Posted on September 8, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [9/08/25]

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

Hello there, anime fans. I’m struggling with a bit of the ol’ burnout on my end, but I think I’ve managed to put together a pretty nice column for you this week regardless. Hopefully you agree. 🙂

Anime – Seasonal

Call of The Night – Season 2, Episode 10

I don’t know when, exactly, during this episode it became clear to me that Anko might be trying to commit suicide-by-vampire, but it hit me like a brick when that turned out to actually, genuinely be the case.

I really think this show’s second season has proven to be just incredible in a way I don’t think I would’ve predicted at the end of the first, even accounting for the fact that I liked the first season a lot. The intense emotion on display all throughout this episode, Nazuna and Anko’s horribly painful divorced yuri, Ko getting caught in the right place and saving Anko’s life, and then in the wrong place at the end of the episode when her gun goes off as she’s trying to kill herself….man, I don’t really know what to say here beyond this is a really exceptional series. I think my favorite of the many little touches across this episode was Nazuna ripping up playground equipment when she starts really trying to stop Anko. Playground equipment, you see, as a symbol of innocence, destroyed because neither of them can ever go back to it. Honestly, just brutal, what an episode.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episode 10

Last week we had a fight, and then comedy. This week, we have comedy, and then a fight. Simple!

This is the episode where we’re first introduced to Sakata Kinta [Fujiwara Daichi], although I don’t think we get his name here. His introduction as a weird nerd—an even weirder nerd than Okarun, in fact, by a mile—who makes inappropriate dirty jokes because he thinks it helps him seem cool is a bit of a slow start in terms of actual characterization, but I have to admit it is genuinely pretty funny. The first half of the episode also has a Tom & Jerry sort of quality to it where Momo and Okarun are looking for each other at school and keep missing each other, eventually literally running into each other and prompting Kinta’s surprise that Okarun is “popular with the ladies.” (Presented as Kinta getting the wrong idea in-fiction, but he’s not really wrong, given that both Momo and Aira are interested in him.)

Naturally Kinta gets dragged into a battle with the supernatural when the “gold ball ghost” that was mentioned last week turns out to actually be an invisible monster using high technology to shield itself from sight. Our heroes seem to defeat it (even Kinta makes a small contribution), but it rises again, growing gigantic and promising a full-on kaiju battle next week. I have to give it up not just to all of this show’s usual strengths here but also the music, the kaiju theme sounds like a drum n bass remix of the Godzilla motif. Lovely stuff.

My Dress-Up Darling- Season 2, Episodes 9 & 10

For all my complaining about the slight hit Dress-Up Darling took with that diet episode a couple weeks back, it returns here with two of its best episodes maybe ever. This is what I get for complaining and, hey, full credit, I couldn’t be happier. Two main things happen over the course of this arc. Let’s talk about the less consequential and funnier one first.

First of all, this arc involves Marin’s friend group prepping to do a group cosplay of some characters from a horror visual novel called Coffin. Unlike the series’ usual formula, the dramatic push and pull here doesn’t come from Gojo having to make an outfit. Marin’s buying a simple off-the-shelf number this time, but Gojo is still going to be involved in setting up the cosplay, so he wants to learn more about this visual novel regardless. He visits Marin plays the game at her place, and of all of the various style emulations that Dress-Up Darling has engaged with over the course of its run, this is some of the most impressive. We get scenes from the VN rendered in tastefully faux-retro, dithered pixel art. As Gojo plays, it goes from being a fairly straightforward slice of life thing to being an absolutely brutal psychological horror story about killer nuns and familial abuse. (And from what we see of it, Coffin really is a pull-no-punches kind of game. It’s easily the sort of thing you could imagine grabbing off of itch.io. And, perhaps, end up regretting that you didn’t read the trigger warnings, depending on how squeamish you are.)

Gojo being Gojo, he doesn’t see this coming at all, and to paraphrase his own words, gets a bit hyperempathetic about it. Worse, he doesn’t actually have Marin with him for the majority of his playthrough to bounce off of. He’s also hopped up on energy drinks, because, surprise, the trains back home are out of service and his whole hanging out with Marin has turned into an impromptu sleepover.

Why is Marin asleep? Well, when she sees our boy buying the energy drinks, they happen to be right next to an aisle of what I’ll politely call supplements and gets the wrong idea. So she spends most of the night anxious that Gojo is trying to make a move on her, even as she also kind of looks forward to it, her head spinning with ideas about how they’re going to do all of the “important stuff”—handholding, kissing, and yes, sex—in one night. It’s a little rare for an anime to have noticeably good body language animation, but the way the show focuses on her eyes, dialed into tight, beady little pupils, and toes, twiddling and scrunching up into little balls of anxiety, is really something. It also noticeably never feels even a little bit salacious, since in this context, Dress-Up Darling—never afraid to be horny when it wants to be, and I must stress that that’s fine in its own right—wants you to appreciate Marin as a person with her own thoughts and feelings, not as something to ogle.

After eating some instant ramen, Marin calms down, sharing an adorable story about how her and her dad used to share the very same kind of ramen while watching movies together late at night. In fact, she gets so comfortable while talking about this that she actually falls asleep, and Gojo puts her to bed, leading to his own odyssey with the visual novel above. (It feels like a pointed contrast that Marin, a well-adjusted and happy girl over all, shares a warm and positive anecdote about her father. The protagonist of Coffin, by contrast, is horribly abused by hers.)

With the clarity of morning, Marin beats herself up a little bit about getting so anxious—and so excited—over a simple misunderstanding. She wonders if Gojo actually likes her in that way at all, and in doing so she imagines him rejecting her, which shakes her so badly that she actually starts crying. Her anxieties are dispelled though upon visiting Gojo at his house a day or two later. Gojo, ever-considerate, sometimes overly so, actually tries to turn her away at first. Not because he doesn’t actually want her there, but because he made fried fish for dinner, and isn’t sure if she should be having that, given her stated dieting goals. Marin is moved enough that she just decides today is a cheat day, and she enjoys dinner with her crush.

Still, she can’t actually work up the nerve to outright ask him out. She tries to, but eventually scales the request back to just asking to come back tomorrow. (He says yes, of course.) On a late-night train, the warmth from their time spent together crystallizes into determination, and she promises herself that after the Coffin group photoshoot, she’s going to ask him out, come what may.

I admit I’ve never been super concerned about the overarching “plot” of Dress-Up Darling. It’s always pretty clear in this kind of thing that the leads are going to get together eventually, it’s just a question of if it’ll take the whole series or only part of it. Still, it’s really exciting to see actual progress being made on that front. Even if it’s a feint in the immediate short-term, the character development here speaks volumes. Marin herself, pondering her and Gojo’s relationship, points out that teasing him used to be easy, but now that she’s actually worried he might reject her, she can’t bring herself to do it anymore.

There are complicating factors; one of the other people involved in the group cosplay—Akira, who were introduced to just a few episodes ago, a mysterious and somewhat reserved girl who primarily cosplays her own characters (awesome, it must be said)—doesn’t like Marin for some unstated reason. This, along with Sajuna’s return to the series and her own reluctant involvement with the Coffin shoot, promises to throw at least one, maybe several, wrenches into this whole business. Still, I’m really looking forward to how this arc resolves, there are a lot of parts in motion here, and I am so fascinated to see how they intersect.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 10

You can say a lot about Necronomico, much of which is not exactly flattering, but damn if it isn’t memorable.

There are two main plot threads in this episode; Kanna contending with Ghatanothoa’s game for her—a supernatural raising sim based on her own life—and Kei being played like a fiddle by Cthugua.

In the case of the latter, I don’t think it’s even explained to us what Gua’s “game” actually is, but she spends her entire half of the episode alternately insulting Kei and calling her a pretty doll, while at the same time making her drink sake until she’s so drunk she can’t see straight. Eventually, this culminates in the two of them kissing and burning to death together in Gua’s palace. I’ll be honest, I have no idea where exactly this came from, but as far as tragic (and commendably strange) yuri goes, it’s pretty good.

Kanna’s half of the episode is a bit more thematically meaty, in that Ghatanothoa’s game is directly based on her own, very sad life, and to discover its true ending (and thus win it) she eventually figures out that she has to make no decisions at all.

“You can’t really change the past” is, as Kanna herself angrily points out, exactly the kind of obnoxious and overdone theme that someone like Ghatanothoa would gravitate towards putting in a game like this, with its presentation of that theme equally so. Despite his bloviating about how all of human art and culture is meaningless, Ghatanothoa is essentially portrayed as a parasocial fanboy, in fact, complete with calling Kanna his “oshi”, and his amateurish-at-best command of visual novel writing reflects this. I commend the show for not taking the easy way out of saying that Kanna’s suffering is what gives her life meaning, but it is a little hard to swallow that this leads to another mutual kill. I get why it has to be set up that way; so Miko and Cthulu can hinge the fate of the world on their final confrontation, but it doesn’t really square with what we’re shown here.

And, well, all of this has to put up with the fact that this episode has some of the worst boarding in a show that, even at its best, has not exactly looked fantastic. Still, the end is in sight by now, so I am interested to see if they stick the landing. My personal theory is that this show doesn’t actually have the stones to commit to a bittersweet ending and we’re going to get everyone revived at the last minute somehow. The still-hanging plot thread of Kanna being “favored by Azatoth” would provide the perfect off ramp.

Oh, and no Eita this episode is notable, if only because it means he will inevitably be back next week.

Turkey! Time to Strike – Episode 9

Fundamentally, right, the whole “bowling” motif in this show, it’s a gimmick, right? Or it at least seems like it should be one. You could write a very similar story to this without that aspect of it at all, and people have. But, more than just a way to stand out from the pack, the way the series uses the sport to actually emphasize the communal nature of play as an idea is like….forgive me for not finding a better way to say this, it’s just not something you really expect from a random seasonal anime. Which is absurd, right? Because every anime was a random seasonal anime at some point. There’s not actually a distinction. But it nonetheless manages to surprise me every time one of these shows actually turns out to be this good.

So, you have this episode. A thwarted—thank god—double suicide and winding, beautiful conversation about what it means to mean something to someone, how people put themselves on the line for those they truly care about.

And of course, there’s how the episode ends, with a thundercloud rolling in, the promise of home on the horizon. Will our heroines actually leave? After this episode, I think it’s very up in the air. It’s clear that the two halves of our cast care for each other a lot, but there are still three episodes to go, so there’s plenty of time for interesting developments.

Oh, and can I say? Starting the episode by immediately catching the viewer off-foot with the altered OP sequence? Brilliant.

Other

Ano Hi no Kanojotachi: day09 Miu Takigawa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’ll be all for this particular week. As always, I ask that if you enjoyed what you’ve read here (or just enjoy my site in general), you consider a donation to my Ko-Fi page, it helps immensely, and helps keep the site up and running.

For this week’s Bonus Image, please enjoy the title screen of Coffin, perfectly evocative of the evolving title screens of RPGMaker games and indie visual novels of both the past and present.

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Posted on August 18, 2025August 18, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/18/25]

Hello, folks! I don’t have much of a message here, this week, other than to note that I’m happy to be caught up on my seasonals. (With the exception of a few things I’m watching with other people, more on one of those below.) If I’m to direct you to any of the subheadings below in particular, I really do recommend reading about Turkey! which went supernova this week in what I’m hoping is a permanent level up from “good” to “great.”

Other than that, I’m relishing in the feeling of caught-up-ness for the couple hours until another episode of Watanare airs and plunges me right back into the mines. But hey, that’s just how it goes.

Anime – Seasonal

Bad Girl – Episodes 1-5

I’ve been watching this show over the past week or so with my girlfriend. I like it! The central premise of a goody two-shoes trying to pretend to be a delinquent to get her class rep’s attention is a little staid, but the execution is solid. It’s very cute, just funny enough to keep things moving, and it’s snappily paced. The production could use a shot in the arm, but that’s a reality of almost any seasonal anime in this day and age outside the absolute A-Tier, so it is what it is.

Episode five is probably my favorite yet, as new character Sumiki Kiyoraka [Lynn] feels slightly out-of-step with the world of the show in a delightful way. With her loose snake motif and ara-ara-ing, she really seems like she’d rather be in a toxic yuri series of some kind, the sort that’s boiling over with sex and intrigue, as opposed to a sometimes somewhat horny schoolgirl comedy where most of the other characters are dumb as a box of rocks. Still, she gets farther along in her little plot to seduce protagonist Yutani Yuu [Tachibana Azusa] than I’d have expected, and I’m excited to see how she integrates into the rest of the cast going forward.

Call of the Night – Season 2, Episode 7

I don’t know what direction I expected Call of the Night to take after its last arc, but it certainly wasn’t this.

The bulk of this episode concerns Nazuna’s relative youth at a night school, and is a flashback to that time, where she met and interacted with—and maybe fell for, the idea is at least floated—an upperclassman named Mejiro Kyoko. Kyoko is a reserved and bookish sort, but she comes from a home presently undergoing some difficulties. Since those difficulties include her father possibly having an affair, she doesn’t really like guys very much. She does like Nazuna, though, whose puzzling combination of cynicism and wide-eyed naivete at the world she finds charming.

The episode essentially ends just as it’s raising its most heightened questions. We learn that a vampire killed Kyoko’s parents, with the very real possibility being that “the vampire” was Nazuna, somehow and for some reason. Likewise, Kyoko’s hair color, love of detective novels, and clear motive practically scream that there is some connection between her and Uguisu Anko, the murderous vampire hunter / “detective” who’s been a looming presence throughout this entire season. Either or both of these connections could be red herrings, but the episode’s end point—with Kyoko and Nazuna caught by an unexpected guest as they’re snooping around, trying to find evidence of Kyoko’s father’s affair. The series is clearly setting up something of a miniature mystery here, and I’m definitely going to be turning it over in my head over the next few days while we wait for resolution.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episodes 4-6

With this, I am officially caught up with the Dandadan anime!

This in mind, despite liking basically all of these episodes, I have remarkably little to say. This week’s episode, the seventh of season two, is a much quieter and moodier episode than usual from the series, and I did appreciate that; lots of piano pieces in the soundtrack and nightscapes on the drawing board here. I also like that for the fight against the musician ghosts next episode we’re teaming up Okarun and Aira, a somewhat unorthodox pairing for the show. It looks to be fun!

