Tag: Summer 2024 anime season

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Out of Luck, Out of Love in MAKEINE: TOO MANY LOSING HEROINES!

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.

Like so many of this season’s premieres—the good, the bad, and the strange—the real meat of Makeine‘s first episode is in its closing few minutes. Unlike with some of those shows, though, we’re going to start from the beginning. Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines, deserves to be taken on its own terms.

Nukumizu Kazuhiko [Umeda Shuichirou] is a cynical sort. Not in a bad way—this is not the sort of show that tries to pass off an asshole male protagonist as having depth by making him a snarky jerk—but he’s pretty sure he’s got some things figured out. Nukumizu is a big light novel reader, fitting considering that that’s his own home medium, and he loves romance LNs. These are stories he clearly deeply appreciates, despite or maybe even because of their generally cliché- and trope-ridden nature, and as we’re introduced to him, he’s sitting in a café finishing one up by himself. Now, Nukumizu isn’t delusional, he’s aware that romance novels aren’t reality, and in fact, he has a little opening monologue here about how most high school couples break up. “Nearly all,” in fact, if you count people who break up after graduation, according to him. ([citation needed] But it’s the kind of thing you can’t blame a single teenager for believing.) Still, he wonders, and maybe even wishes—and who hasn’t wished for things, every now and again?—that he could know what it’s like. He’s never had a girlfriend, and he doesn’t know how it feels to have your life upended by fleeting and sudden feelings. You can’t really blame him for being curious.

Some of that feeling might vanish though, by his meeting (or really, getting to know) our other main character, Yanami Anna [Toono Hikaru]. Anna and her friend Sousuke [Oosaka Ryouta] are having what at first seems to be some kind of lovers’ quarrel, but as Nukumizu eavesdrops, it becomes clear that Anna is actually encouraging Sousuke to make his feelings for someone else known. Somewhere in the conversation, it slips out that Anna, a friend of his since childhood, loves him too.

This is all quite awkward. Moreso when Sousuke has little hesitation in making his choice, despite Anna’s own hurt feelings, she encourages Sousuke to tell his crush how he feels before she transfers to England in the coming months. Thus encouraged, Sousuke runs off, his own romance story beginning off-screen and somewhere else. Meanwhile, left behind, Anna pathetically nips at the bitten-down straw of the soda he’s left behind, an act that Nukumizu happens to catch her in. Unfortunately for him, Anna notices and pulls up to his table.

Thus begins a full-on unwelcome venting session. A torrent of TMI traumadumping that makes Nukumizu feel equally awkward and unable to really wriggle out of the situation. Worse, Anna orders a bunch of food and stress-eats all of it (relatable) while getting over what she charitably describes as her “breakup.” Anna, as you may notice, is not the most considerate person in the world, but as a noted fan of anime girls with bad personalities, I enjoy her antics. Especially when she complains further about how they’re too lovey-dovey later in the episode when they invite her to karaoke and she has to hear them sing duets.

This is, in fact, the central comedic conceit of this series. Nukumizu acts relatively normal, everyone around him is a font of romcom light novel clichés and bad coping strategies post-getting rejected. This applies to Anna throughout the episode, who runs Nukumizu’s charge up at the cafe ordering first a big plate of fries and then, we later learn, several other things as well. (This sprouts a whole side-plot where the reason that Anna and Nukumizu keep interacting after this point at all is because Nukumizu wants Anna to pay him back. When she eventually reveals that she can’t, she starts making lunches for him, giving them further reason to talk to each other.) It also seems like it’s going to be true of the other main girls. Lemon [Wakayama Shion], for example, laments that her boycrush only likes smart girls. I am interested to see what bad decisions she ends up making as a result of this.

Mind you, I’d also be fine with it if Lemon just got to be uncomplicatedly happy. She’s like a sad puppy here, it really got to me.

