The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture. Expect some degree of spoilers for the covered shows.
Hello, anime fans! You may have noticed the site looking a little different this past week. I got a new WordPress theme which comes with a somewhat spiffier look and more general readability. Sadly switching themes does seem to have made the archives a bit of a pain to browse and there’s not really anything I can do about it until I can eventually afford a WordPress Premium plan and implement some custom CSS. I’m going to try to work on a workaround at some point in the future, but in the meantime, I beg your patience.
All that in mind, I do strongly urge you to take a gander at this article’s footer and consider pledging some support. It really does help me continue writing in a very real and tangible way.
Administrative notes aside, we’ve got a bit of an interesting bit of zeitgeist in the air this week. Four of the five anime covered here are about an all-female cast pushing through some obstacle(s) or another. For the girls of Magia Record this triumph is shadowed with equal parts tragedy, but nonetheless, it remains compelling. For the most part at least, it seems the girls are alright.
Blue Reflection Ray
This is among the first anime to actually end since I started doing this column. I’ve already written about the series at length in my review of it and I’ve no desire to repeat myself too much. So let me just say, Blue Reflection Ray is that rare anime that just kind of clicks with you if you’re the right sort of person. It has its flaws, sure, but I wouldn’t trade the series for the world and I’m very happy with how it ended. I may simply be a straight-up sucker for magical girl anime. But my view that there is always room for these stories of girls triumphing over the evils of the world remains unchanged. Blue Reflection Ray was not the best to ever do it, it wasn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it is a valid, meaningful part of that artistic lineage, and no one can take that away from it.
The Detective is Already Dead
Another recently-concluded show. Boy, Detective was….something, wasn’t it? I think after the dust settles and it recedes into memory, the few people who remember Detective at all will remember it more as a sometimes-compelling trainwreck more than anything genuinely awful. I don’t mean to come across as elitist about this, but I think anyone saying it’s truly terrible hasn’t seen any truly terrible anime. (Not that I blame them, of course.)
But it certainly wasn’t particularly good either, and I can’t picture it picking up even the ironic cult following of something like Big Order. Such is the curse of being rough going but not outright bad enough to watch “as a joke”.
That said, as I mentioned in my review of the series, I do think all of that gives it a kind of charm if you’re a pretty specific sort of person. But most people aren’t that sort of person, of course. So into the dustbin of history it will inevitably end up. What a tragic fate for our heroic detective! But so it goes. So it goes.
Kageki Shoujo!!
I stand by what I said last week, and what do you know, Kageki Shoujo!! stuck the landing. I’m still not sure I’d put it in my personal upper echelon of anime from 2021 (you’ll have to wait for my year-end rankings to find out for sure), but it did what it wanted to do and it did it well. That’s worth quite a lot all on its own.
The finale this week succeeds in my mind largely because of two things. One; it finally gives us, however briefly, a Sarasa performance that’s truly her own. Her take on Romeo & Juliet‘s Tybalt here is a wonderful thing to behold, and watching the audience (which, mind you, is just her own classmates) dance in the palm of her hand as she wrings the dark, moody character for all he’s worth is just excellent. Two; it ties up some other loose ends, in particular with respect to the hitherto slightly underdeveloped Sawa Sugimoto. Her own frustration at not getting that very same role comes through just as clear as Sarasa’s triumphs, and how she deals with that disappointment ends the show on a realistic, but still high, note.
Inevitably, some will be a bit cold on the choice of stopping point. (We don’t even get to actually see any of our girls act in a proper play, after all.) And the faint hope of a second season remains in the air. But I think that so many people care so much about Kageki Shoujo!! in the first place speaks a lot to its strengths. No one really expected much of this series, but it ended up captivating the crowd anyway. Isn’t that sort of surprise what following seasonal anime at all is all about?
It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to feel “proud of” a show, but nonetheless that’s where I find myself at with Kageki Shoujo!! When the season started I was fairly sure it would be written off by most due to sharing some vaguely similar subject matter and a very similar name with Revue Starlight. That it’s managed to comfortably find and secure its own audience, even over here in “the West”, is a lovely thing. I’ve rarely been happier to be proven wrong.
Magia Record
Magia Record‘s second season is over, though not without some amount of tumult, coming as it does after a week of delays and with a number of technical issues.
As with before, most of my thoughts are over on Geek Girl Authority. Though with an asterisk, this time.
This is the last article I’m going to be writing for them. My current plan is to fully focus my efforts over here on Magic Planet Anime. So, if you could give it a look, that’d mean a lot to me. The people at GGA have been great to me in the, gosh, two years I’ve written for the site, and I’m happy to part with them on the best terms possible.
As for the episode itself? Honestly it’s a real treat to have Mami survive a season of anything Madoka-related alive and unhurt. Everything else, probably deliberately, remains up in the air right now. I’m definitely quite invested in the fate of Kuroe, in particular. Her disappearance here raises a lot more questions than it answers.
Tropical Rouge Precure
I don’t write about Tropical Rouge Precure, or really Precure in general, much in this column, both because its air-day, fairly late on a Saturday night here in the States, makes it hard to talk about the “current” episode and because, being a year-round show with four full cours, it doesn’t change that much from week to week. Most of the time, that is.
But every once in a while Precure will deliver an absolute knockout, and that’s episode 29 (“Reviving A Legend! The Pretty Cure’s Power-Up Makeover!“) for Tropical Rouge. Easily the best-looking episode of the show so far (and one of the best of the year period, up there with Magia Record season 2’s debut episode among others), it introduces some half dozen new plot points without making anything feel congested or convoluted and looks amazing while it does it. It’s the rare anime episode that feels twice its length in a decidedly positive way. Expect this one to come up in conversations even years from now. Episode 30 has since aired too, and it’s also good, but 29 has to remain the star here, an all-timer if there ever was one.
Elsewhere on MPA
I linked them already, but seriously, do check out my reviews of The Detective is Already Dead and Blue Reflection Ray if you have the time. I’m quite proud of how the both of them turned out.
Lastly, it’s yet to fully come to fruition, but I can say with relative confidence that a new episode of KeyFrames Forgotten is on the way. I’m not entirely sure when it will arrive, but the wheels are in motion, you have my word of that much.
Until next week, anime fans.
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