On another visual note, I must also say that I really enjoy the return of the show’s trademark electric greens and purples, they really tie the anime together and I was kind of missing them during the Serpent Lord Arc (or whatever we’re calling it). Even so, the frozen-out grayscale-with-some-color episode seven cut to as it closed here was also great, so I’m excited for next week, regardless of what direction we’re getting.

Gachiakuta – Episode 6

A theme Gachiakuta frequently returns to is worth. The worth of objects, of people. Self-worth, the value we place in each others’ lives, the value of the roles we give to ourselves, and so on. The show has, thus far, batted this around but not really engaged with it directly all that much. Here, it does so via a major plot development for the first time.

Zanka’s assailant from last week is formally introduced to us here as Jabber Wong [Shin Yuuki]—what a name—and we learn that his vital instrument is a set of Edwardy scissor hands. Cool stuff, moreso when they’re revealed to be laced with a neurotoxin that incapacitates his victims. I’m not huge on his design beyond the knife hands themselves—anime, and honestly media in general, could probably stand to do the “big dreadlocks = scary crazy guy” thing less often—but the core concept more or less works. He makes a villainous little speech about how much he values (there’s our watch word) strength, and how much he doesn’t value people like Gris, the non-powered support Cleaner we’ve been following for a couple episodes now. This serves to establish Jabber as the kind of sadomasochistic combat freak so common in these sorts of stories. Then, to establish him as a genuine threat, he makes a lunge for Gris, who he seemingly kills.

Gris’ death initially lacks much impact. (And he might not actually be dead at all, when we last see him in this episode he’s still bleeding out. You know how shonen anime can be with that kind of thing.) Sure, we got to know him a little bit recently, but he’s ultimately a minor character of a sort that is essentially written to be disposable. But, after the OP ends we cut to a slow-motion look at the scene that blends it with the traumatic memory of the death of Rudo’s mentor. The series briefly adopts a wonderfully stark, pure ink sketch-on-paper black and white look for this, and it’s probably the best creative decision Gachiakuta has yet made.

This is then followed by a flashback where we learn that Rudo’s affinity for discarded objects comes from identifying himself with them; his violent instincts restrained, he feels worthless, and there’s a pretty gnarly scene of self-harm here as the flashback opens, with Rudo bashing his head into a cobblework wall.

The fight scene that follows all of this is not quite as good a payoff as you might hope, but it’s still solid. Gachiakuta is mangaka Urana Kei‘s first serial. So to me, this sequence, where Rudo transforms Gris’ protective talisman into a floating, golem-like ward that protects him from hostile intent, reads as someone figuring out the general paces and expected beats of their genre in real time. As, too, does Jabber’s eventual solution to this; to poison himself with his own neurotoxin, not enough to die, but enough to put him at the threshold of consciousness so he can thrash around mindlessly. These kind of battles, that are much wars of magic-like semantics as they are actual fights, can be very entertaining when done well. Gachiakuta‘s display of the form here won’t rank as an all-time great, but for a relative beginner, it’s good.

We end on Jabber making that play, so any resolution of this fight is going to have to wait until next week. Still, despite my qualms, if Gachiakuta can keep up this level of entertaining visual storytelling, it’ll be a worthwhile watch overall.

My Dress-Up Darling – Episode 7

Lots of thoughts with Dress-Up Darling this week. Not all of them positive, but I like this show, and I think people (including me, in the past) are often unfair to it, so I’m going to start with what I like here.

The last third or so of episode seven sees Marin and Gojo on a very cute park date where Marin surprises her still-not-technically-bf by revealing that she’s bought a fancy camera. For several minutes, the show is done entirely from Gojo’s perspective as he clicks the shutter. He’s in love with the new camera, sure, but he’s mostly in love with Marin, and it’s a sweet reminder of the genuine, gentle love the two clearly have for each other. It’s a culmination of what we’ve seen so far, and an indication of where we’re heading next. All told, it is absolutely lovely.

That being said, I really did not like the rest of this episode, so it’s good that the part I just discussed was at the end.

This is a weight loss episode. I know. Sigh with me. I don’t like them either.

I am marginally less down on this particular instance than I would be in many similar shows for two reasons. One; Marin is a model, so very specific weight goals do actually, genuinely matter for her, as opposed to just being an insecurity. Even if that doesn’t neatly box away the “are we really doing this?” vibe across this plot, it at least provides a coherent reason for it being here in the first place as opposed to coming out of nowhere. (And we’ve seen her eating with Gojo and his grandfather a lot recently, so again, there’s an actual logical through-line here at least.) Two; this is a series with a lot of empathy for its characters. Usually that means Gojo, but it does mean Marin, too, and the show has been pretty careful with, for everything that could potentially be criticized about it—the horny framing, etc.—making sure that you the viewer understand that cosplay really does mean a lot to her. (In fact, as much as her modeling job giving her grief is a cause for concern, it’s Gojo’s cosplay outfits getting tight on her that really gets to her.) Where I’m going with that is that I think the show is trying to do a bit of an inspirational message, or perhaps mining this material for relatability, as opposed to just ridiculing Marin.

That said, it’s still pretty unpleasant. I’ll admit some amount of my yuck reaction to this particular stock plot is insecurity about my own weight (I am a fairly hefty trans woman. It comes with the territory), so maybe I’m not being totally fair. Still, this did feel like one of the show’s relatively meaner episodes. Compared to a lot of stuff in this vein, the jokes at Marin’s expense are relatively light. (This is not Sailor Moon’s weight loss episode, for example.) But still, things like illustrating her recent eating patterns with “chomp chomp” sound effects just come off bad no matter how lightly you intend them. I’m sure at least some part of this is lived experience, but if I, twice Marin’s age, felt a little hit, can you imagine someone watching this and getting hit with these vibes if they’re actually sixteen?

I feel the need to temper my criticism, because this plot doesn’t actually get resolved by episode’s end. So it’s possible I’ll feel differently about it next week depending on where this goes, even setting aside the fact that I’m aware I’m sensitive to this kind of stuff. Still, for a show that’s normally so sweet, even slight sourness can seem very bitter. I’m hoping that either the series is going somewhere meaningful with this or, failing that, that we just tie this up quickly and get back to the actually fun parts of this anime.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 7

^{I think I’m finally deep enough into my anime fandom that I have started getting just a little annoyed at Akira bike slide homages.}

After 4 1/2 episodes of Eita doing his I Am An Alpha Gamer shtick, it was immensely gratifying in this week’s episode of Necronomico to see him a) be run over with a motorcycle and b) have his eye(s?) gouged out. That’s the kind of karma you love to see. (I’m sure they’re going to try to make us feel bad for him later. I will not be falling for it.)

That particular development aside, episode seven was a good but also relatively standard one for Necronomico. The tower defense game setup was pretty fun, I enjoyed the various little twists and turns like Gua getting shot with a high-powered sniper rifle and Kanna being secretly from Kyoto. The latter dovetails nicely into the episode’s last and meanest twist, that the damage done to VR Kyoto also carries over to real Kyoto. I admit it’s not hard to see coming, but it’s cruelly effective nonetheless.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 7

Like Gachiakuta, Ruri Rocks is another anime that centers value as a theme. (This is about the only thing they have in common, but it is a similarity nonetheless.) In previous episodes, this has consisted of Ruri learning to find value in minerals beyond the strictly monetary or aesthetic, and she’s come to appreciate everything from pyrite to fluorite in the process. This week, the show introduces a new character and, in doing so, also shifts to focusing on a different sort of rock. As opposed to being about earth minerals, this week’s episode is about a man-made phenomenon; sea glass.

The new character in question, Seto Shouko [Hayashi Saki, in what seems to be her debut role], is introduced with a broadly Tomori-esque flashback sequence where, as a child, she wants to play with some pretty rocks she’s collected at preschool, but she’s pulled away from them by her teacher. Her parents don’t approve either, and she overhears them talking about how they hope she doesn’t become a mineralogist something like that for a career, given that there’s “no money” in it.

^{Only the most normal of parental conversations here.}

This is all a tad silly—it certainly doesn’t reach the world-through-her-eyes pathos of the aforementioned Bang Dream episode—but as a tone setter and a quick backstory, it works just fine. Shouko is introduced, in the story’s present, as a classmate of Ruri’s but not anyone she’s ever really engaged with. When Shouko happens to spot her holding a piece of sea glass at the beach, she remarks on it. Ruri rather stubbornly insists it’s agate. And later, she takes it to Nagi and learns, nope, it really just is sea glass. Nonetheless, this prompts Imari to propose looking for further specimens of sea glass, and this becomes the trio’s latest adventure. As you might expect, Ruri Rocks applies the same level of care and detail to sea glass as it does to natural minerals, and the episode has all of the usual charm one would expect from the series, especially when Shouko eventually joins our usual crew.

Throughout, an implicit comparison is made between sea glass and Shouko. Shouko doesn’t seem to think of her rock-collecting hobby (which she’s kept up in the present day) as meaning very much, but when she meets Imari, she learns that it can be both a passion and a career, thus highlighting that in both of these cases, the personal worth of the subject is what gives it meaning. In more literal terms, Shouko’s delight that she is not just allowed, but encouraged to value minerals and her collection of them, to the point of considering it as a career, is also a classic “passion ignited” sequence—wherein a character, often but not always the protagonist, is awakened to the joy and wonder inherent in whatever field a given hobby anime happens to be about—and it can stand with the best of them.

The ending of the episode, coming after some truly gorgeous character animation during a scene where our heroines rake the beach looking for more glass, makes this comparison more explicit. Both Shouko and Ruri, Nagi points out, have names explicitly connected to glass; Shouko’s contains the kanji for the word, whereas “ruri” is an old term for blue glass. It’s another small, jewel-like detail in a series full of them.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episodes 5 & 6

If I could compare the experience of watching Watanare to anything, it would be a tennis match.

Renako, our main character, keeps getting batted back and forth between the mind games of the various scheming girls in her friend group. She is a ball flying through the air between them. All of these girls also seem to have their own emotional baggage between each other that Renako is not necessarily privy to, which is an important complicating factor.

Thus, this storyline, which follows up Renako having dated Mai in a strange, convoluted way, with her doing the same to Satsuki, the conniving, underhanded one of the group, who wants Renako on her arm to hurt Mai’s feelings. Satsuki acquits herself amazingly across these two episodes and she genuinely comes off like a real bitch at certain points. (I mean that in a loving way, something like this isn’t entertaining unless the characters can be believably nasty at least some of the time.)

As you might suspect, Satsuki begins dating Renako by strong-arming her and playing on her guilt. But what beigns as an obligation (one Mai claims to be fine with, in fact, even as she’s obviously not) turns particularly spicy in episode six where Renako happens to catch Satsuki working at a donut shop late at night. This ends with Satsuki taking Renako home (where the pair briefly meet Satsuki’s notably young single mother) and, of course, shenanigans ensue.

Aside from Satsuki herself being great, Renako and her gallery of Bocchian wild takes are absolutely essential here. In providing a sugary comedic overtone, they serve to make the actual emotional development more subtle. Satsuki consequently gets much closer to Renako than she even intended to. The house visit becomes a sleepover, and by the time of the cold, dreamy sensuality of a shared bath and Renako unintentionally stealing Satsuki’s first kiss, the goalposts have already moved pretty damn far. The show’s real strength is in the moments where the comedic mask drops away; Satsuki unintentionally hurting Renako’s feelings by telling her that her attempts to come off as an extrovert are only half working, Renako’s simple and clear explanation of why she wanted to be an “extrovert” in the first place, the aforementioned bath scene and swiped first kiss, Satsuki’s clear and genuine affection for her airheaded but kindly and diligent mother, and so on. That it’s maybe the first anime in a decade to actually get a laugh out of me with a “protagonist falls on a girl and accidentally feels up her boobs” joke is more a nice bonus than the main reason this thing is so good.

Turkey! Time to Strike – Episodes 5 & 6

At the start of the season, Turkey surprised me—and many—with its genre switch. Here, at its halfway point, it surprises again, this time with one of the year’s single best episodes.

A common concern of the time travel narrative is that of the dissonant value systems of those in the past compared to those who live today. This episode deals with this dichotomy, in its many forms, from its beginning to its end, starting with relatively simple examples—Sumomo being betrothed to someone she’s never met, for instance—and slowly snowballing up until the episode’s final, harsh climax. The relevant early example is that Sayuri has her period here, and initially panics because she’s not really sure what to do about that in a time before pads were invented. Suguri is there to help, thankfully, and is revealed to be a woman—ordered by her father to play a man’s role as a protector and warrior of the estate—in the process.

Were that all this episode did, we’d already be approaching rare territory for an anime (think of how many anime bring that particular subject up at all. It’s not zero, but it’s not exactly a thriving club). But episode six’s masterstroke is instead in drawing a connection between that blood and blood of a very different kind. After Suguri and Sayuri’s initial connection and bonding over their shared womanhood, a group of bandits threatens the estate, forcing Suguri and her men to take defensive action. This, of course, entails killing them.

Perhaps understandably for someone growing up in the relatively privileged position of being a high school girl in modern Japan, this sort of breaks Sayuri’s brain. She lashes out at Suguri, simply not understanding how such a kind and caring person can be so willing to take a human life. (And, for perhaps the first time, she processes the death of the bandits in the second episode as something other than horror-movie shock.)

She initially finds Sugiri’s counterargument, that protecting someone necessarily entails that you may have to harm or even kill someone else, unconvincing, and runs away in tears. It is thus left to not a single character but the show itself to explain how these traits coexist in a person.

Turkey‘s answer to this dichotomy is that because the bloody period the girls are trapped in will one day become the gentle times they grew up in, any one person—Suguri, Sayuri, anybody—is exempt from blame. It articulates this, quite deftly I would argue, with its final scene. One of the bandits who survived Sugiri’s forces’ initial attack threatens her again, and in order to save Sugiri, Sayuri heaves a massive rock at the bandit, allowing Sugiri to finish him off. (The sound work deserves a check in particular, here, the bandit’s death gurgle is absolutely grisly.) The fight scene is equal parts stylish and over the top and positively ghoulish, a reminder that the relatively pampered lives we now live are the exception, rather than the norm, of human history. (And, it must of course be said, it’s not like those are a universal human experience in of themselves.) By putting blood on Sayuri’s hands, symbolized by it dripping down and staining the petals of a pure white flower, Turkey has involved her directly in the period’s violence. In doing so, it asks, even if our girls ever do return home, will they ever be the same? But the stained flower is the show’s answer; unchanged, no, but the same at their core, yes.