The joke is thus Nukumizu’s constant pinballing off of everyone’s antics and drama, essentially making this a harem comedy where the girls more want the main guy as a shoulder to cry on than a love interest. However, if this were to just be a harem series where the protagonist is also secondarily the girls’ therapist, it might get a little formulaic. Thankfully, more than that, there’s a slightly deeper world being built here. Since Anna and, eventually, all of the main girls, seem to have unrequited crushes on other people, there is an entire cast of minor supporting characters who are off living happy romcom stories of their own. Our main characters are, thus, “the losers,” hence the title of the show. Admittedly, it is also true that the “winning and losing” nature of romcom media discussion can feel tedious and childish, but that is perhaps more a consequence of their being read largely by teens and teens-at-heart than anything else. Even so, this seems like something that Makeine wants to seriously engage with rather than simply inverting.

This creates an interesting effect whereby Makeine feels like the B-Side of a “normal” romcom anime that doesn’t actually exist. Our characters are the weirdos, the outcasts, or simply the awkward. People too shy or too strange to properly make their feelings known to others. Makeine‘s protagonist being somewhat genre-aware of all the clichés the other characters speak and do is not terribly original in of itself. Indeed, you could argue that “protagonist somewhat aware of the clichés of the genre he’s in” has become a cliché itself over the years. But this broader, wide-net arrangement of characters where the entire cast feel like the background characters of another anime certainly is. This is Makeine‘s subtle innovation, and it’s why, of the 3 (to 4, it depends on how you count) romcom premieres I’ve covered on the site this season, this is easily the best. It extends to the character designs to a certain extent, even. While our own hero and heroines have nice designs of their own, the supporting characters meant to come off as the “real protagonists” of their own stories often have similarly striking ones. This is particularly true for Karen [Waki Azumi], Sousuke’s love interest, a pink-haired sweetheart who seems for all the world like a born romcom lead and is even the rare contemporary anime girl with hair vents1, but who is nonetheless a minor character in the actual story of Makeine.

She even talks like the lead in a “normal” romcom.

This might even explain the otherwise-puzzling decision to give the girls’ uniform a vertical array of four bowties for each character, as it draws some attention to the lightly heightened nature of the setting. That it looks funny (and provides an opportunity to color-code each character’s ties to their general appearance) is a nice bonus.

I want to pause there, because these claims of subversion are the kind of proclamations that get anime saddled with heavy, meaningless terms like “genre deconstruction” or its equally-meaningless cousin “reconstruction.”2 Makeine is neither of these things. By all indications, it is not going to sit you down and lecture you about why Romcom Light Novels Are Bad, nor is it going to gently reassure you that Romcom Light Novels Are Good. Makeine is taking it as a given that you understand the value of its own genre. The B-Side feeling is a structural trick—a very impressive one, no doubt, but a structural trick nonetheless—a way of delivering this story in an intriguing and engaging way.

As Nukumizu finds out, a romantic comedy that takes place on the B-Side, underneath some other story, is still a romance story. Despite his own cynicism, his own awareness of how these things usually play out both in reality and in fiction, the final scene of the episode sees him shot through the heart. He sees Anna on the school’s rooftop—a shamelessly stereotypical occurrence, completely unrealistic, lifted from a hundred other anime, other manga, other light novels—her sky-azure hair against the backdrop of a billowing white cumulus cloud, and the wind catches it just so. Just like that, it is completely fucking over for our boy.

Anna doesn’t clock his smitten stare. The two talk for a while, and after spotting Lemon running track in the field below, she suddenly begins crying. This, she says, is her heart catching up to her head that she won’t ever be with Sousuke, which threatens to leave the episode on a bitter and sad note.

Instead, after she lets it out, she and Nukumizu talk for a bit about how “getting dumped” feels. There’s something very subtle and sweet about the complexity of feeling captured here. How the utter hole left by a love lost can hijack your thoughts in strange, unintuitive ways. Anna says it herself; thinking about Lemon running track down below her suddenly crashes into the feeling of rejection. Makeine is very observant here; rejection is not a “logical” feeling. Anna describing this whole thing as “getting dumped” in the first place is frankly a little generous, as she admits in an earlier scene she and Sousuke were never dating in the first place. But the human heart is not driven by what does and doesn’t make sense, and so here she is, crying on a rooftop, she and Nukumizu looking absolutely miniscule beneath the massive sky.

