge is the requisite Fanservice Bit, here toward the end of the episode, where the situation contrives itself such that Alya is sitting with one of her stockings removed in a classroom that only herself and Kuze are present in. She teases him (again) and things end with the camera spending way too much time on her foot and a panty shot that was so sudden that it felt like a jumpscare. (She also kicks him in the face, but that’s a lot less surprising.) I’m not going to criticize the show just for attempting to be salacious, but there’s something about the integration of it into the other material that feels jarring. Then again, as I keep saying, I’m not the horny teenage boy that this kind of thing is aimed at anymore. I dimly remember being like that, a period of my life where I would’ve defended Love Hina to the death as an important work of art because there’s, like, dude, there’s totally a scene where you can see Motoko in a hot spring, but not only is it hard to return to that mentality some 15 years later, I don’t really have any desire to. Does this stuff work for its target audience? I have no idea, if it does, good for them. I don’t wanna see Alya’s feet.

On the other hand, that light mind game element is still present even during this scene, and I think if they had played the whole thing a little more subtly it might have felt a little less out of place. In the middle of all this, and in between freaking out about Girl Legs, Kuze has a stray thought where he basically psychoanalyzes Alya and tries to get to the bottom of why she’s doing this whole muttering-in-Russian thing in the first place. Are his conclusions correct? Who knows! But I like that even during what’s probably its scene that is most easy to object to, the show still treats Alya as a character.

On the other other hand, there are also areas where the show feels more like it’s objectifying Alya, and really the female half of the cast in general, than treating them like people.1 During a scene in the school cafeteria, one of Kuze’s friends, a kid with a shaved head named Maruyama Takeshi [Sakai Koudai], is a fountain of what sometimes gets called locker room talk. He talks about Alya and two other characters and how badly he wishes he had a shot with them, he ranks the three, preferring Kuze’s childhood friend Suou Yuki [Maruoka Wakana], and just generally acts like an ass. My initial impression was that we were supposed to sort of think this guy was a loser. In light of the scene described above, and just the fact that Roshidere lingers on this guy’s yapping for so long, I’m less sure. This, to me, was much grosser than the whole foot thing. A series does not need to explicitly condemn characters like this in order to be good, but in context with everything else, it does make me see Roshidere in a slightly less charitable light.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I can appreciate a fair number of aspects of this show, certainly. I haven’t talked much about its presentation, but said presentation is quite solid. “A high school” is perhaps the most ISO standard setting in anime, but Roshidere‘s feels distinct and has a genuine sense of place. This is also true of the flashback scenes, late in the episode, that depict a young Kuze hanging out with a person who is probably a young Alya in a park at dusk. The “chase sequence” that ends the episode is also pretty strikingly directed and animated, and I’ll admit to being a sucker for strong action sequences in non-action shows. It feels worth noting as well that the OP is a ridiculous, incredibly elaborate thing that promises all sorts of fantastical scenarios that, barring some sort of full-on genre shift (wouldn’t that be interesting), we will never get in the show itself. The ED—apparently one of twelve, they’re giving this the Monogatari treatment—is similarly grandiose. These sequences are fun on their own, but their presence feels telling, in a way, as though the story’s actual charms weren’t quite considered enough to carry it. (Some might remember I had basically the same thought with regard to Shikimori‘s elaborate fantasy OP. These two shows come from some of the same people at Doga Kobo, which may have something to do with it.)

On the writing side, I like a majority of Alya and Kuze’s dynamic, and some of the ancillary characters seem like they’ll eventually be fun to follow even if Takeshi is absolutely unbearable. I bring all this up to say, I might actually finish this! It’s entirely possible I don’t, we have a busy season ahead of us and most of what I’m looking forward to the most still hasn’t premiered, but it’s not impossible. Even if I do, though, this series isn’t for me, to an even greater degree than most of what I cover on this site. So I again have to come back to my keen awareness that what I think of it just doesn’t matter that much. Ultimately what I specifically think of any anime doesn’t matter that much. (If it did, Healer Girl would be widely hailed as a modern classic.) Still, much more than usual, I find myself with a shortage of strong opinions here. I’m sure it will do fine in a broader sense. But will it appear on Magic Planet Anime again? Who knows, stranger things have happened.

1: Some people would read this line and ask, “isn’t that what every anime like this does?” To which I would reply no, it really is not.

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