It is a thesis Turkey will need to spend the remainder of its runtime proving or, perhaps, disproving, but this episode proves it can pull off this kind of subject matter. So I await what is to come with anticipation and bated breath. Godspeed, girls.

And that’s it for this week! As always, I ask that if you enjoyed the column, please consider a donation, as this site is my only consistent source of income. Beyond that, I hope your week is lovely. Hang in there, friends! 🙂

This week’s Bonus Screencap comes from Dandadan. I mentioned really loving the show’s use of greens and purples in the writeup, but didn’t get to fit any screenshots showcasing that into the writeup itself. So here’s one now!

Posted on August 11, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/11/25]

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

A much lighter lineup this week, but there’s a real doozy down in that “Non-Seasonal” section to make up for the comparatively slower seasonal episodes here. I hope you enjoy reading, and have a lovely week.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of the Night – Season 2, Episode 6

Call of the Night presents a much goofier episode this week than most of what it’s been laying down recently. That’s just fine, a breather after the fairly intense arc that just ended is welcome. Love Green [Sugita Tomokazu], the otaku vampire introduced here, is a fun if slightly one-note character, and he and Midori, who returns here for the first time in a while, do indeed make a cute pair. On top of this, there are some fun visual gags. I particularly like Nazuna’s desire to impersonate an extremely dated otaku stereotype (that L.G. happens to fit, in part).

It’s interesting to note that even here, in a much less serious episode than the show’s recent norm, we do get a few bits that seem designed to spur on some real thinking. Kabura tells Nazuna that her parents are no longer alive at the start of the episode. Later, in a much sillier scene, we are reminded through L.G.’s antics that a vampire’s memory is highly fallible. This seems important, I’d say.

CITY THE ANIMATION – Episode 6

Episode six marks a return to the standard for CITY. For the most part, this sees the show operating in its usual mode of discrete, gag-focused “chapters” as composing the bulk of the episode. There are some real highlights here, especially in the soccer team sketch, but also a few less-great gags that are more light chuckles than hearty guffaws. Not a serious problem, but something to keep tabs on.

The end of the episode is the real standout, though. In it, the series gains a true plot development, in that the schoolgirl Eri is moving away to England, taking her from her synchronized dumbass lesbian bestie Matsuri. Most of that sketch is silly too, but the simple reveal that Matsuri’s shenanigans during it are just her masking that she’s sad about her friend leaving is good stuff. An endpoint high note to an otherwise fairly median episode.

My Dress-Up Darling – Season 2, Episode 6

Gojo locking in to do Marin’s makeup—with an audience!—is a really nice scene to end this arc on. Marin’s great as “Rei-sama” too, she absolutely serves in the outfit Gojo made for her, winning the pageant and bringing this particular part of the story to a close.

I also really enjoy the end scene where Marin really wants to take some pictures in a photobooth with Gojo but gets sabotaged by the many, many friends she and Gojo have made since the start of the series crowding along too. It’s extremely cute! I love these two.

Gachiakuta – Episode 5

I have very little to say here, this week. There’s a cool fight scene between Zanka and a pair of bandits here that takes up the back third or so of this episode, so that’s quite nice. The bandits have solid designs, and I like the senior bandit’s ability to create and control mud automata. Other than that, this was an oddly slow episode by Gachiakuta‘s standards and I don’t think I really like that about it. This series is simply not good enough at emotional moments to get me super onboard for them.

I’m also not sure I like what we seem to be doing with the other villain here, but I’m going to keep mum about that until they actually properly reveal him next week.

Kamitsubaki City Under Construction – Episodes 4 & 5

The past two weeks have seen future hard Anime Music Quiz round Kamitsubaki City Under Construction continue to be wildly disappointing, albeit in distinct ways.

In the middle of episode four (actually the fifth episode, because this show’s episode count began at episode zero), one scene stands out in the midst of everything else going on. Koko gets a nice, quiet scene with her familiar—“familier” per the show’s spelling—Kugel as the two of them get some udon while talking about the events that have transpired over the course of the series so far. (Or what passes for “events” in a show this scrambled, anyway.) It’s downbeat, moody, and effective. The second it ends, the show goes back to being a chaotic nightmare whorl of proper nouns, leaden exposition, and aura farming (dig the familiers just hanging out on a crane). Kugel’s betrayal and subsequent death in episode five undercuts most of this, despite being largely more coherent overall. For once, the show slows down enough to actually make narrative sense for a majority of the episode. Which is impressive, given that we’ve gotten time travel (or parallel worlds? One or the other) involved. When the plot doesn’t make literal sense, it can cobble together a kind of sleepwalking nightmare logic, made of images of hapless citizens exploding into blood and literal witch hunts. This episode is impressively gory all around, actually, which hey, that’s something.

Let’s keep the praise tempered, though, because having traded away “incoherent” for “maudlin”, the ending of episode five sees Kugel kill himself in one of the most shamelessly cliché scenes I’ve seen in recent memory. We end on a song again, as Koko cries over his dead body. The show having lost what little emotional charge it had, this feels more hollow than ever. I’m not sure what’s keeping me motivated to watch this show at this point, and I would be unsurprised if it doesn’t return here next week.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 6

If I can reveal something that was probably already obvious to most of the people who read these, I mainly watch this show for Cthulu. Cthulu is a great villain, but this is actually the first episode where we’ve gotten to see her do much, and I appreciate that about episode six a lot.

The conceit of this episode is that the Great Old Ones take a day off in temporary semi-human bodies to kick around Japan and see what Earth is like. Most of these diversions aren’t too interesting. Gua’s in fact actively annoyed me. Several times while she’s taking Kei on a foodie tour she whips out the old “we are to humans as humans are to ants” chestnut, which is a lot less convincing coming from the eldritch terror in the first place. Even more so when the Old God in question is chowing down on udon or whatever. Cthulu’s though is great, because she chooses to spend her day off hanging out with and also tormenting Miko. Why?

Because she has a crush on her.

Yeah, really!

Now Cthulu’s not stupid, so she openly wonders whether these are her own yearnings or those of the body she’s possessing—Miko’s relationship with Mayu is referred to in textually romantic terms here, stripping any remaining ambiguity that may have remained about that—but she doesn’t really seem to care! In fact, because Cthulu is, you know, evil, she seems to take a lot of delight in the fact that Miko is attracted to her despite hating her guts. This reaches its apex when she forces a kiss on Miko. Miko is obviously very distraught by this, which just winds Cthulu up more! She’s the fucking worst! I love her!

This season was hardly lacking in yuri, but more of it from a place as relatively unexpected as a death game anime is always nice. Doubly so when it’s this toxic.

Some other stuff happens in this episode too—Eita defects to the Old Gods’ side for whatever good that’ll do him, as if anyone could care—but none of it matters nearly as much to me as Cthulu’s gleeful tormenting of her new pet.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 6

A lovely episode from Ruri Rocks this week concludes what I’m going to loosely term the sapphire arc. (Is two episodes an arc? I’ll say so.) In addition to all of the show’s usual strengths in showcasing the effectiveness of hard work and the scientific method, this episode also incorporates some really interesting stuff about the mythology of sapphires. Particularly, how—per the episode anyway, I haven’t double checked this but I have no reason to assume it’s not true—in some parts of Japan, sapphires were once taken to be the bones of dragons.

It’s interesting stuff. It’s also nicely tied in with the actual location of the episode, which is near a dragon shrine. I’d be remiss to mention that on top of all of that, it’s also nicely serendipitous with some of the other things I’ve been watching and reading this week. Scroll down to the “Non-Seasonal” section for more on that.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 4

I’m a bit behind on Watanare here (I’m waiting on fansubs. With bated breath, because I am to understand episode five is a doozy), but I like where its head is at right now. Renako and Mai make up in characteristically messy fashion, and the pool scene toward the end of this episode is one of the best bits of vibrant emotional work to come from any anime this year.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Land of the Lustrous

It feels strange to call anime that’s not even yet a decade old a classic, but Houseki no Kuni has very much stood an already-impressive test of time¹, and as I found out after finally crossing it off my plan-to-watch list this week, that’s for very good reason.

A lot could be said about Houseki no Kuni‘s story—I’m particularly fond of the way main protagonist Phos, by the end of the anime, has started to become an amalgam of everyone they looked up to—but I’m actually more interested in the look of the series here. The anime opts to translate the shadow-heavy and stark visual style of the manga into something hypnagogic and hazy, defined by the bone-white architecture of the compound the Lustrous call their home, the pearlescent mirror-shards that they shatter into when harmed, and the frightful fractals their Lunarian adversaries spring from. Zoom in anywhere across this anime’s twelve episodes and you’ll see something like this; the warm but curiously lifeless sea of its first half, the Caspar Friedrich ice floes of the winter arc, the yawning night that hangs above the beaches Cinnabar patrols alone. These are the qualities that have seen it persist over the past eight years, the same that will ensure it persists for many more.

Yet, that very same misty atmosphere also means that Houseki no Kuni is unique among its ostensible peers and descendants. There are other aspects to its presentation as well, of course; the series has a curiously loose, sometimes loping directorial style. It locks in for the dizzying, David vs. Goliath action sequences and knows when to freeze a good shot in place for an emotional conversation, make no mistake, but many of its more incidental shots have a candidness to them that, at least to my knowledge, has yet to really be replicated. A candidness that carries all the way to the anime’s end. The final episode, after a climactic emotional confrontation between Phos and Cinnabar, ends the morning after, mid-sentence and mid-thought, leaving a million disquieting images and unanswered questions in the air. It disappears like a dream under the morning Sun. An elegant and triumphant form all its own, its incompleteness nonetheless casts a shadow. Like it was bigger than our own imaginations could sustain. Like it was never there at all.

It was, of course. The manga ran for another seven years after the anime concluded, and the TV series adapts only 30-some of its 108 chapters. Houseki no Kuni must truly win some kind of award for “anime that the most people want a longshot second season of,” but there’s no indication Studio Orange, or really anyone else, are in any particular hurry to make one. Having since read the rest of the manga, I can say only that capturing its atmosphere, its emotional highs and lows, and especially the most abstract parts of its final chapters, would be an incredible challenge. Still, these are hypotheticals, and it’s all too easy to let what-ifs distract from the artistry that’s actually there. Any comment about the anime’s incompleteness ignores one key fact, one that any collector natural gemstones would know: sometimes the flawed specimen is the most beautiful one.

That’s all for this week. As I always say, if you can afford it, a donation to my Ko-Fi page is always immensely welcome.

As for the all-important Bonus Image, I don’t usually do this, but we’re going to make this week’s picture something from the Non-Seasonal section. Please look at Phos, dignified and proud under the acidic moon. And do look closely, because barring a miracle, we won’t see them in this column again.

^{If you know….you know.}

^{1: That’s not to say it was the only heavy hitter to air in Fall of 2017, of course. Girls’ Last Tour, another anime people have been begging for a second season of since it finished, aired that same season. Also of note to me, personally, from that same season, is the ever-underrated Anime-Gataris.}

Posted on July 18, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/18/25]

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

It’s been a minute! But I am a bit over belaboring the point; I do these when I have the energy to do them now.

Thus, a roundup of what I’ve watched this past week.

Seasonal Anime

Gachiakuta – Episode 2

I watched this while, among other things, clipping my toenails, which feels about right.

Jokes aside, I am a bit stunned by how non-invested I still am in this story. It’s cool that the show is willing to be genuinely kind of gross and unpleasant, given that it takes place in a giant garbage dump, but I also don’t really feel much for the main character which makes his rage hard to empathize with even if his reasons for it are completely understandable. He just—there is no politer way to put it—comes off as a bit cringey. It’s a teenager’s idea of what having real problems is like. “What if everyone was mean to you constantly and betrayed you and treated you like shit and it made you so mad that your secret superpowers awakened?” Again, I’m criticizing a show for kids here, so I don’t wanna be too mean, and if some 15 year old thinks this is the best thing ever I’m not gonna tell them otherwise. But it just feels a little short on actual ideas or stakes to me so far.

Enjin [Konishi Katsuyuki]—Umbrella Guy as I will be calling him—is kinda cool, but not enough to be a supporting cast on its own, so hopefully we start meeting some of the other people in the OP sooner rather than later. The bit at the end of this episode with the other poor Groundlings just stunned me. I realize this is probably not what the show is *trying* to say, but it sure feels like we’re doing something to the tune of “Yeah, rich people who destroy the environment are evil, but do you know who’s also evil? People who are too poor.” And I simply cannot get onboard with that, if I’m honest.

When I first wrote this over on tumblr I mentioned that I wasn’t dropping the show yet because I wanted to give it another chance, but it’s a bit more up in the air at this point. The series’ third episode has been delayed on account of election coverage in Japan, and I find it harder to imagine I’ll still have time and mental bandwidth for this show in two weeks. We’ll see, though.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 2

A delightful second episode from this one. I like Ruri’s little bit of character development over the course of this episode where she goes from being disappointed about the financial lack of value in pyrite to refusing to sell a rare gold sample because it means more to her to have it than having the money would.

Overall, I’d say this show is more cute and lightly entertaining than anything, but in moments like the one where she finds that lump of gold, the series really does come alive in a very vivid and poetic way. I hope to see it lean more into that going forward.

Turkey! Time to Strike – Episode 2

I was a little worried that Turkey would—aha—fumble the ball when it came time to commit to its actual premise as opposed to its fakeout faux-premise. I am pleased to report that this has not happened.

There are a few hiccups in this second episode, but not anything major, and by all indications this is about to be a really nice little time travel adventure series. I like how era shocked the girls (understandably) are throughout much of this episode, although the bandits who try to assault them are maybe a little too much of a jump from episode one right out the gate. Still, overall this was great.

If I have to give a shout out to any one moment in particular, it’s at the very end of the episode. Suguri [Inoue Kikuko], a Sengoku warrior who rescued the girls from the bandits (and was then rescued by them in turn when he was captured), takes them to the estate he lives on. There, we see that a character we’ve yet to properly meet, but who Anilist tells me is named Sumomo [Hidaka Noriko], is playing what can only be described as Sengoku-era bowling. It’s hilarious, and is the culmination of a surprising amount of bowling related trickery in this episode. (Have you ever wanted to see a Sengoku-era bandit get clubbed in the head with a bowling ball? Turkey delivers). The plot twist at the end of the first episode is that this is not a show about bowling. The plot twist throughout episode two is that, actually, it very much is about bowling.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 3

So first of all, I cannot fucking believe there’s a completely straight-faced “if you die in the game….YOU DIE IN REAL LIFE!” in here.