They talk, eventually Anna stops crying, and after collecting herself—admitting in the process that it doesn’t even “feel like a fresh start”—she takes a massive, hearty chomp out of a chikuwa. All the while, Nukumizu is thinking. Thinking about himself, about Anna, about boys and girls, and about the romance novels he loves.

He repeats the episode’s opening monologue to himself. Perhaps in denial, perhaps in realization that he is not immune to a good yarn, even if he’s the one living it. The episode ends here, on a soaring, hopeful note. It’s an open question as to how long it will take Nukumizu to realize what’s happened to him here, but I’m sure he eventually will. Because this, after all, is a love story.

1: A kind of hair style that was popular in anime character designs in the ’00s. Sadly, it seems to have fallen out of favor somewhere near the turn of the last decade. Perhaps it’s starting to come back? We can only hope.

2: I am here referring to both of these terms in their latter day TVTropes-y usage. I would actually argue that both are wholly artificial concepts and neither really applies to almost any piece of media, but even if we take the framework that these terms create to be a real thing, Makeine doesn’t fall into it.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Succumb To The Power of MY DEER FRIEND NOKOTAN

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

It will inevitably sound like hyperbole, but I’m serious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this before. Normally, when an anime picks up a pre-release hype train, it’s a dramatic work. Something with action, something that will make you hyped up or make you cry or maybe both. My Deer Friend Nokotan, a blisteringly absurd comedy series, is a rare exception to this rule. Its own hype seems to have come from its gleefully demented trailers. Not one, but two complete masterworks of the form whose onslaught of relentless shitposting and brutally catchy sloganeering seem to have more or less just beaten the entire English-speaking anime fandom into submission. The year of the deer is here. The rest of us are just living in it.

If I seem like I’m harping on about this, please understand that this is legitimately pretty weird. People were already doing things as zany as remixing the show’s theme song weeks before it even premiered, that kind of pre-release hype just doesn’t really happen for comedy anime. The only obvious point of comparison is Pop Team Epic, a similar example of a violently goofy show picking up a big following before it actually started airing.

So, obviously, this thing is a huge hit, right? Everyone’s watching it, everyone’s talking about it? Surely the only way it would be anything less than a consensus anime-of-the-season candidate is if a distributor did something very stupid, like, say, forcing every official English-language release to use subtitles so bad that there’s an ongoing debate about whether or not they were machine translated. In such a terrifying hypothetical, you might not even be able to watch the English dub, because the dub would be based on those unreadable subtitles.

Of course, that would never happen, right?

Right?

That you’re reading this at all is due to a person, group of people, or herd of deer in human guise going by DeerGod, who have seen fit to fansub the series. Their subs are lucid, carry the jokes well, and have a nice bit of flair to them. If there were any sense in the world, they’d be getting paid for it. Don’t blame me, OK? I, and most people who were excited for this series, tried going through official channels, and they did not have a version of this series that conveyed any amount of its original artistic intent.1 I will paraphrase DeerGod’s release post; if you want to support this project, buy the official English translation of the manga, done by Seven Seas. That translation clearly had actual work and care put into it, unlike the anime’s subtitles. Suffice to say I’m a bit annoyed about feeling the need to preface this whole thing with a rant about bad subtitles before we can even talk about the actual goddamn show.

Which is a shame, because My Deer Friend Nokotan is pretty fucking funny. As the trailers suggest, it’s a baldly silly, perfectly-engineered, 20-car pileup of a cartoon. This is a rare breed in the contemporary anime landscape, the most recent I can think of is TEPPEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, and that show had the manzai routine framing device to tame its nonsense into a semi-logical shape. Nokotan is a bit like a manzai routine too, at least in that there’s a clear fool and straight-man. Respectively the titular Noko-tan [Han Megumi], and her blonde classmate, the overachieving former delinquent Torako [Fujita Saki]. But unlike Teppen, and indeed unlike most comedy anime (but like Pop Team Epic and some similar anime, such as Teekyuu! and Ai Mai Mi), there is no “behind the curtain” here where we can be relatively sure we’re seeing these characters act in a sincere way that’s “outside” of their respective bits. Nokotan is all bit, all the time, and that’s part of what makes it work.

