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!

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Hello, anime fans! Over the last week, things have really been heating up in certain corners. I won’t belabor the point, every episode covered below is, at bare minimum, compelling, and some are absolutely arresting. Let’s get into things!

Anime – Seasonal

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 8

The anime continues its relative strong streak here, with an episode that expands a part of the story that was only a chapter or two in the manga and gives it full focus.

Here, we focus on a young Sumireko’s adventure to a mysterious bookstore and how said encounter helped her overcome her anxiety. There’s a real nostalgic warmth to both the bookstore itself—I spent a lot of time in book shops as a kid, I get it—and its actual depiction, which thankfully ditches the dripping, cloying sepia of previous flashbacks for an extended full-color reminiscence, lightly brought down into the realm of earth tones, to quite literally paint a picture of what going to this place felt like. Gentle, comforting, mysterious, childhood-defining, it’s all things that this kind of flashback could be, and my only real point of contention here is that more of the show hasn’t tried this hard to look this good. I should also bring up the way they depict the books Sumireko is reading, which has a fun paper cut-esque quality to it. It’s visually inventive in a way the rest of the show hasn’t been even if the actual technicality of what’s being done isn’t particularly crazy.

Naturally, the book shop has mysterious origins of its own that aren’t revealed until the episode’s second half. Its mysterious proprietress, a dark-haired woman whose kindness is matched only by her love of literature, is revealed as an ancient spirit from the early Shogunate, immortalized in part via her love of literature, she is someone to whom heaven is literally a library.

The second half of the episode kicks off what is likely the second to last arc that the anime will cover. It remains to be seen how the show will handle that, but I’ve been enjoying the series’ late recovery and am pleasantly surprised by it. I don’t get to give out the “substantially improved” award distinction super often.

Girls Band Cry – Episode 9

After last week’s emotional bombshell, we have a slightly lighter episode this week, although still one with a lot of narrative momentum. (And, crucially, a focus on Tomo, one of the show’s less developed characters up to this point.)

Those who succeed in their chosen field have a tendency to romanticize hard work and effort. Presumably, those working on Girls Band Cry are no exception, most of this episode characterizes Tomo as a cornered tiger, someone who struggles to speak her mind but can be absolutely vicious when given permission (or reason) to do so. This collides with Nina’s ongoing quest to learn guitar on her own so she doesn’t have to keep relying on Momoka in an interesting way. Tomo’s feedback, when Nina presses her enough to actually get it, is withering, and a less determined person might give up. Nina doesn’t, and much of this episode revolves around getting the whole band on the same page so that Tomo can provide some direction. This is epitomized here by the ongoing process of hammering out the song they plan to play at the upcoming festival.

To provide some context for why Tomo is like this, we get flashbacks, one of the show’s favorite narrative devices. I like that, running with the show’s general use of flat animation as a depiction of the idealized past, Tomo’s memories are done in a mixed style. Her bandmates (rendered faceless) are drawn in 2D, but Rupa and Tomo herself—who seems to still be stuck in that moment—are 3D. It’s a nice way of conveying how out of step she feels with other people (and perhaps a way of quietly signaling that Rupa is one of the relative few who understands her).

To be honest, I find Tomo as depicted here kind of an admirable figure. As someone who’s had a lifetime of difficulty in committing to anything, much less improving on anything—I’m only a bit less bad at writing these kinds of things now as I was 7 or so years ago when I started, after all—I find her stubbornness endearing, her willingness to be direct and to the point compelling.

Much of the episode also employs the running motif of a snake (Tomo’s pet) who won’t eat. Why it isn’t doing so is never directly stated, but it eventually does in the episode’s closing minutes. Perhaps the reason is that, like the show’s human characters, it just needed some time and effort.

To be clear though, this is not solely a Deep And Serious Episode. There’s a fair bit of slapstick, especially in the opening bits with the busted air conditioners. I think it’s possible that how funny Girls Band Cry is might get lost in the shuffle when the show ends and the time comes to assess it in retrospect. I hope not, the show deserves full credit for everything it’s doing, not just the high-intensity emotional plays and excellent characterization.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episode 9

Ouch.