Secondly, wow, the male characters on the human side of things sure completely fucking suck, huh? Other than I guess maybe Hat Guy, whose whole deal we don’t really know yet. This episode sees Eita—the gamer, you’ll recall, and the guy I flagged as the most annoying character in the first episode—betray the almost-as-annoying mangaka character NAO-KICHI [Ichikawa Taichi], tricking Nao into trapping himself in with one of the enemies in this particular death game. (At least partly because Eita was a fan of Nao’s manga but hated its ending. Can you imagine this happening to, I don’t know, the Jujutsu Kaisen guy?) Eita is theoretically more interesting as a villain, but in practice he’s about the same level of insufferable, just to different ends. It doesn’t help that his entire motivation seems to be that he thinks the world is “a shitty place,” which I guess entitles him to be Gamer Light Yagami. He also gets caught gloating at Nao’s death, meaning that his good guy cover is blown almost immediately. Rather incredibly, this happens while he’s condescendingly telling Nao that it’s easier to fool people if they think they’re smart. You don’t say?

Elsewhere in the episode, the teacher character “hilariously” admits he’s a pedo, which would maybe inspire some kind of reaction in me if I had previously thought about him even a little bit. Like, I didn’t care about this character before, but you’ve given him one defining trait and you’re treating it like a joke, so what am I to do with this information? It comes off as very amateur hour, and is pretty easily the worst and dumbest thing in the episode.

Cthulu is a highlight here, and I like her unironic shoujo villain laugh and I hope we get to hear it many more times over the course of the show. Other than that, this is turning out to be a bit of a trainwreck so far. Entertaining, but perhaps not for the intended reasons.

CITY The Animation – Episode 2

I think this is a list-topper of “anime whose worlds I’d most like to spend a two week vacation in.” I know it’s basically just Japan but it’s so utterly whimsical and fantastical that it just makes me want to live there. Also, the after-credits sequence with the demons was fantastic. Maybe the funniest single bit in this show so far? I just about cried when the Ars Goetia demon showed up.

My Dress-Up Darling Season 2 – Episode 2

Another delightful episode this week. The whole “Marin getting sick” plot was really sweet and well-handled. I said this on bluesky but I love how much of this show is powered by the fact that Marin is both a super hot gyaru and the sort of loser who’d own an ahegao shirt. One finds character depth in contradictions, even very silly ones. (Of course, much the point of Dress-Up Darling is that there’s not actually that much of a gap between these things as one might assume.)

As for the new character, the crossplayer, I’m a bit undecided. I feel like as a trans woman I’m kind of expected to have a kneejerk negative reaction to femboy characters. (Maybe that expectation only exists in my head? I’m not sure.) But I think this guy is fine. He seems nice, and the ending scene that gives the episode its title is funny. I’m obviously hoping we don’t do anything weird or offputting with him, but this show has never been like that, so I don’t think it will.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

California Crisis: Gun Salvo

Honestly, this is pretty much exactly as fantastic as everyone who recommends it says it is. Just 45 minutes of California as imagined by a Japanese creative team [led by Video Girl Ai director Nishikubo Mizuho], and it’s maybe the most flattering depiction of the US ever put to film. Bright, sunny, summer days, hot, neon-lit nights, filtered through a light sci-fi plot that essentially just kinda stops at the end of the movie. The narrative isn’t the point, though, as this is a visual showcase first and foremost and it’s a fucking great one. I see why people love this so much.

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

Seasonal First Impressions: Summer Stragglers & Sequels

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.

You know how this goes. This time I’m also doing some writeups on sequels for shows I’ve previously covered here on MPA. Other than that, business as usual for one of these roundup posts.

Gachiakuta: A new shonen series, and an alright one overall so far, I think. It’s very edgy, and the social commentary is so heavy handed you can physically feel it while watching. But, I think this is if some teenager’s first exposure to a story that explores class dynamics that’s cool. Personally I think I am maybe a bit too old for this (a feeling I do not have with better shonen anime despite that still being kinda objectively true with those as well) but I’ll give it another episode, it may win me over.

Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube: The problem I always have with anime remakes, and I have them even—maybe especially—when I haven’t seen the original, is that I’d usually rather watch the original, because you can often tell that they’re trying very hard to translate the OG’s style into the current anime landscape. The end result here is an anime that has a bunch of faux-90s affectations despite everything about the show screaming 2025 in terms of direction and animation.

I didn’t think this was bad by any means, and I actually liked the action sequence toward the end of the first episode quite a bit, but I feel like it’s more likely that the rest of the show will look more like the first half of the episode; a parade of pretty lifeless classrooms and just general visual flatness. I’m not sure what to think of it overall beyond wondering if this really does much of anything for anyone. I enjoy shows with this sort of premise, but wouldn’t it have been better to come up with something new instead of just rehashing an IP from 30 years ago? Granted, I get the business reasons for doing this—teenagers who grew up watching the original are in their 40s now and are prime nostalgia market targets—but that doesn’t dampen that the entire endeavor feels rather cynical.

Hotel Inhumans: In a world with seemingly about a thousand replacement-level narou-kei per season (look a few spots below for one of them), it’s really reassuring that something can occasionally step up and show them that it’s possible to suck in interesting, standout ways. Marvel at the unambitious direction and storyboarding, stand in awe at the all-suggestions, incredibly broad writing. Wince at the frightfully generic character designs. Listen to the soothing sound of the hilariously bad music placement. They just do not make many anime that are this hilariously incompetent anymore. If Hotel Inhumans has a selling point, it’s as a throwback to the way bad anime used to be bad 20 years ago, which is only a shame because the core conceit is interesting enough that I imagine the manga this is based on might actually be good. Still, if that appeals to you, then by all means, load it up.

Milky☆Subway: The Galactic Limited Express: A friend¹ put me onto this one, and I’m quite glad they did. In overall vibe Milky Subway has a lot more common with other web cartoons I’ve seen than most anime per se, but that’s fine. You’ve got a thing here that takes place in some kind of wacky far-future sci fi setting where there are physical highways and train lines linking different planets. Our two leads are a pair of I’m just gonna say girlfriends, respectively a robot and a demon, who in the short that serves as a setup for this series (“Milky Highway”) get arrested for speeding after they get too into a retro pop song that comes over their car radio.

The action is very fun and snappy and I enjoy the first short a good bit for that reason. The second sees them being press-ganged into community service, to clean a bunch of subway cars. Somehow, this ends up with the robot getting decapitated, although I can’t imagine she’s actually dead-dead given the largely upbeat and comedic nature of these shorts. The proper series (which is what Milky Subway is) will, I suspect, be a how-we-got-here leaning up to that sequence of events.

All told, it’s pretty fun. The setting is really unique and the art is quite fun. The voice acting is also excellent, it has a conversational, casual fuck-around vibe especially in the quieter scenes, and you get the sense that everyone here—including the officer overseeing the other characters’ community service—is in way over their heads. Also the look of the show is Interesting. I’d again compare the art, which is full-3D CGI, reminds me more of, I suppose, Amazing Digital Circus or something? Hardly the best comparison but it’s where my mind went. Overall, this is a very unique little thing. The only “complaint” I have is just that with only 4ish minutes per episode it’s a bit on the slight side, but that’s pretty minor overall. Even then, that’s a benefit, too, since their being so short means they’re very easy to recommend.

KAMITSUBAKI CITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION: I have been a fan, admittedly an off and on one, of v-idol group The Virtual Witch Phenomenon for a few years now, so I was pretty excited when they got their own anime announced. Having since watched the first episode (or technically “zeroeth” episode. Remember that convention? Not the only late-00s/early-10s thing about this show), and indeed the second, since I first wrote the version of this that’s going up on tumblr, I’m pretty baffled by the whole thing.

Despite what one might expect, given that this is being helmed by Ave Mujica director Kakimoto Koudai this isn’t really a music anime in the conventional sense. It’s more of a Madoka Magica / Yuki Yuna / etc. kind of thing. A grisly, dark magical girl series of a sort that was more popular about a decade ago. It stars the V.W.P. playing characters loosely based on themselves. KAF plays Kafu, the main character, which makes sense given that she’s the group’s center. She acquits herself decently as a voice actress, although I imagine most of her sung material (this is also a musical? Sort of?) being in her very high, whispery and peaky register might be a bit of a divisive element for some. (Personally, I’m fond of it, but I could imagine someone not being so.) Despite this, the music is the inarguable highlight here. Everything else is a lot more scattershot.

Visually the show is….okay? Not great. My main complaint is the rigging. This is a 3D series and in slower and more emotional moments the model work is pretty stiff, which is unfortunate. The other aspects of the visuals, especially the use of color and lighting, mostly mask it, but it’s occasionally noticeable. The action scenes are probably the visual highlight, and there are solid setpieces in both episodes to date, but that’s only one element of what the series is trying to do.

My main issue is just that both episodes are incredibly exposition-heavy but manage to be very low on context or stakes in spite of that. Of all things, a giant fish (originally from the “Eat The Past” music video, I think? Admittedly hardly the only music video it’s been in) is a main character, and can also turn into a cute anime boy, Laplace [Sakura Ayane]. He more or less serves as Kafu’s magical girl companion. That’s all well and good, but the premiere just stops dead after its first action sequence so he and a weird bird thing he summons can explain how the setting’s magic works in detail, which is pointless of course, because it’s all technobabble anyway and mostly boils down to “Kafu’s singing makes people feel things and therefore is magical.” In general there’s just a lot of talking, and it’s all a bit much. There are also two time skips by my count in the first episode alone, although the framing of these scenes makes whether they’re actually timeskips or not a little unclear at first, so the series just feels generally very bogged-down and disjointed, with an overall poor command of the basics of visual storytelling.

Initially, I was unwilling to write the show off, but having now seen the second episode, I think I’ll be steering people away from it, as the second episode is unfortunately more of the same. It’s cool that Kafu and the other girls are basically a magical girl Justice League now, I suppose, but the fact that all of the fighting is left to their companions makes this feel pretty hollow. (It’s not just Kafu, all of the VWP girls have a cute anime boy that doubles as an animal summon / stand / whatever. This not only doubles the size of the cast, it also makes the girls themselves, the ostensible focus of this whole series, feel pretty superfluous even if their magical singing is also nominally important.) In general, there’s just a deep incoherence here. A user on this site’s Discord server said Kamitsubaki City “radiates mixed media energy,” and I can only echo their sentiments. I’m not opposed to the format in general (two of my favorite anime this year, Ave Mujica and Cinderella Gray, are part of large multimedia franchises), but this is an example of the form being done pretty poorly. I like the big hat that Sekai [Isekai Joucho‘s character] has. Other than that, unless you’re truly starved for current magical girl-esque anime (and I’m weighing as I write this whether that describes me or not), you can give this one a pass. This entry probably could’ve been its own article. Oh well!

Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse: Sometimes I like to describe the premise of a series when starting one of these, but that’s difficult here because I barely have a handle on what that premise is. Very basically, it seems like our protagonist got Vision of Escaflowne’d at some point before the start of the series, but then he got sent back to his own world (implicitly our world), and then, not ten minutes into the first episode, he gets isekai’d yet again. He notes that this his 2000th time, so clearly the sheer amount of times he’s been through this is something we’re supposed to pick up on.

But he seems impossibly ignorant about the general mechanisms of this “ability” of his (if it’s indeed even something intrinsic to him at all), and doubly so about the world he ends up in, which is a blend of Heian-era Japanese aesthetics and mecha sci-fi. Twice in the same episode, he encounters “the mist,” black fog that summons monsters and freezes innocent townsfolk in their place. The second time, he turns into a black and blue tiger-oni-monster-thing and can fight it off for a while but he gets completely owned by the end of the episode and gets isekai’d again, except this time he ends up in the Heian-Sci-Fi world at the point he visited earlier in the episode.

It’s not that any of this is confusing per se, but it’s all delivered so rapid-fire and so nonchalantly that none of it has much impact, so it’s both a bit hard to follow and hard to care. Combine that with the generally unappealing design work, the extreme hoariness of some of the writing clichés at play here (there are two different “main guy falls into main girl’s boobs” gags), and you’re left with less the amount of unanswered questions you might expect of a first episode of an anime and more just a very weird and disorienting sensation of having been thrown into the middle of something in a not-entirely-intentional way. I have no idea what to make of this at all, and I might just watch an episode or two more just to get a better handle on it.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy: Impressively, this geologically-minded slice of life series from main Studio Bind director Fuji Shingo is quite possibly the best-looking thing to premiere this season. And if it isn’t, it’s at least in an easy top five. Given some of its competition, that’s quite the feat. Replacing mono as my once-a-season-if-I-can-find-one “sightseeing” anime, Ruri Rocks is a funny, laid-back slice of life comedy about minerals. There’s a real sense of inspiring awe at the natural world in this one, and the garnet pool sequence at the end of this episode is easily one of my favorite visual moments in anything that’s come out this year. The show is surprisingly educational, too, if you’re interested in the actual science of how rocks form. I can, in theory, imagine the fanservice maybe being too much for some, but other than that one caveat, you’ll probably want to at least give this one a shot.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless….: Socially awkward girl Amaori Renako [Nakamura Kanna] is rescued from a life of loneliness by her beautiful blonde classmate, a total alpha named Ouzuka Mai [Oonishi Saori], who then decides she loves her. Renako doesn’t want that, thus leading to a series premised on, basically, gay chicken. They spend odd days as a couple and even days as friends, Renako trying to make sure they stay just friends, Mai trying to ensure that Renako falls for her. An entertainingly weird premise, and it lends the show a madcap energy that I actually really like quite a lot.

I think the visuals really help sell it; the actual drawing quality is a little up and down, but the animation is extremely fluid and expressive, and in particular the way the show’s colors are done is a huge part of establishing the energy of the adaptation, placing it somewhere pretty far from reality, despite the surprising depth of the character writing. (Most obvious, this early on, on Renako’s end.) Everything is super bright, there are almost no shadows, and a lot of the backgrounds have minimal detail, leading to them looking sort of like, I don’t even know, city pop album covers or something. It’s a really interesting visual identity for something like this, and shines brightest in a scene in the second half of the first episode where Mai takes Renako to an expensive hotel’s pool. It feeds into the zany but slightly bittersweet vibe of the subject matter to make one of the stronger premieres of the season. I will definitely be keeping up with this, and if you’re on the lookout for a good yuri pickup, I recommend you do the same.