Torako, we’re told, has spent a great deal of effort into trying to put her past behind her. It seems to have worked, because every character she encounters treats her like a perfect girl-about-town, up to and including the Narrator [Toriumi Kousuke]. This all changes when she meets Noko suspended between on a power line on her way to school. Torako freaks out, eventually helping her down when Noko guilts her into it, and this, in some cosmic sense, seems to be Torako falling into a trap. Because from that moment on, Noko is a constant presence in her life, and the show leaves any remote semblance of common sense behind.

For example; at one point, when Noko transfers into Torako’s class, she finds that her antlers don’t fit through the doorway. Undeterred, she simply marches right in anyway, destroying the wall and peppering a bunch of her fellow students in the face with random debris in glorious slow motion.

Meanwhile, the soundtrack switches over to the menacing “shika shika shika” theme music that it returns to, time and again, for whenever This Shit happens. The situation is clear; Torako lives in Noko’s world now, and there’s nothing she or her incredulous reactions (which serve as more of a break between comedic beats than comedic beats unto themselves) can do about it. This sets the tone for the rest of the episode; Noko will do something bizarre, Torako will be taken aback, and every other character present will act as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. We are basically watching Torako being gaslit, it’s great.

This continues for the rest of the episode. Noko does bizarre things like attempting to “thank” Torako for her help with a massive pile of deer crackers that the honor student obviously doesn’t want. She refuses to call her anything but “Delinquent-san” and “Virgin”, since her antlers (which appear to house some kind of sensors) and “animal instincts” tell her that Torako is both of those things. When she complains about a different nickname later on, Noko reverts to calling her those two things in order to get the new nickname to stick. In the episode’s last few minutes, Noko founds a “Deer Club”, an absurdist parody of the kind of do-nothing hobby clubs so common to the kind of school-based, lightly yuri-inflected light comedy that often gets filed under the “cute girls doing cute things” banner (see this frighteningly exhaustive reddit post, for a list). The club’s sole purpose is to “take care of deer, mostly”, and she manages to trick Torako into being its president with the enthusiastic help of her teacher. Played even a little bit differently, all of this would amount to a horror anime, and frankly with the bizarre visual touch of copy-and-pasted 3D CGI deer wandering around and spying on everyone to their apparent ignorance, it’s halfway there already.

I realize my choice of verbs is making Noko sound like a malevolent figure. To be honest, she’s actually mostly a cipher, we are given very little sense of her inner life—if she even has one—because the show is primarily, at least so far, from Torako’s perspective. Seven Seas’ manga listing asks the question, again from Torako’s point of view, “Is Noko[-]tan a deer, a girl, or something in-between?”, this seems a limited set of options only because it doesn’t include “terrifying deer-god from beyond the realms of time”, but it goes some way to conveying her utter confusion at this strange scenario she’s found herself in. Noko could be malevolent, she could simply be stupid, she could be a force of nature with no interiority at all and this entire show is basically the equivalent of being struck down by the gods for hubris. It flummoxes Torako all the same. Torako’s confusion, despite being the expected behavior for a straight-man character, is interesting, because she actually breaks the fourth wall a few times over the course of this episode. If she has the awareness of medium to know that she’s in an anime, then surely there’s nothing truly inexplicable about this situation, right? And yet, the thought never occurs to her, which just makes it all the funnier.

That Torako seems aware of the artificial nature of her world is telling, however, as it reveals Nokotan‘s structure as a deliberately depthless un-reality. These characters don’t exist beyond the jokes they were created to tell. This is true to some extent, with assorted minor variations, of any work of fiction, but it’s rare for a TV anime to draw this much attention to it. It extends even to the visual aspect of the series, which has a flatness to it that seems intentional or at least serendipitous. All of that is a fairly heady, maybe even pretentious, way of saying “the Deer Show is pretty funny.” But I can hardly help that I find the way in which it’s funny interesting. And besides, it’s not like this somehow puts the series above criticism, I could certainly make my nitpicks. In fact, I will!