This episode follows up on the commission work that Mahiru was offered last episode, to do art for the Sunflower Dolls, Kano’s old idol group, the problem being that this would pre-empt the project that JELEE want to do around the same time. The fallout from that offer, what Mahiru does with it, and how it permanently bends the Jellyfish‘s narrative, is immense, sprawling, and messy. It’s also the best episode of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night, trumping its electric premiere episode by being an almost total inversion of it; emotionally, thematically, even visually. What I wrote below is an after-the-fact edit of what I wrote as I was watching the episode, because the thoughts came to me in such a torrent that I knew there was no way I’d remember everything I wanted to write about if I didn’t get it down in type first. This is the sort of episode people will bring up to prove that this show was worth it. It is a permanent part of the conversation, an immediate lightning bolt to the zeitgeist, and, to the extent that the “girls band war” between this series and Girls Band Cry is a real thing, is the first time in weeks it’s been able to comfortably claim the better episode between the two. That counts for something too, on a more cynical level.

One of the main threads of this episode is Kano’s consistent flashing back to her fallout with the Sunflower Dolls. Showing us how she initially joined the group and her eventual departure from it, and why and how that all happened. Several times, an overwhelming feeling of negativity is conveyed by the actual video blurring lightly in and out, a nice, lightly experimental touch from a show full of them.

The present day contains the main events that actually drive the episode, however. Mahiru’s meeting with Yukine, Kano’s manipulative mother and former manager, makes it clear that this is a very large-scale project that she’s being tapped for. Mahiru rightly wonders why, exactly, she’s being considered for this, although Yukine claims that the connection between Mahiru herself and Kano isn’t a factor when she’s pressed on it. This is an obvious lie—whatever Yukine’s opinion of Mahiru’s actual talents, it is very clear she’s asking this of Mahiru with an agenda in mind—but Mahiru buys it.

In general, Yukine is quite obviously a very manipulative person. A simple but very effective technique of oscillating between telling Mahiru what she wants to hear, lightly criticizing her, and then circling back around works wonders, which she finishes by, basically, promising her the world; at a Sunflower Dolls concert, Mahiru’s art will be projected onto the entire surrounding landscape. This plants an idea in Mahiru’s head, a very enticing one as a character who clearly deals with impostor syndrome and seeking external validation, “literally hundreds of thousands of people will see my drawings,” she must think to herself. “There’s no way I can say ‘no.'”

In any other show I’d question myself as to whether or not Yukine was really that bad, but Jellyfish has not historically been very subtle about signaling its characters motives. This is setting aside Kano’s flashback where Kano becomes “Nonoka.” Her mother controlling her style and manipulating her talents for her own ends is pretty vile, and paints a very clear picture of her as an old-school slimeball record exec. Really, the moment that seals the deal in hindsight is when she lays out her goals to Kano. “I want to one day nurture an artist who sings to 50,000 people.” The max capacity of the Tokyo Dome, as she points out. When I first heard this line, I rolled my eyes a little, thinking something like “It’s always numbers with this show.” Hold on to that thought, though. We’ll be coming back to it.

Especially when the show starts bringing up LookIdiot again. LookIdiot (a….whatever the opposite of catchy is, shortening of “Look at Reality, Idiot”), an in-universe gossip and scandal Youtube channel, is eventually revealed to be run by Mero, the former Sunflower Dolls center who Kano replaced. Mero certainly has the motive—she’s deeply resentful of this display of straight-up nepotism from her beloved ‘Yukine-P’—but it seems implausible, even in the world of Jellyfish, that a single teenage girl could be running a channel like that on their own, especially when one of the channel’s videos derails the careers of one-time Sunflower Dolls rivals the Rainbow Girls.

This is all contrasted with a brief visit that Kano takes during the flashback to visit her dad. We don’t see much of the man, but it’s clear that he and Yukine are not on remotely good terms anymore, and he and Kano meeting up at all seems to be a secret. (This is also where we see Kano seeing the jellyfish mural for the first time, inspiring some off-the-cuff lyrics which she takes the time to jot down.)

Inevitably, Kano finds out about Mero’s antics, thus finally contextualizing for us the punch to the face that got her booted from the Sunflower Dolls before the start of the show. Jellyfish again draws on its more experimental inclinations here; Yukine glares at Kano and Kano seems to almost go up in flames as the show’s visual style completely changes to a gauzy, faux-painted look, swamping Kano’s recollection of events in an oily blur, and smothering the dialogue in an equally thick layer of muffling.