The Water Magician: It’s so fucking tired to complain about bad isekai, but this one had an okay looking trailer and a pretty key visual, and I checked it out, hopeful that it would be a rare standout, or at least better than the baseline of uninspired drivel in this format that continues to trickle out season after season. It was not. Protagonist Mihara Ryou [Murase Ayumu, an actor I normally like] is reincarnated into another world, learns he can use water magic, and spends most of the episode reading a D&D-ass monster manual about the Big Scary Animals that live in his new neighborhood. There are some mostly pretty bad fight scenes. There’s an icebox in his house. It’s all very passé. There’s a dullahan, which is so out of place that it’s the one interesting element to grasp onto here, but even mentioning that much is me doing the show a favor. Everything feels so perfunctory and workmanlike that, even if you are a huge fan of this genre, I can truly not imagine getting anything out of this at all. There’s some alright water animation, as you’d expect from the premise, but other than that there is not a single fucking thing worth talking about in this show. It’s just total ass. It looks bad, is written badly, and isn’t really about anything. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to write this and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch it. Easily the worst premiere I sat through this season

And now, the sequels!

Call of The Night, Season 2: An interesting return from the vampire quasi-romcom here. I’m undecided as to whether or not I’ll actually keep up with this one. Despite really liking the series when it originally premiered—I rated it pretty highly on my 2022 year-end article—that was three entire years ago. This episode is very quiet, essentially picks up right where the series previously left off, and honestly it’s not terribly visually ambitious. But I do concede it was nice to hear from Nazuna and Ko for the first time in a long time, even as they’re still figuring out what precisely their relationship to each other actually is, and the show’s nightscapes remain lovely, so maybe I will stick with it. We shall see.

DAN DA DAN, Season 2: My main thought here is that this is an unfortunate and pretty noticeable visual downgrade from season one, which does just kinda suck. This is most obvious in the area of the color choices, which were much duller and less vibrant in this episode than they would’ve been back then. Pretty unfortunate! I’m gonna keep watching to see if it improves but I admit the first episode being so visually lackluster took a bit of the wind out of my sails with this one. The fact that I’ve since gotten mostly-current on the Dandadan manga probably isn’t helping, given that I know what to expect from the series at this point and my honeymoon period with it is several months in the rear view. Still, it wasn’t a bad first episode by any means (although all the usual caveats about Dandadan apply), and this series has the special status of being something I’m watching with a group of friends, so I will be keeping up with it regardless.

My Dress-Up Darling, Season 2: Here’s something to chew on. For some reason, this episode is called “Wakana Gojo, 15 Years Old, Teenager.” No, I do not know why Gojo is being reintroduced to us by All-Star Batman. This quirk aside, I was very happy with this episode overall. My Dress-Up Darling holds a bit of a special place on this site as easily the most popular series I have ever written about (seriously, you guys should see my statistics. Individual episode writeups for MDUD consistently clear almost everything else I put out). I started covering it because of a community vote back in 2022 when it first premiered, and it makes me very happy that, in spite of the gap between seasons, MDUD returns like it never left.

This is in fact easily the strongest return showing of anything here, and makes for a pretty dizzying display of technique. An array of different visual styles and well-timed gags make this one of the most purely fun premieres of the season period. Shinohara Keisuke and his team on are on top of their game here and I really cannot stress just how much fucking fun this premiere is. The opening few minutes are an anime-within-an-anime once again, and they’re so convincing that I actually briefly thought I’d opened the wrong series somehow. (This time, the subject of the episode, TsuCom, is a pastiche of the sort of zany action-comedies that were popular in the late 90s to early 00s. You can easily imagine this kind of thing having originally been a limited-run OVA of some sort before eventually popping up on RetroCrush years later.)

The episode follows Gojo’s attempts to make a bunnygirl outfit for Marin, and as is the norm with this series, this simple premise leads to tons of total goofball shit that really must be seen to be believed. My particular favorite gag ensues when Gojo talks to a fabric vendor and accidentally puts him under the impression that the bunnysuit is for Gojo. This man then has a whole awakening, reasoning that in the modern day, men can absolutely wear bunnysuits and he shouldn’t be so surprised by all of this, only for Marin to appear and for the man to realize his mistake. Obviously, as with all gags centered on pacing and presentation, this is much funnier to watch than it is to have relayed secondhand. Still, my point is that this episode is supremely funny. It’s also quite sweet in places! The episode ends with Gojo attending a Halloween party with Marin and some of her other friends, and he feels rather out of place until Marin mentions his doll-painting to someone else. Initially, he tenses up, but because everyone is impressed and interested in his dolls as opposed to put off—these are a bunch of otaku with varying offbeat hobbies of their own, mind you—the episode ends on a high note, with him finally feeling like he’s found somewhere he belongs. Frankly, I think I actually appreciate Dress-Up Darling now more than I did when I watched the first season. With hindsight, I think I spent far too much of my coverage of the show hemming and hawing on if its fanservice was “okay” or not. Full disclosure, that returns in full force here, too, but if you’re two seasons into this show you know what you’re getting at this point. So let me just say it for the record and wholeheartedly; I am really glad to have this show back.

1: Hi Josh

Posted on December 30, 2022January 2, 2023 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

Ranking Every 2022 Anime I Actually Finished from Worst to Best – Part 2

“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly, multi-part column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.

You’ve met the bad, and you’ll meet the good starting tomorrow. Meet the ugly. The weird, the flawed, and the under-sung.

Let me give you a peek under the hood, friends. To break this list—the whole thing, I mean—up into manageable chunks, I conceptualized it, as, essentially, four broad categories. The first part of the list was those few shows from this year that I genuinely disliked. This chunk? A motley assortment of the flawed but interesting, the under-loved and underrated, and a handful of things I still more liked than didn’t but was too frustrated with to put higher on the list. (I try not to think too much about this kind of thing when writing these lists, but if there are any truly Controversial picks here, I’m betting two in particular from this chunk of the list will be them.)

Without further ado, let’s get to this particular collection of weirdos.

#30. Miss KUROITSU from the Monster Development Department

It’s janky, it’s obscure, and it occasionally cracks problematic jokes. Nonetheless, Miss KUROITSU From The Monster Development Department is the first entry on the entire list that I can truly say that I like without too much in the way of further qualifiers.

Now, being a doofy comedy anime based on the premise of following a scientist who works for the evil organization in your average toku show, Kuroitsu is also undeniably really niche, at least as far as Anglophone audiences are concerned. But what can I say? I started watching it on a whim and found a lot to love between the deep-cut toku references, the absurd character comedy, and from time to time, some actual no-shit feel-good moments, such as an episode where the titular mad scientist helps one of her creations, a zombie girl, become an idol in spite of the fact that she can’t initially sing (or even speak) at all. Between that and the cameo of a character who is pretty obviously Minky Momo, I can’t help but have a certain only slightly-begrudging affection for this show.

Now, the gags about Wolf Bete, a male wolf monster accidentally put in a cute anime girl body, maybe those I could do without. But, hey, no show is perfect. Next!

#29. My Dress-Up Darling

Ah, young love. It can be sweet to the point of cloying, it can be horny to the point of awkward. In that sense, maybe no anime so far this decade has yet captured the feeling so well as My Dress-Up Darling.

You can distinguish MDUD from the bottom of the barrel romcom by virtue of both of its leads having tangible personalities. Honestly, Gojo and Marin make a pretty sweet (and believable!) couple the vast majority of the time, and it’s easy to intuitively understand how their overlap in interests—making clothes for dolls on his end, cosplay on hers—would push them closer together. On top of that, MDUD has a real love of otaku culture; Dress-Up Darling is almost certainly the anime this year with the most fictional anime, manga, games, etc. within it, and we learn enough about Pretty Cure ersatz Flower Princess Blaze that I was able to wring an entire april fools’ article out of the subject.

So why isn’t it higher on the list? Well, let’s circle back around to that “horny to the point of awkward” point. The series is fairly salacious; I’ve gone back and forth over how much of a flaw I think this really is. One must after all remember that this show is aimed at teenage boys, and teenage boys deserve good anime, too! Still, I think the series’ sometimes overbearing fanservice crosses the line of good taste a bit too often and it unfortunately hurts the show more than it helps. Maybe the inevitable second season will tone that down a little bit? Eh, let’s not ask for miracles. Ultimately, MDUD is an otherwise good show that just needs to learn to keep it in its pants better. Or maybe I’m just a prude, who knows.

#28. TOKYO MEW MEW NEW

The cat came back! 2022 was a great year for anime all around, but I was personally saddened by the lack of much that fits the broad “battle girl” mold. There were a few magical girl anime, but not terribly many that fit the wider idea of the supergenre, with even most of this year’s mahou shoujo being decidedly less fighty than normal. In the broader battle girl field there was of course Lycoris Recoil, but if you weren’t super keen on that show, or just wanted something that involved fewer guns, what exactly did you have to fall back on if you wanted to see a troupe of girls in themed outfits kick some ass?

Well, Pretty Cure. But! If you wanted a second choice, Tokyo Mew Mew New wasn’t a bad one.

Mew Mew New is a pretty naked nostalgia play; it aired in an otaku time slot, so it wasn’t really trying to compete with Pretty Cure or any other kids’ anime. Instead, it aims to be a distilled and concentrated version of the original Tokyo Mew Mew anime. A somewhat breezier adaptation of the manga that the former is based on, perhaps. I can’t say how well it succeeds in that specific regard—being unfamiliar myself with both the original Tokyo Mew Mew anime and the manga source material—but I can say that it’s an enjoyable and, more than anything, just downright fun twelve episodes of classic magical girl silliness. It was beat in even that category this year, as we’ll get to, but that doesn’t make Mew Mew’s attempt not worthwhile.

Speaking of which; of all the anime on this list that have gotten second season announcements, this is probably the one that surprised me most of all. But hey, I’m going to tune in, will you?

#27. Spy x Family

Once upon a Cold War, there lived a man named Twilight who, to fulfill a mission, found himself with a “fake” family consisting of an adopted daughter and a hastily fake-married wife. I think time and the show’s popularity have obscured just how weird Spy x Family’s premise is, but it’s worth bringing up because that strangeness is what makes the show worth following. When SpyFam dials things down into normal “shonen comedy” territory, you get bores like the episode of part two that is entirely about how bad Yor (the wife, if you somehow don’t know) is at cooking. When it remembers that it takes place in what is effectively East Germany during the Cold War, the show suddenly springs to life.

I’ll be honest, I debated long and hard where, precisely, to stick Spy x Family on this list. Because in its best moments it can be ridiculously funny—and it’s not just a parade of strong Anya Reaction Faces that’s making me say that—and even surprisingly heartfelt, but enough of it drags that I don’t really feel comfortable putting it particularly high up, either. I’ve written more about SpyFam than most anime on this list, and yet, I am still thoroughly undecided as to what I actually think of it “on the whole.” Ultimately, though, what I think doesn’t really matter here, SpyFam is easily the most commercially successful new face on this list, with its first season (broken up into two non-consecutive cours. Confusing, I know) raking in a truly rare amount of viewership not just among otaku but among the general public, probably owing to its fairly accessible nature. (There’s not a ton of “anime bullshit” in Spy x Family if that’s something you care about.) With a second proper season and a theatrical film on the way, Spy x Family will probably return for next year’s list. Maybe by then I’ll have a better idea of what the show means to me.

#26. Shinobi no Ittoki

Here’s a hypothetical for you; can you call something “okay” and mean it as a compliment?

No, I’m serious. Shinobi no Ittoki feels like a self-conscious throwback to an older kind of action anime, where The Sakuga™ was not necessarily guaranteed and was more of an intermittent thing when it did show up, where the character designs were mostly interchangeable, and the entire thing was entertaining but not really about much of anything beyond maybe some nebulous spins on big ideas like determinism vs. free will and cycles of violence. The series’ unflashy charm has all but guaranteed that it hasn’t and won’t ever develop a large fanbase (although, I should be careful about saying that ever since The Detective is Already Dead had its second season announced. Maybe you never really know.), but I’d argue it doesn’t really need one. Stuff like this is almost meant to fly under the radar, there was no way that this was going to pick up some huge following in the season that featured both Chainsaw Man and the return of Bleach, but that it has any fans at all is no mean feat, given the circumstances.

As for why it feels like a show out of time, I have a pet theory; a running theme in 2022’s anime was the knowingly retro. Miss KUROITSU is arguably an example as well, and we’ll run into a few more throughout this list. Of these, Shinobi no Ittoki might just be the one that realizes those mid-00s ambitions the most fully. Surprising, for an anime most people probably wrote off from its key visual alone.

Why does it nail that aughts-core authenticity? Well, in of itself, it’s hard to pinpoint anything “special” about Shinobi no Ittoki, but that very semi-anonymity is exactly what makes the show tick, a curious case of something being obviously nondescript but nailing the fundamentals so well that it manages to breathe a bit of new life into some pretty old tropes. The doofy high school protagonist who’s ripped from his ordinary life and inherits a secret legacy, ridiculous gee-wiz techno ninja gadgets, the scheming and sinister Tsuda-voiced villain, the death of the village chief, the final suicide mission, the all-in finale with excellent animation, it’s all here.

For bonus points: The blonde twintail traitor Kirei serves as an outside pick for one of Aoi Yuuki’s stronger—and weirder, dig that scratchy, nervous timbre—roles, if you’re into that sort of thing.

#25. The Demon Girl Next Door Season 2

Returning from way back in 2019, the anime more commonly known as Machikado Mazoku is the other other other magical girl anime on this year’s list. Although you could be forgiven for not really thinking of it that way, given that The Demon Girl Next Door focuses more on charming character-driven antics and general goofiness than it does fighting the forces of evil. (That’s really all in the rearview for co-protagonist Momo anyway. She’s retired.)

To be honest, in terms of “objective” merits and flaws, this is one of the rougher shows on the list. Machikado Mazoku’s second season has a real problem with overdrive pacing; some of the gags aren’t given quite enough room to breathe and it does hurt the show a bit by suffocating some of the more subtle character work. On the other hand, though, when it remembers to slow down there’s a real sense of approachable personality here, one that holds through equally well when the show delves a bit more into its proper plot with elements like journeys into lead Shamiko’s troubled mindscape as when it’s in more lighthearted pure-antics territory, as when she gets a job at a restaurant owned by a baku.

Machikado Mazoku will probably never top popularity polls, but managing to stick the landing on a second season several years later proves that it’s maintained its dedicated fanbase for a reason.