  • Nitpick 1. Two scene slowing down = funny bits in one episode is hilarious, but definitely pushing it. Three is entirely too many and gives the episode a weird herky-jerky energy.
  • Nitpick 2. Compared to everything else, the jokes about Torako being a virgin just aren’t that funny, although how much it hurts her feelings kind of is.
  • Nitpick 3. There’s more bodily humor than I’d like: which is to say, any. I don’t really like thinking about spit or snot basically ever. I will admit this is a preference thing.

But nitpicks these remain. Nokotan is an oddity, but I hope it does well despite the obvious obstacles in its path relating to its distribution and such. It’s a legitimately brilliant little show, if this first episode is any indication, and the promise of more freaks characters being added to the mix only makes me more excited for what’s to come.

1. That this would happen the season immediately after the Girls Band Cry fiasco, wherein that series simply wasn’t licensed in English at all, is instructive. After all, simply not entering a market in the first place is to some extent a declaration that you don’t care what happens in that market. There just wasn’t an official product in the case of that series. This situation, where a disastrously low-quality one has been provided instead, is significantly more insulting, because it signals that you care enough to enter the market at all in an attempt to get peoples’ money, but not enough to actually provide a quality product.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Dead or Alive 1333 – In Search of THE ELUSIVE SAMURAI

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

The opening few minutes of The Elusive Samurai are mostly setup, to establish our feudal Japanese setting, and some basic character humor. I must stress, not very good character humor. These are all cracks at the expense of one-note stereotypes; an ableist caricature that serves as a puppet ruler, a greedy, homely girl who hounds our main character because she has Mon signs in her eyes over the idea of marrying him someday, etc. I bring this up first not to criticize a Jump adaptation for having Jump manga humor (it’s an unfortunate reality of most things that run in the magazine, honestly), but to point out that Elusive Samurai pulls off a pretty nasty little trick with it, one that I can only respect. By the end of the episode, no matter what you thought of these characters and their flat interjections of comedy the first time around, you’re going to miss them, and appreciate the stabs of comedy that remain, no matter how out of place they’d otherwise seem.

The Elusive Samurai is interesting as an adaptation, essentially holding the manga open and bleeding it. The resulting effect is a series of incredibly strong tones, moods, and single scenes that work excellently in of themselves but only cohere if you take a step back. This isn’t a major departure from the manga, to be clear. Both feature a wild tonal seesaw. But the manga’s visual experimentation in the first chapter is constrained. Panels align to grids, pages are more or less orderly. Ambitious, but typical. The anime, meanwhile, is a shattered, slivered kind of chaos. Everything clashes with everything. All abrupt jolts. A procession of staccato jumps. It’s abrupt. Percussive. An analogy: Elusive Samurai is a song. Its plot beats, the rhythm. Tokiyuki, our lead, is the melody. When the action follows him, it sings and soars. He’s like a rabbit; nimble, ferociously committed to his own survival, and so cute you can’t help but be on his side. Yuikawa Asaki gives him an endearingly boyish voice, which goes a long way to elevating his already strong characterization from the manga.

I’m not trying to downplay that manga; it still does quite a lot with the 50ish pages of its opening chapter. But one gets the clear sense that it’s straining against the format a little1, which simply isn’t true of the anime. Every hook and jab designed to throw you off kilter feels intentional. Around the episode’s halfway point, Tokiyuki and his older brother—the child of a concubine—are playing with a kickball. It ends up on a roof, and it never comes back down. Instead, an ice-cold match cut turns it into a severed head, and from then on, Tokiyuki’s idyllic life is over.

Let’s rewind a little. Hojo Tokiyuki was a real person, a member of the Hojo, a house in 14th century Japan who were, in loose terms, nominal rulers of the country but several steps removed from any actual power. (The Hojo were, and Tokiyuki is the heir of at the start of the story, something absurd like the regents for the shogun for the Emperor. In turn, they, via Tokiyuki’s father, who is here the ableist caricature mentioned up at the top of this article.) The Elusive Samurai is thus, very loosely, historical fiction. Its events comprise the leadup to, and depending on the time period this series spans, possibly the actual events of, the Nanboku-chō Wars.

This friendly-looking tale of straightforward heroism is presented to us at the start of the series as an example of what we will not be seeing here.