Back in the present, a paranoid Kano finally snaps when Mahiru reveals that she’s going to take the commission from Yukine. I have previously criticized this show for feeling contrived, but someone splitting from the little indie group they came up with for a bigger opportunity is probably the single most realistic conflict Jellyfish has ever had. God bless Kiwi and Mei for trying to smooth things over, even if it obviously doesn’t work. Kano’s blow up at the end is absolutely vicious, she completely lays into Mahiru, saying a ton of things she can’t possibly mean because in that moment her only aim is to hurt the girl she’s close with as much as she possibly can. It is legitimately difficult to watch, not a term I use lightly, and even Kano herself seems shocked by what she says.

As she lays in her bed after the fight, the show’s obsession with numbers—followers, seating capacity, arbitrary dates, whatever—is revealed as a trait of Kano herself, a fraction of Yukine’s controlling personality inherited the worst possible way. Ouch. My fucking heart. And yet, in this absolute buckshot blast of emotional devastation, Jellyfish seems to find its footing all over again. The episode ends with a truly rude twist of the knife; a montage of Mahiru and Kano’s moments up to this point, concluding with a simple procession of Kano saying her name. Over and over again, as the credits play.

Things will not be the same ever again for this show, and how it handles the next three episodes is going to define its long-term legacy—people can forgive a lot for a strong closing arc—but for the first time in a while, it feels like it means something again. Kano has a long road ahead of her to picking up the pieces of her shattered relationship with Mahiru and the rest of JELEE, but I’m interested in seeing her—and seeing Jellyfish itself—make the attempt. Other people have said it better than I. Sometimes you discover yourself when you fall short.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 9

This show is so delightfully stupid.

Here we follow Sara and Yuna’s respective first days at school. Suffice to say, they go pretty differently. The first half of the episode follows Sara, and is generally gag-based, with the majority of these first twelve or so minutes being a nonstop cavalcade of the other students falling in either love or admiration for Sara and her charmingly over-the-top personality. She out-maths the class intellectual, impresses the local hot blooded boy with her skills at ruler fights, finds her way to the heart of the class’s soft boy with her deep appreciation and open-mindedness toward food, and makes the “English speaker” (most of what he’s saying is, in fact, nonsense) laugh with a goofy impromptu manzai skit. All of this is played purely for jokes, and much of the humor has a regional color to it owing to the heavy focus on the “Gifu-ness” of Gifu, where the series takes place. All the while, Sara also picks up a group of rivals, who promptly pledge their loyalty to her as “retainers” once they see her blow the lock off of a shed they try to lock her in.

The second half of the episode is substantially more serious and focuses on Yuna, taking the form of a simple story about bullying. It’s quite the swerve, and this is such a straightforward depiction of girls bullying girls—specifically, a group of second years picking on a freshman, Mizuki, who they’re jealous of for being picked up for the basketball team—that it’s more something I’d associate with old shoujo manga than anything contemporary. Yuna uses the burgeoning detective skills she’s picked up from her time with Sousuke to get audio and video footage of the girls bullying her. Yuna actually advocates taking the whole case to the police if Mizuki is so interested, and mirrors many of the same talking points that Sara and Sousuke gave her several episodes back. In general, the show seems to advocate a “do no harm but take no shit” attitude here, which is more applicable in general than anything more specific it might be pushing.

At episode’s end, Yuna admits to Sousuke while visiting Sara that she helped Mizuki more out of a desire to test herself and “solve a puzzle” so to speak than a pure desire to help a classmate. This is a fair point, and Sousuke doesn’t discourage her, but given what I know about police psychology it does damper the episode a little bit for me. Not much, but a smidgen.

It’s also worth mentioning the show’s visuals here which are….fine? It’s more worth mentioning that they’re not worth mentioning I suppose. This is a supremely workmanlike adaptation being carried hard by its writing, a trait, presumably, of the source material. I wonder if the manga or light novel are being translated.

Train To The End of The World – Episodes 9 & 10

Episode 9 of Train begins in somewhere we’ve heard a lot about but haven’t actually seen until now; Ikebukuro itself. Here, Youka is being kept in some kind of dreamlike haze by Pontaro, possibly by the “wibble wobble surgery” that affected Zenjiro. The first half of this episode is, therefore, our rendezvous with her, our first since the show began, and an assessment of her mental state. The verdict? Not great. At one point she gets into an argument with one of the survivors of Ikebukuro—“survivor” really is the right term, the city’s few remaining citizens seem to cling to life in a desperately hostile environment—who blames her for the city’s state for reasons she can’t really understand. When she gets angry enough, she zaps him with a beam of unknowable magic, and turns him into a bowl of egg custard. That’s 7G Powers at work, baby, and it’s nasty stuff. Further complicating things are her mysterious bodyguard / retainer “Pochi”, named after the dog of course, who keeps a watchful eye on her but doesn’t seem entirely aligned with Pontaro’s goals, either. The whole thing is rather mysterious.