#24. Lycoris Recoil

Oh, LycoReco, what are we ever going to do with you? With the hype cycle some months in the rearview this feels like less of a #HotTake than it did at the time, but to me, what Lycoris Recoil is, before it is anything else, is an illustration of the difference between having good characters and telling a good story.

Here’s what it does get right. An extremely strong cast; not just Chisato and Takina, whose uneasy partnership blossoms into what anyone with eyes will be damn ready to call romance by the end of the show, but also Chisato’s father Mika, Mika’s villainous ex Yoshi, the playful hacker Kurumi, etc. They all feel like real people, and it’s a joy to watch them work through the winding tunnels of espionage that comprise the show’s plot. LycoReco does intuitively understand that a connection between two people, if it’s strong enough, can get anyone through even very dark times. This is a theme that showed up in several anime this year, including a few we’ve yet to get to, and it’s a strong core for something like this to have.

But, the same can’t be said of everything about LycoReco, which is why it’s not higher on this list. Too many of the actual plot points simply don’t survive any scrutiny, and I remain offput by the assumptions the show’s world is built on. Fiction that stars what are essentially cops develops more and more problems the closer it gets to reality. Lycoris Recoil’s galaxy brain spin of “it’s bad that cops shoot people but it would be fine if they used rubber bullets like the protagonist” is so utterly ridiculous that it’s not worth seriously engaging with, despite being a spin on a real thing some people think. The series’ commitment to exploring the idea is so minimal and half-assed that it scans as simply brainless rather than an active defense of the concept. But it is still pretty bad, and the show suffers for it.

Because of all this; how much of LycoReco’s downsides someone is going to be willing to forgive because of how charming the characters as written actually are, not to mention the show’s rock solid action anime fundamentals, is going to vary wildly. Especially because how good the show is at a given moment tends to be tied pretty directly to how much it’s focusing on its characters vs. how much it’s focusing on its boneheaded central narrative. I feel like an indecisive centrist putting LycoReco in this spot, of all places on the list, but as summer changes to autumn and autumn to winter, and LycoReco moves further and further into the past, I find myself totally torn between appreciating LycoReco for what it is and being disappointed in what it isn’t. There are worse ways to end your series than a sunny sky and crystal blue waters, so I can’t dislike the show and indeed, I don’t. The “retired in Hawai’i” ending doesn’t even entirely feel unearned. Even so, it still feels like something is fundamentally missing. So, when you get down to it, do I actually like-o ‘Reco? Well, at the end of the day, yes, but with a fucking lot of caveats. Hence its appearance here rather than a fair bit farther up. There’s only so many ways I can say that I love the characters but am not crazy about how they’re handled. It is what it is.

(And if you’re a super-fan and it makes you feel any better, this is another case where maybe you shouldn’t care what I specifically think. The show did just top a popularity poll over in Japan.)

#23. Fuuto PI

Every year, I watch a few shows that are solidly quite good, but have a few central flaws, or even just don’t hit quite enough high notes to make it into my personal best-of’s. 2022 was a damn good year for anime, so even the stuff that is merely decent, is, in a vacuum pretty good. Fuuto P.I. is one of those, combining a novel premise (transforming hero shenanigans + a somewhat silly pastiche of ‘gritty detective’-type stuff) with an impressive pedigree (it’s a sequel to 2009’s Kamen Rider W, which, full disclosure, I haven’t seen), and an unusual production team from Studio KAI, who are not really known for punchy action anime like this.

Upgrading to an older audience (remember; W is over a decade old. All those 8 and 9 year olds who watched it when it was new are adults by now) means that Fuuto P.I. acquires a bit of a sleazy streak, and while this feels like a flaw I should be nailing the series for, I found it hard to be seriously upset by the show’s more openly leery tendencies. Mostly because of the fact that it has a shameless amount of camp that really makes the jump from live-action tokusatsu to an adult-aimed action anime feel totally natural.

Because of where it lands in terms of character building, our heroes—Shotaro and Phillip—have already had their long journey wherein they learned to trust each other long ago. Here, they’re just two cogs in a well-oiled machine, with newcomer Tokime, the female lead and the focus of much of the fanservice, providing a twist on what is presumably the old formula. The result? A solid six hours of lightly trashy fun, combining action anime flash, the particular campy sensibility that only toku can deliver, and a few interesting, meatier points to chew on by its conclusion. And hey, the ending strongly suggests more on the way in the future. (Which makes sense, given that it’s an adaptation of an ongoing manga.) I’d watch it.

#22. The Executioner and Her Way of Life

The year is 2022, and isekai has reached a point of true saturation. Every single season, we are inundated with new tales of featureless potato-boys being whisked away to generic JRPG-style fantasy worlds and given heaps upon heaps of special powers which they use to fulfill idle fantasies of banging as many dubiously-drawn Hot Anime Women ™ as they can find while lazily hacking up goblins. The Executioner & Her Way of Life sees all of this, and it is not impressed. But to avoid going too far down the path of “this anime isn’t like other girls,” it should be noted that the main reason that Executioner is, shockingly good, is what it does with the basic conceit of an isekai in the first place. It doesn’t stand out because it rejects the premise, it stands out because it does something interesting with it.

To wit; our protagonist is not the otherworlder—isekaijin, as said in the show, which I don’t think is a term unique to Executioner but is one I am very fond of—Akari, who serves as more of a secondary lead. Instead, it’s Menou, an assassin employed by the local church whose whole job is finding these crazy-powerful elseworld drop-ins and killing them before they can cause too many problems. There’s just one issue; Akari is way more powerful than even she realizes, and Menou quickly develops a hard-to-place liking for the girl. I won’t spoil too much, but suffice it to say that what’s going on here is a lot more interesting than the stereotypical “guy gets a huge harem and looks at stat screens” plots that litter this format. (In fact, there isn’t a single stat screen at all, so far as I can recall, which is kind of amazing in its own right at this point.)

What this boils down to is that Executioner’s main strength lies in its ability to pull its parent genre apart into its constituent building blocks and then reassemble them into an intriguing new shape. Not just in its core narrative but also interesting worldbuilding details that show us just how the isekaijin have shaped Menou’s world. (Note, for instance, that literally everyone seems to speak only one language; Japanese. And yes, that detail is intentional. It’s pointed out explicitly at one point.)

It was not the only surprisingly good isekai anime this year (aside from another which will appear farther up on this list, there’s Reincarnated as a Sword, which apparently got quite good only a few episodes after I wrote it off. You can take my mentioning it here as an apology), but it was the only true anti-isekai this year. A story stitched together from the ripped-up shreds of a genre that many people, myself included, are very tired of by now. The show isn’t perfect, of course. Its flaws are few but fairly obvious; it ends in a noncommittal “go read the books, stupid” kind of shrug, it’s maybe occasionally a bit too edgy for its own good. That kind of thing. Still, all in all, in a year that had fewer “lesbians kicking ass” anime than I might have liked, you really do have to hand it to Executioner for holding it down.

#21. Delicious Party♡Precure

Ah, here it is. The exception, the thing I carved out a specific little niche of its own for. Delicious Party Precure—DePaPre, for short—isn’t actually finished airing, which on its own, makes scoring it a different, and much more difficult, prospect than ranking anything else here.

Yet, the fact remains that I really just utterly fucking love Pretty Cure. Delicious Party feels like it’s already being written off as a “weaker” season of the series before it even ends, and while that might be true in some grand rank-your-faves sense, it’s awfully rude to the show itself, which has maintained an effortless charm from its premiere up to present while dodging production issues and the deeply unfortunate Toei database breach earlier this year.

Certainly, that resilience shows itself off better in some corners than others. Amane, alias Cure Finale, is almost inarguably the character who’s most developed. Seeing her face turn is one thing, but the real meat is in how she copes with feeling like she isn’t quite a good enough person to be a Pretty Cure. Even that aside; there are all sorts of fun little details that only an anime afforded a full four cours—rare in this day and age—could indulge in. The gentle light that is the grandmother of Yui, the lead Cure, the quiet-girl introspection that Kokone is prone to, the zany antics of Ran (who, as Cure Yum-Yum, might hold the record for the silliest Pretty Cure alias), and even the ever-present B-plot about Mary, the girls’ mentor figure, and his disappeared former partner. This thing’s even got a time travel episode. Really, can you complain when even a “weak” Pretty Cure season is this good? I certainly can’t.

#20. The Ranking of Kings

You may be a touch surprised to see this here! Ranking of Kings (Ousama Ranking at home in Japan) started airing late last year, but only finished up back in the ‘22 winter season. The entire way, it forged a strong visual identity that looks like absolutely nothing else that aired this year and spun that visual charm into a fully realized fairytale world of princes, knights, and monsters.

Our heroes? Bojji the little mute prince and his roguish blob of a best friend, Kage. Together they set out on a truly classic adventurous tale, the kind that makes you wish that this sort of thing got such lavish treatment more often. Really, it’’s one of Wit Studio’s best-ever anime from a purely visual standpoint, with enough characterful sakuga to bring a smile to even the most cynical animation enthusiast’s face.

Ranking of Kings’ ending sees Bojji spurn his original goal, only to set out on a brand-new adventure, so it seems likely that we’ll return to this fairytale someday in the not-too-distant future. (A spinoff is definitively in the works. I wouldn’t be shocked to see a second season greenlit.) Like many anime on this list, I’d happily watch that second season, and I doubt I’m alone.

#19. TEPPEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Laughing ’til You Cry

Comedy anime get no respect. Whether classics like Nichijou or Azumanga Daioh or modern offerings like TEPPEN!!!!! here, pure comedy anime just never seem to quite pick up the followings that their more dramatic compatriots do over here in the Anglosphere. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that comedy is fairly cultural. Maybe people just don’t respect the power of a hearty chuckle enough. Whatever the reason; TEPPEN!!!! Deserves more credit than what little it got. If absolutely nothing else, it’s the only anime on this list whose air schedule was directly impacted by the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. That’s weird and notable enough to stand out all on its own; it helps that the show’s pretty good, too, featuring bizarre, absurdist shaggy dog tales concocted around everything from haunted inns to Bitcoin schemes.

At the end of the day that is why Teppen is higher on this list than a number of things I have “more to say about.” It was just fucking fun! Deriving a wide variety of zany slapstick from its central conceit of a group of teams competing to be the best comedy group in Japan (the titular Teppen competition) is in some ways the obvious route, but it worked for Teppen, and I can really only dock points for a couple off-color jokes I didn’t really like. Two sets of bonus points for you: along the way it found the time to squeeze in probably the year’s single best time travel-related episode (its fifth) and engineered an insanely catchy rapped OP theme. Put some respect on its name.

#18. Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Final Season -Dawn of a Shallow Dream-

I have to confess; I develop a not-entirely-logical attachment to anything I cover for long enough. I have written about Magia Record in various places a number of times since it originally premiered back in 2020. It is, as of this entry, the only anime that’s showed up here, on my 2020 year-end list, and on my truncated top 5 last year. There is an admirable strength to that persistence, even as I have to admit that what MagiReco tried to do as it closed out its final season, Dawn of a Shallow Dream, is a pretty niche thing. I’m actually not sure between this and RWBY: Ice Queendom, which was the more-watched SHAFT battle girl show of the year. This was certainly the better of the two, but anecdotally, I saw almost no discussion about it at all. Have people really written the Madoka Magica extended universe off that hard?

If so, that’s sad, but all too apropos. This particular corner of the dark magical girl subgenre pulls off an interesting trick of thriving best when ignored, and Magia Record itself ends with the white-gloved hand of Madokami herself shutting the book tightly on this particular story, as its protagonists lament that no one will ever know what they did here. Will it even remotely shock you, coming from a woman who’s eagerly defended both Day Break Illusion and Blue Reflection Ray, that I thought this was pretty good? It’s not just the metatextual angle, but that does help.

Now that’s not to say it’s a perfect finale, not by any means. For one thing, it’s really more of a movie, with any notion of it being a “season” being put to a serious test by the fact that it dropped all at once. (Not that this is inherently a problem, but it does suggest some behind-the-scenes issues.) For another, it is visually all over the place. It never gets as unsightly as the ugliest parts of Ice Queendom, but there is some pretty wonky character art in spots, here. But, by contrast, there’s also a lot that’s really lovely to look at, and in general the ‘season’ has a mesmerizingly surreal look to it that, in its best moments, does ably recall the heights of The Rebellion Story, still the strongest single articulation of Madoka’s core themes and aesthetic concerns. I am also still a little sad that they felt the need to kill b-character Kuroe, who took an unexpected leap from being totally off my personal radar to one of my favorites in the second season last year.

Still, despite its shortcomings, I find it hard to argue that this isn’t a solid end to an intriguingly strange alternate take on the Madoka story. I’m glad we got to take this particular ride.

And that’s all for today’s chunk of the list. See y’all tomorrow.

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 Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr 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.

Posted on April 1, 2022April 2, 2022 in anime, Misc. Anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Lost Legacy of FLOWER PRINCESS BLAZE!!: How a Forgotten Toei Series Shaped 15 Years of Magical Girl Anime [April Fools’]

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“This world was not made for us. But I understand now that it’s the only one we have.”

For most here in the west, the history of Toei‘s forays into the magical girl genre begins with Sailor Moon, a monstrously successful franchise that is widely beloved to this day. If they know a little more, it ends with Pretty Cure, another monstrously successful franchise that is widely beloved to this day. Those with a still more slightly expansive knowledge of the company’s history might also be aware of Ojomajo Doremi, a marginally less successful franchise that is still beloved enough that it spawned a sort of distant sequel film, Looking for Magical Doremi, as recently as 2020, a full fifteen years after its original conclusion. Those who particularly care about the genre might point out that they’ve made all sorts of magical girl anime over the years, including Himitsu no Akko-chan, one of the very first. Regardless, all of these anime get their flowers from those in the know, and none could rightly be called overlooked by anyone with a decent knowledge of the medium.

But the same is not true for every magical girl series they’ve made.

The year is 2006. Futari wa Pretty Cure has just ended its second and final proper season. Alongside Splash Star, a reboot of the Precure IP, Toei launches a second action-oriented magical girl offering; Flower Princess Blaze!!

Time and the language barrier have rendered this decision obscure and puzzling, but in the moment, it must’ve made sense. Splash Star was the “safe bet”, essentially a retuning of the original Pretty Cure concept. Blaze was the wildcard; stranger, more experimental, and airing a bit later in the day. (Perhaps aiming for a slightly older audience–the 10-14 demo, perhaps–than Pretty Cure and its predecessor Doremi did.)

Splash Star has proven divisive over the longview of history, but in the moment, it absolutely crushed its younger sibling in terms of popularity and sales. Flower Princess Blaze did not do badly; it pulled decent ratings and sold decent amounts of tie-in merchandise. But it was nowhere near as successful as Precure, and “decent” only goes so far. That is perhaps why, when its second “season” concluded in late 2008, the IP was shelved.

(Technically, when airing, the show was split into two “seasons” which aired back-to-back with only a short break between them, Flower Princess Blaze and Flower Princess Blaze!!–yes, the exclamation points are the only difference in title–but the distinction is minimal, and the few later releases of the series haven’t made it, applying the second title to the series on the whole and treating its combined 126 episodes as a single, sprawling saga. The only place I’m aware of that still draws a line between the two is Wikipedia.)

To this end, Toei evidently decided their grand experiment had failed, and cut back to just one girls’ anime. Pretty Cure soldiered on and continued to be insanely popular, but its shadowy younger sister disappeared like a thief in the night, never to be heard from again.

Despite this, Flower Princess Blaze has proven to be quietly influential, with a diverse array of artists and industry figures both within the anime medium and without citing it as an inspiration. Puella Magi Madoka Magica‘s soul gems were taken directly from this series in all but name. And not one but two Pretty Cure seasons–Heartcatch and Happiness Charge–would later make fairly obvious homages to some of its villains.

Even outside the specific lineage of Toei magical girl anime, there are nods in works separated by space, time, and even medium; Steven Universe‘s Gem Homeworld draws on the Midnight Kingdom for architectural inspiration, Wish Upon the Pleiades xeroxes its finale outright, Anime-Gataris features the show’s real-life director as an in-show character. Most recently, and perhaps most famously, My Dress-Up Darling licensed the name and worked actual footage from the series into its own plot, giving lead girl Marin a fixation on secondary villain (and fan favorite) Black Robelia, (rendered “Lobelia” in that show’s official subs) whom she cosplays in several episodes.

And yet, in spite of the shadow it casts over the past 15 years of the magical girl genre, the series remains fairly obscure, especially in the west. Well, I’m not naïve enough to think I can change that on my own, but perhaps this, combined with the renewed interest from MDUD’s cameos, can help a little bit. Today, we dive into one of the strangest magical girl sagas of all time. Wilted flowers and shattered crystals. A hundred worlds in peril and the six girls who’ll save them. Midnight cities and a battle at the end of the universe. This is Flower Princess Blaze.

It starts out so simply. We follow two girls; one of them, Mirai Tengeji / Princess Daisy (Sakura Tange), cast in the then-young but already-typical mold of the upbeat, peppy lead magical girl. She has her foibles (the most obvious of which being her comically rough manner of speaking), but she is certainly what we’d now recognize as the most “typical” of Blaze‘s characters. With a minimal amount of tweaking, she’d fit right in with any given Pretty Cure season.

But she’s not the real main character, not really. Much of the show instead centers on her rival–then friend, then rival, then friend again–Shion Nikaido / Princess Lily (Rumi Shishido). Some context: it’s established before too long that the Midnight Kingdom, the requisite baddies-of-the-week, both a group and the physical place they hail from, form when ordinary people fall into despair, that word that translated anime love to use as a catch-all for negative emotional states. That’s not a background detail; each and every episode features someone, whether it’s a minor one-off character or one far more important, joining the Midnight Kingdom. Sometimes they’re rescued by episode’s end, but it’s far from a sure thing. As such, even early on, Flower Princess Blaze operates with a level of intensity and tension very rare for children’s anime.

At the climax of the series’ first major arc, Shion, learns that her own sister (and former comrade) Neon, (Houko Kuwashima) joined the Kingdom’s ranks after abandoning her position as the Flower Princess Hydrangea.

The revelation that Neon and Black Robelia are the same person remains one of the show’s most iconic twists, eventually fully elucidated in flashback, as does the ensuing scene. Hints peppered throughout the show’s first cour that Shion and Neon are not blood related come to a head here, where Robelia lays out her motivations plainly. People look down on them for their familial situation, she feels like a burden on her parents, she basically flat-out says she wants to die. She’s sick of the world and wants to burn it to the ground. (Her heartbreak over teenage crush Soma probably didn’t help either. Although I think some reads of the character over-emphasize that point.) But this scene is illustrative for another reason; in most magical girl anime, at least those aimed at a young audience, this is not a point of view that would be given any serious credence. There’d be a rebuttal, Shion would assure Neon that people really do love her, something.

But earlier in the episode, Mirai tried that on Shion, and the two had a (comparatively rare for the genre) mahou-on-mahou scuffle. It’s perhaps for that reason that Black Robelia’s speech is so effective that Shion actually defects too. Her flower crystal goes black, and the Midnight Kingdom gains another soldier. This sets up a pattern that recurs three more times over the remainder of the anime, until Mirai is eventually the only Flower Princess still standing. (Not for nothing is Flower Princess Blaze one of the few magical girl anime I can name where the bad guys are also given henshin sequences.)

One of the reasons that the late-series development of all the Princesses eventually shaking off this evil influence feels so well-earned is that we know why they felt this way to begin with. It’s the old adage; no man is an island. Or, well, no little girl in this case.

There’s a lot of good in this show, and much I haven’t mentioned (the other three Flower Princesses; Anemone, Azalea, and Rose, all get solid character arcs as well.) But that’s not to say the series is flawless. Something that Dress-Up Darling lightly pokes fun at when discussing the show is that it’s 126 episodes long. By the standards of the day, that probably didn’t seem unreasonable. For many modern anime fans, however, it’s untenably long, not helped here by the fact that Blaze is a victim of the same spotty visual consistency as any anime of that length. (Plenty of episodes look great, but plenty of others look…well, less than great.) It’s also the only magical girl anime I’ve ever seen with a form of Dragonball Z‘s fight length problem. There are a few encounters in the series that take up entire episodes or even several episodes in a row, and while that certainly does make them feel suitably epic, it can make a few stretches of the show feel oddly empty, too.

Not helping matters is the fact that the show’s main big bad, The Wilt Princess Spiderlily (Minami Takayama), does not appear at all until episode 60. She does not appear in person until almost 20 episodes later, in episode 78. There is a fair amount of running around, here. Adding to this is that while the defection of one of the Flower Princesses to the Midnight Kingdom is shocking the first time, it does become a bit predictable by the time Rose, the last of them, falls to the darkness. Although Blaze doing the whole “adding magical girls to the team as the show goes on” bit in reverse is certainly not something I’ve seen before or since, and Mirai’s few episodes totally alone are suitably harrowing.

This all said, even in its less substantial stretches, there’s a lot to appreciate. The surreal atmosphere of the Midnight Kingdom itself, which our protagonists eventually visit–as well as the surrounding Land of Sadness–is just wonderful. In the second half of the series, Mirai and the remaining princesses leap across a good dozen different worlds when the Earth itself becomes too inundated with negative magic for them to stay.

At show’s end, The Princesses are eventually turned back to the side of good, in some of the show’s best episodes. There is of course a magical doodad, the Miracle Seed, which they assemble. Reunited, they’re faced with a choice. Spiderlily lays it out for them plain; they can destroy her with the artifact and end the threat of the Midnight Kingdom forever, but if they do, they’ll be sent back in time. From our perspective, just before the very first episode. Their memories will not stay, and they’ll forget all the times they’ve had together. A square-one reset, like the whole thing never happened.

Of course, none of them hesitate, and we are treated to a shockingly rough scene where Spiderlily dissolves into red smoke as the girls’ memories are literally ripped from their heads. Time rewinds, and for 5 of the last episode’s final 15 minutes it really does seem like we just watched the entire series be undone in an instant. We soon learn one person does remember, Mirai, whose companion is the only one who seems to have survived the time reset. The exchange that follows, as Mirai breaks into tears and her fairy tries to comfort her, is one of the most eerily prescient in animation history, given the series’ obscurity. Especially the mention to the now ex-magical girl that even if no one else remembers their adventures, they still happened. Forgetting does not undo the work they’ve done.

Of course, both within the show and without, it turns out that people do remember. There’s a brief timeskip to the following day, and Mirai’s interactions with Shion are cold until she lets slip a small detail from their now-past lives. At this, Shion’s demeanor changes in an instant, and the two break into happy tears. The montage that follows weaves some adorably fluffy nonsense about how the strength of one’s heart means that true friends never forget each other. It’s a sweet, and surprisingly simple, end to one of the wildest rides in mahou shoujo history.

After its conclusion, the Flower Princess Blaze IP, as mentioned, was shelved. Enigmatic director Ryusei Nakao (no relation to the voice actor of the same name) had an apparently acrimonious (sources differ) break with Toei over this fact and dropped out of the industry entirely. It’s unfortunate, since Nakao’s distinct style does lend an unreal air to the show, especially with regard to the surreal liminality of the Land of Sadness episodes. Most other staff on the project went on to other things, largely much more successful than FPB had been. (Some, including character designer Yoshihiko Umakoshi, already known for his work on Doremi, would even work on later Pretty Cure seasons. Heartcatch in his case) Even with regard to the director, if he was only going to make one project, this is a hell of a legacy to leave.

Flower Princess Blaze has had a particularly bizarre half-life, not just for its genre but anime in general. Comparable in some respects to other non-Sailor Moon, non-Precure magical girl anime of the time period and slightly before. The main difference of course, is that there aren’t any fingerprints from Cosmic Baton Girl Comet-san or such on Steven Universe and whatnot. FPB’s legacy is paradoxical; forgotten by most but embedded into the very DNA of many far more successful anime.

There is one famous example, in particular.

I have heard it claimed that Homura Akemi is directly patterned after Shion. (The show’s TVTropes page once called her an “expy,” site slang for a copycat character, until some roving Madoka fan removed the line, and to be fair, not without reason.) There are definitely parallels to be drawn between Shion’s quest to save her sister and Homura’s to save Madoka. There are important differences here, though (for one thing, Shion is only subjected to a time loop once, and it’s along with everyone else. Shion also fails pretty early on but unambiguously succeeds once she becomes the first Princess to return to the side of good. A very different structure than Homura’s story), and it’s important to not confuse influence with rote copying, but it’s hard not to see at least a faint resemblance. One can definitely see many traces of Flower Princess in Madoka in terms of mood and atmosphere as well, and the bizarre “Deep Wilt” creatures that the Princesses encounter later in their adventures are almost certainly one inspiration for the Witches. It’s an askew influence, and not purely 1 to 1, as some other anime bloggers with too much time on their hands have previously argued, but it is definitely there, and it continues to be a source of contention.

I would say that if Flower Princess Blaze really did inspire even some part of Madoka Magica (and it seems unlikely, all told, that it didn’t), that casts its shadow even wider, including to relatively recent fare like Wonder Egg Priority and Blue Reflection Ray.

But to an extent, the ongoing debate over its impact muddles a simpler truth. Even if FPB had inspired absolutely nothing, it would still be a damn good show. I said earlier that Flower Princess Blaze is obscure, and that’s true in the grand scheme of things, but it’s never really gone away either. In the late 2000s and very early ’10s, it made messageboard rounds as a stock “hidden gem you have to see” recommendation, alongside anime such as RahXephon and Read or Die. (It helped that it was given an excellent fansub treatment by one-off group Mid-Nite Subs in 2010.) It’s managed to stick around in some corners of the internet, both domestically and abroad.

It’s a decent fanart magnet to this very day, and if you stick your ears to the walls of those anime forums that are still around, it’s said you can still hear Shion / Neon shippers (hmm) fighting with Shion / Soma shippers (also hmm). This is to say nothing of the aforementioned cameos in Dress-Up Darling, which have reignited fan interest even further. (It’s worth noting that because of the MDUD dub, Mirai, Shion and Neon are the only three Princesses to have official English voice actresses; Luci Christian, Monica Rial and the ever-underrated Jamie Marchi respectively.)

Maybe, to cheesily echo Robelia’s famous quote moments before she returned to her true form, this world just wasn’t made for Flower Princess Blaze. But it’s become a part of it anyway, and its impact on anime–as a medium and an artform–is an inarguable good. That counts for a lot.

Until we meet again, Princesses burning bright with hope.

“Lustrous flowers bloom bright from dark soil. I believe that we, too, will live on in a way.”

Like what you’re reading? Unfortunately, the anime you just read about does not exist, and this post constitutes an April Fool’s prank of truly stupid proportions. Seriously, you have no idea how long it took to write all this and make it feel semi-believable, and that’s with me fudging a few details, like its alleged air-hour. Anyway, if you want to see me write in terms this grandiloquently pretentious about actual, real anime, (such as My Dress-Up Darling, where Flower Princess Blaze originated and which I covered week by week). 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 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders. I don’t plan to do this again next year, but no promises. I figure, if you can’t laugh at yourself once in a while, what’s the point of even having a job this silly? PS: The joke is not that this anime doesn’t exist. It’s that I just made you read a fanfic formatted like a review.

Posted on March 27, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 12 – “My Dress-Up Darling” (SEASON FINALE)

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

Ladies, gentlemen, nonbinary folks of the jury, our long national wet dream is finally over. Yes, it’s been a long twelve weeks, but here we are, at the season finale of My Dress-Up Darling. Before we even talk about this episode at all, let’s go over some facts of the prior eleven. Some of MDUD’s episodes have been spectacular, others have been pretty bad. This is an inconsistency not rare among anime or, honestly, among linear TV shows in general. Evaluating a run of episodes that includes both the former and the latter is difficult, especially since the “good episodes” aren’t entirely devoid of flaws and the “bad ones” aren’t entirely devoid of merits. Such are the limits of purely qualificative criticism.

One thing it has undeniably been, is successful, and while this is certainly the season finale I would not be at all surprised if the series were hastily renewed. An anime does not simply put an extra two million copies of its source material into circulation and not get a second turn at the plate. To argue that a second MDUD season is unlikely would be to argue that capitalist businesses aren’t actually that interested in making money. Things just don’t work that way. So, to put aside my own–and our own–collective biases for a minute, this is clearly a series that has connected with people in some way. Is it because Gojo is just really that relatable? Maybe it’s because something about Keisuke Shinohara‘s directorial style really resonates with The Youth. Or maybe people just want to wife Marin that badly. (Given the show’s target demo, probably at least some of that.) Maybe it’s all of these. But the point remains; MDUD is here, and it’s probably not going away any time soon. If you care about the current anime zeitgeist, it is at least worth consideration.