Train returns to its theme of environment as a reflection of the inner self here, and more than ever, makes a clear connection to the tech bro-y nature of Pontaro, whose early days after the crisis were apparently defined by “claiming this was the plan all along” and admitting that he can’t exactly tell people just how badly this has all fucked up. The general picture is a bit akin to if what Elon Musk did to Twitter happened to all of physical reality, but also he had to convince a random teenage girl in order to let him actually do anything. Also worth a minor mention; Youka has had a light redesign in the intervening years, and her new look, despite having only relatively minor adjustments, makes her look pretty cool, and in some shots even properly regal, which is not an adjective I would’ve ever dreamt of associating with the character when this show was new. Did she make all of these changes herself, or is this Pontaro influencing how she presents herself? It’s hard to know for sure, but things seem to definitely be leaning in the latter direction, despite all her power.

In the episode’s latter half, the girls meet a figure who I was honestly pretty sure was never going to show up in this series again; the guy in the swan boat from way back in episode 2! The conversation our heroines have with him is important—as is the conversation Dr. Makoto has with Zenjiro around the same time, which is intercut with it—we learn that Ikebukuro is physically expanding, in what is described as a miniature approximation of entropy. That sounds pretty bad! Worse is Zenjiro’s theory that it will simulate the Big Rip if it goes on long enough, causing the whole world to simply vanish in a snap. Worse, he has no idea when that will happen. In his own words, it could be tomorrow, it could be in two billion years.

The episode ends with a cut back to Ikebukuro, where Pontaro informs “Pochi” about an approaching band of miscreants—our heroes, as you might guess—and tells him to remain on high alert. In the episode’s last scene, Youka seems to have a brief flash of lucidity wherein she questions where she is and what she’s doing. In a relative rarity for Train, it’s subtle, quiet, and very sad.

By contrast, these are adjectives that do not describe the following episode, the show’s tenth, in any way. Episode 10 is, in a very literal sense, a setup for the show’s finale. By the end of Episode 10, Shizuru and company know who the threat is, know what they’re trying to stop, and have an at least vague idea of how to do it. Getting there is another story, which requires going through heartwarming father-daughter reunions and art movement-invoking battle scenes alike.

For the former, Shizuru’s dear old dad makes his return to the series after a very brief appearance back near the start of the show. He and his two companions have been turned from animals into animal mascots. He and Shizuru talk some things out, and their reunion is both genuinely heartfelt and also very silly in a way that is pretty typical of this show.

Importantly, Akira also gets a beret from Shizuru’s dad, which he identifies as a ‘war trophy,’ which becomes important in the second half of the episode which I am frankly much more interested in talking about. Here, our heroines are forced to battle a trio of mangaka with art-related superpowers who are blocking their way forward. They get their powers from those very same berets, of course. (Which are based on a “subscription model” somehow. A shot at Adobe and other overpriced pay-per-month art programs? Probably not, but I’m choosing to interpret it that way anyway.)

As you might guess depending on how many weird anime you’ve seen over the years, this fight entails beams that turn our girls into versions of themselves rendered into genre cliché. Nadeshiko becomes an old-school shoujo character complete with Glass Mask-esque expressions, Reimi becomes a hot-blooded delinquent, and Shizuru, like her pa, becomes a cute little animal creature.

What the mangaka fail to consider is that Akira is very much capable of wielding the powers of the magic beret too, and Akira, being a lovably pretentious dork, fires back with expressionism lasers that summon copies of the screaming guy from “The Scream,” hordes of dosgs, and so on as she righteously tells the trope-loving mangaka that artistic expression has no bounds! There is an irony here, in how this kind of metafictional, art style-hopping, self-commentating episode has, itself, become something of a minor cliché. Off the top of my head, the eternally-underrated Anime-Gataris did it some seven years ago. Not that this inherently invalidates the points that Akira—or Shuumatsu Train itself—are trying to make, but it is notable and funny. The whole sequence is pretty great, all told, though, and it makes for a fun final action piece before we move into the show’s last stretch.

From 30 stops to Ikebukuro down to just one, only the surreal stronghold of the city itself remains. Can Youka, and the world, be saved?

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Asura Cryin’ – Seasons 1 & 2

Solid overall, and I don’t have a ton to say, given that this is just an all-around pretty good anime from an era where there were a lot of those, but there is something I like about this one that puts it a notch above bare “decent” to me.

It’s got a solid little theme of taking losses in your life as they come as opposed to clinging to the past, which I think is a good thesis for something like this.

Obviously, it’s not perfect. There’s a lot of the ambient misogyny prevalent in the writing that poisoned tons of anime from around this time—obviously that can still be a serious problem, but anecdotally I feel like it was way more of a thing in the 2000s—everything from stupid jokes about how an important plot coupon looks like a vibrator to the fact that most of the show’s characters are organized into 1-guy-2-girl groups, complete with a narrative justification for these off-the-shelf harem setups. So, if you want to take a dim view of the series, there’s more than enough here to justify that.

That said, I think it has a good heart, and its actual plot ambitions are mostly realized pretty well. Plus you can read the main 3 characters as a polytrio without much squinting, which is nice. Looking at this from the contemporary landscape of light novel anime, where most main characters are self-inserts to such an extent that they’re actively discouraged by their narratives from doing any introspection and the power fantasies themselves tend to be pretty boring, it’s actually refreshing seeing a series where the main character’s situation, itself a power fantasy, is used to facilitate character growth. The story itself is wild and weird, too, I mentioned in my last writeup about this series how crazy it can get and that carries through all the way to the end of the series. I miss this era when “light novel anime” meant more something along the lines of putting every genre ever in a blender than the narou-kei slop we tend to get now. Maybe I’m just looking at things with rose-tinted glasses, though.

Also, the final battle in the last episode is actually pretty cool, which given that the visuals are a bit of an up and down ride throughout the series wasn’t a given, and is something I appreciate.

I’m rambling. Show’s pretty good, check it out if you like this kind of thing.

Rozen Maiden – Episode 3 & 4

I haven’t talked about Rozen Maiden since starting it with some friends recently, but these two episodes—four in particular—have really elevated my opinion of this show. We don’t get enough anime that explore characters’ inner worlds as artistically-rendered symbolic landscapes anymore. (The most recent example I can think of is Magical Destroyers which, that was one of the best episodes of that show, but the series overall doesn’t really do enough to make watching it for that worthwhile.) Jun’s inner landscape is a place defined by a wasteland of broken televisions and homework slips glued to the floor contrasted with a lively forest full of insect-cars that he spends time trying to catch (beetle-Beetles, if you will). It’s interesting stuff.

I also like the characters a lot, particularly the dolls who all fall into easily-recognizable archetypes but in entertaining ways. I’m also very excited to see more of the I-assume-villain of the piece, gothy, crow-feather-laden doll Suigintou (Tanaka Rie).

Manga

Deep Raputa – Chapters 3 & 4

Over the course of these two chapters, Raputa’s ability to “hack” peoples’ brains comes into its own. This is, on a plot level, both alarming and astounding, but more interesting is what the manga is doing with that power. Chapter 3 is mostly a wash, being a somewhat corny story about Raputa meeting Kei’s father Fugaku Joe and playing Side War with him, but Chapter 4 more than makes up for it. Kei wants to be a good dad someday—understandable, it’s a pretty normal ambition for a boy in his young teens—and Raputa has a full-on crisis about how she can never give that to him for all the obvious reasons; she’s just a computer program at the end of the day, and Raputa gets hung up on the idea of the two of them ‘having a baby’ together. It’s weird! It’s uncomfortable! But given the timbre of the story, it seems to be intentionally so, we’re again getting into this division of experience between Raputa and a physical flesh-and-blood human.

Naturally, Raputa tries to solve this by controlling the dreams of everyone in town so that she can create a perfect dream world where she and Kei are together forever.

This doesn’t last, and Raputa realizing just how big the gap between herself and Kei is hits hard. The chapter’s last few pages tease the possibility that she’s going to target his father next, and so we move further into the whole “yandere AI” zone.

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That’s all for this week. I leave you with this Monday Bonus Thought for you to contemplate.

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