So, for the final time–at least for now–let us consider it. My Dress-Up Darling‘s 12th episode, its season finale, also called “My Dress-Up Darling”, begins with a heavy summer night hanging over Japan. A small breeze clinks a windchime as Gojo focuses on his first passion, dollmaking. He gets the sort of text that would send just about anybody–age, gender, whatever, aside–into a bit of a panic.

Cut to opening credits.

It is, of course, not actually that serious. She wants help with a costume thing and to vent about her dad not letting her go to a festival. Normal teenage girl stuff. Things happen, and our heroes end up A) working on summer homework and B) watching a scary movie. Also, somewhere in here Marin casually reveals that she has a side job as a model.

The horror movie itself is a real treat. We don’t see much of it, but, in keeping with MDUD’s prior visual ambition in this area, it’s animated totally differently from the rest of the series. The character designs are more grounded and realistic, and in general the visuals look like something out of the Boogiepop franchise. It’s pretty cool! Marin is scared witless by the film while Gojo nerds over costuming details, which, yeah, that sounds about right.

There are a lot of great character moments here, in fact. Gojo and Marin later end up needing to run to their high school to pick up some over-summer math homework that Marin left behind. (And, really, props to them, there. I don’t think you could’ve made me enter my high school over summer vacation if you put a gun to my head.) There’s a scene here where, after falling into a pool(!), Marin muses on how she loves going to the beach even though she can’t swim; to watch the Sun set and make the ocean’s surface sparkle, to talk with friends and eat tasty food. It’s a bit of quiet insight into her character that the show has done well a few times and I really hope it doesn’t let up on when the inevitable second season arrives.

Gojo gets his turn, too. He and Marin attend a festival after Marin finally does finish all her summer homework; one Gojo’s lived near for years but never actually gone to. There’s a lot of great stuff in this scene. Some of it, tropes that are so old to the genre that they’re practically cliche. Gojo is practically dumbstruck by seeing his love interest in a yukata, Marin buys way too much food, etc. But the one Dress-Up Darling works the best is probably the most classic. The fireworks go off; Gojo hears thunder and smells gunsmoke as a billion neon flowers bloom in the night sky. He spends more time looking at Marin than he does the actual show. Marin returns the favor by shattering the mood into a million pieces by goofily sticking out her tongue, which is a solid blue from the Blue Hawaii she’s been eating.

Is the moment actually ruined? Not really, Gojo has to carry her home. (Traditional sandals evidently do a number on your feet. I’ve never worn Japanese-style ones, but, that tracks with my experience with flip-flops.) And when Marin casually mentions being more careful with her footwear next year, when they go again, Gojo gets so hung up on the “next year” that the boy looks like he’s practically going to cry. It’s really sweet.

There’s an equally-sweet after-credits scene, where Gojo keeps Marin company over the phone after the latter makes the brilliant decision to watch the sequel to the horror movie they’d seen earlier. We don’t get a concrete sense of how long the two talk for, but it seems to be quite a while. At episode’s end, Marin tells a now-asleep Gojo that she loves him. Maudlin? Maybe. Heartwarming? Absolutely, and the visual of their two separate beds being stitched “together” by their phone call is really lovely.

The episode–and the season–ends with Marin wishing him a goodnight, and a promise to see him later.

A promise that might well extend to us, the viewers, as well. One can say a lot about Dress-Up Darling, most of which I already noted in the opening paragraphs of this column. But, the show definitely cares about its own characters, and that’s a good thing. I have my own hopes and expectations for the near-inevitable season two, but there will be time to write about those in a future column. MDUD will almost certainly return to the pages of Magic Planet Anime in some form or another. (Perhaps sooner than you think, even.)

For now, I think perhaps I should end this particular round of Let’s Watches the same way MDUD itself ended. To that, I say; goodnight, and see you later.

Egregious Horny Score: We’re at a tasteful 2/5 this week. Although some teenager is going to watch this and discover he has a thing for exposed necks. Pray for him.

Overall Egregious Horny Score: A solid 4/5. Frankly this was my biggest complaint with the show and probably a lot of other peoples’ as well, and I sort of regret waving the extraneous cheesecake that was present early on off in the way that I did. Oh well.

And finally, by far the most important of these little mini-entries, returning for the finale is the Bonus Nowa Screencap. Let’s hope we get more Nowa in season two. If we can’t get an authorized Flower Princess Blaze spinoff I at least want Nowa: The Anime. I would take that as a consolation prize.

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 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.

Posted on March 20, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 11 – “I Am Currently at a Love Hotel”

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

Alright, let’s get this out of the way. Yeah, this episode of My Dress-Up Darling is called “I Am Currently at a Love Hotel.” That’s the title they chose–and the premise they chose–for the penultimate episode of this show’s first season (let’s be honest, there’s no way it’s not getting more), and we just all have to deal with that together.

But why is it called that? Well, true enough, Gojo and Marin end up at a love hotel after a Wacky Misunderstanding ™. The explanation is simple in concept but winding in practice; Marin wants to cosplay a new character (a succubus named Liz from a comically-long-titled 4koma series. The sub track abbreviates its name to the frankly hilarious SuccIDK, so I will be using that here, too.)

She ends up booking a “cheap studio” to take photos at. The studio ends up actually being a love hotel. Whoops.

There are some good shenanigans in the episode’s opening, pre-mixup, where Gojo has to have both what succubi are and their appeal explained to him. He doesn’t entirely get it (and to be fair, I’m not sure I could rationally explain demonic gap moe` to anyone either), but he gets pretty into making the costume. Given that SuccIDK is drawn in a chibi art style, he has to come up with most of the details himself. He does not get that leeway with the bottom of the costume, which is basically just a pair of panties with frilly lace. Yet another excuse for the show to put Marin in showy outfits or just true to actual anime character design tropes? We here at Magic Planet Anime ask; is there any reason to assume it’s not both?

The actual love hotel portion of the episode is…something else.

On the one hand, it’s genuinely pretty funny in spots. Marin seems to make the wildly improbable mistake of thinking an honest-to-god vibrator propped against the bed’s headboard is an “electric massager” before revealing that she’s just pulling Gojo’s leg. And she also brushes off Gojo’s objections to them being there at all in a way that is both pretty insensitive and fucking hilarious. (It’s in exchanges like this where Gojo and Marin feel most authentically “teenager-y” to me, maybe that’s just me.)

Gojo, being an awkward bundle of nerves in a vague humanoid shape, verges on panic attack throughout a good chunk of all this, but eventually the two get too caught up in the actual process of taking cosplay photos to mind the environment too much. (And Gojo’s desire to photograph almost literally everything Marin does while in-costume is genuinely sweet.)

This bit is very cute, and as I often do, I wish more of the episode were like it. Things seem like they’re going to get awkward again when Gojo has Marin sit on him to get a better photo angle (no, seriously. He does this, and seemingly without any ulterior motive. That second fact might be the least realistic thing in this show so far.) But they largely don’t! Not through any fault of Gojo and Marin’s own, at least. The two get some good shots in this position and Marin talks about how much fun she’s having. It’s nice.

Ah, but then Gojo and Marin hear a woman getting her back blown out in the next room over, and suddenly they are again very keenly aware of where they are, and the moment of fun ends. We are treated to an absolutely delightful (EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS IS SARCASM) shot of Gojo getting an erection and awkwardly trying to get Marin off of him, which of course just makes things worse.

The final main scene here is the two of them sitting in dead silence in the dark, with nothing but the sound of their breathing filling the audio track.

And like, I get it, right? This entire 22 minutes is a juxtaposition of the absurd, the funny, the awkward, and the intimate. This bit is supposed to be that last thing; the two of them forced together for a moment that lasts an agonizingly long time, until an external force (a phone call from the front desk telling them to pack it up, they’re out of time) pulls them apart.

That slurry of different emotions and absurd situations is not a bad portrait of what being a teenager is like, and to the show’s credit this all does scan as believable, in its own way. But it’s all just a little much, isn’t it? This is not the worst episode of Dress-Up Darling (not by a longshot), and it certainly isn’t the best. But it is among the skeeviest. I won’t pretend I can dictate how other people feel about that, but to me at least, the final few scenes end up cutting the legs off the otherwise pretty solid first two-thirds of the episode. Maybe I just need to get out more, I don’t know.

I will say, as a positive side note, that whatever team actually did this episode is very good at capturing strong emotion in facial expressions. Marin really does look like she’s about to jump out of her own skin at the, ah, Moment, she and Gojo just shared.

(I have a suspicion some of the Akebi’s Sailor Uniform guys might’ve been involved, since it’s the same studio and some of the exaggerated facial shots remind me of a more reined-in version of that series’ weird faces. But I don’t have the show’s production details in front of me and, frankly, I don’t feel like looking it up.)

It’s also possible–though certainly not a given–that this all scans less weirdly if you’re still in the target audience of actual teenagers. As somebody who’s 28, it’s a little difficult to look at this stuff with the same lassiez-faire attitude I had ten years ago. It’s not like, say, B Gata H Kei didn’t exist during my teenage years, and I won’t pretend I didn’t like that show at the time.

In any case, the finale airs next week, and as such, our long national wet dream is almost over. Until then.

Egregious horny score, which I forgot to do last week, whoops: Yeah, this is a straight 5/5. There’s less skin shown than some other episodes but…well, re-read the whole article if you need further explanation.

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 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.

Posted on March 14, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 10 – “We’ve All Got Struggles”

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

Since I started the Let’s Watch column late last year, I’ve noticed that over the course of a full twelve weeks talking about a specific show, I do tend to repeat myself. This is probably normal–if a little annoying, as a writer–since there’s only so many ways one can make the same broad statements about an anime’s central characteristics.

For example, how many times have you heard me say that My Dress-Up Darling shines when it’s focusing on cosplaying, its primary subject matter and its chief distinction from other romcoms? If not in those exact words, I’ve expressed the same sentiment about a half-dozen times over the course of these columns. Maybe I’m being repetitive, but on the other hand, it’s true. So, when “We’ve All Got Struggles” opens with the Flower Princess Blaze cosplay shoot we’ve been building up to over the past several weeks, it has a pure warmth to it that matches MDUD’s prior best moments. The series deftly calls back to several prior insights we’ve gotten into Juju and Shinju’s characters, and the episode’s title is a quote from a sympathetic Gojo. It’s great stuff, and not just because Marin looks absolutely amazing as Black Lobelia.

Or because the style-cut gags make a welcome return here.

It’s nice because the whole cast clicks together in a way that just works and is good, simple fun to watch. And all of that happens in the episode’s opening six or so minutes, before the OP even rolls.

Most of the rest of the episode is about Marin’s next cosplay. And also, her being a bit jealous after she finds out that Gojo and Shinju spent time alone together. Because this is Dress-Up Darling, this creeping jealously is cut with scenes of Marin rewatching FBZ. Specifically, the scene where Shion’s soul gem becomes corrupted. Funny visual gag or foreshadowing of something darker in the show’s future? Who can say? (Probably just the former, though, if I had to guess.)

This time, she wants to cosplay a girl from an unnamed game, Veronica. There is a pretty substantial difference between Marin and Veronica. See if you can spot it.

To say that cross-skin color cosplay has historically been somewhat of a contentious subject would be greatly understating it, especially when skin tone-altering cosmetics are involved, as they are here. It’s also not a subject I feel terribly qualified to comment on, for a number of reasons (my own whiteness, my being American and not Japanese, and the fact that I don’t personally know many cosplayers being the first, distant second, and ever more distant third, respectively). But it is at least worth noting that the completely blasé tone the show takes toward this feels a little weird, even as an outsider by all metrics. If someone were outright angry, I would understand completely.

Thankfully, this particular plot point is shuttled past pretty quickly. Gojo is unable to overcome his own awkwardness and can’t really bring himself to help with the Veronica cosplay beyond making the basic outfit itself. (Which, given how little Veronica wears, a whole other subject of conversation in of itself, is not much.) The cosplay ends up shelved, at least for the time being.

^{Sorry, Ver. You’re simply too edgy for this world.}

That doesn’t mean we don’t get anything good out of the effort, though. One of the things Gojo makes for Marin before eventually bailing on this particular cosplay is a set of fake pointed teeth. Marin goes nuts for them, of course.

^{And on that day, something awoke inside Gojo.}

The final bit of the episode is spent with Marin taking Gojo out clothes shopping. This is another case of the two of them being uncomplicatedly sweet together, even if that sweetness mostly expresses itself this time around by Marin not realizing that Gojo looks like an absolute turbonerd in any outfit she puts him in.

This all concludes with the scene I mentioned earlier, where Gojo confesses that he can’t bring himself to help any further with Marin’s Veronica cosplay, and awkwardly explains why. Despite the brief hint of genuine tension, once Marin learns his reasons, she immediately dials back into ruthlessly teasing him. You know, like couples do.

In an unusually shrewd move for Marin, she even sees the opportunity to double down, by saying she’ll keep the outfit as housewear, and then doing this to whisper something about sending him pictures in Gojo’s ear.

She almost immediately retracts the “offer” of course, though I doubt Gojo’s heart got the memo right away.

I could see someone finding all this silly or maybe even just dumb, but I think another strength of My Dress-Up Darling‘s is when it works in this fairly traditional light-romcom mold. We don’t get the coveted confession scene yet, and hey, maybe we won’t get that this season at all (a second season seems like a given for something this popular), but progress is being made, inch by inch. I imagine anyone who watches this show for the lead couple will walk away from this week’s episode happy.

Anyway! The next episode is called “I Am Currently at a Love Hotel.” See you next week when we learn whatever the hell that’s about, Dress-Up Darling fans!

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 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.

The Magic Planet

Tag: Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru

The Weekly Orbit [9/08/25]

The Weekly Orbit [8/18/25]

The Weekly Orbit [8/11/25]

The Weekly Orbit [7/18/25]

Seasonal First Impressions: Summer Stragglers & Sequels

Ranking Every 2022 Anime I Actually Finished from Worst to Best – Part 2

(REVIEW) The Lost Legacy of FLOWER PRINCESS BLAZE!!: How a Forgotten Toei Series Shaped 15 Years of Magical Girl Anime [April Fools’]

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 12 – “My Dress-Up Darling” (SEASON FINALE)

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 11 – “I Am Currently at a Love Hotel”

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 10 – “We’ve All Got Struggles”