This setting contextualizes all of these tone shifts somewhat. On the one hand, Tokiyuki is a child. He’s a boy of scarcely 8 whose tutors, throughout the episode’s bright forehalf, chastise him for being lazy, for running away when he doesn’t want to do something, and just generally being too carefree. But he is also a noble, and while his father’s position is that of a puppet, it is still a position. These expectations must weigh on him, and we get some sense of how when we’re introduced to our other main character.

Suwa Yorishige [Nakamura Yuuichi], a priest, is introduced to us, to Tokiyuki, literally beaming. The boy-prince finds himself in a tree and Yorishige appears suddenly behind him, offering portents of glory and doom in an extremely overbearing, forceful fashion.

A divinity dwells within him and seems to spill out of the screen; when he’s “on,” he emits radiant lights, dimmed somewhat only by his snarky assistant Shizuku [Yano Hinaki], who explains he’s a sham of a priest, but a real oracle. When Yorishige proclaims that Tokiyuki will, in a few years time, be a war hero beloved and feared in alteration, the prince is skeptical, and he promptly darts off once again.

Returning to his castle, we return to the scene of he and his brother playing. We return to the ball, and to the severed head.

When the violence intrudes in the episode’s second half, it is immediate, overwhelming, and oppressive. Like the smoke from a fire, but not like the smoke from a fire, as the city burns in very literal flames. The betrayal of Takauji [Konishi Katsuyuki], a vassal of Tokiyuki’s, marks a massive and irreversible turning point in the individual lives of not just Tokiyuki and every other character, but history itself. The two are juxtaposed; big, white text pops up like news headlines, proclaiming mass death, including of characters we met in the lighthearted first half of the episode. Tokiyuki’s archery teachers? Dead. His father? Committed suicide alongside his retainers. Kiyoko [Matsuda Satsumi], the girl who teases him in the very first main scene of the episode? “Violated and brutally killed,” per the sub track. These things aren’t dwelled on, exactly. They’re just presented as cold facts as the city of Kamakura burns to cinders. (Although it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that many of these characters are the very same who offhandedly called him cowardly in the episode’s first half.) The pounding drums of what’s become a war song.

One can hardly blame Tokiyuki for being completely devastated. When Yorishige appears to rescue him, he initially rejects the offer. He wants to die alongside his father. What’s more surprising is that the sham shaman obliges, pushing the displaced prince off of a cliff and alerting a group of samurai to his presence. In this hopeless situation, does the rabbit lay down and die?

Of course not. The running, ducking, bobbing, hiding, and dodging of the first half of the show comes flooding back. This time, with consequence. The samurai hack and cleave at him, but only hit each other. They go from an indistinct, merged smear of viciousness to cutting each other’s limbs off; both senses of the phrase “bleeding together” bleeding together. Improbably, Tokiyuki escapes. He, Yorishige, and Shizuku retreat into the night. The composition of the show has flipped around; now, Tokiyuki is the percussion, and the melody are the smoldering flames reaching into the night sky as he flees.

Yorishige lays out a plan. Tokiyuki can’t defeat Takauji alone, he must hide, he must flee, he must court allies and deceive his enemies. Tokiyuki must become El-ahrairah; cunning, full of tricks, listener and runner. That’s just how it goes for a prince with a thousand enemies. If it feels hard to read any glory into such a tale, that’s probably the point. A story where the hero is a coward and the villain sends armies to rape and murder townsfolk isn’t the cheeriest thing, no matter how much cheesing for the camera Yorishige might do. Then again, brutal violence is hardly a foreign element to this kind of historical fiction. That’s probably part of the point, too. The show spells it out directly; Tokiyuki is a hero of life. Takauji, his nemesis, one of death.

The series asks us to take on faith that this will be worth it, in the end, that it will tell a satisfying story. It’s a fair point to raise! All of these visual tricks are great and lovely and engaging, but does this story come together? If you take a very big picture view, you can read its dizzying fractiousness as intentional, as I’ve chosen to do here, but we’re in for 11 more episodes of this stuff, so it’s fair to ask what it will all add up to. And there is always the temptation to try to be definitive. If you forecast that a show will do this or that, and then it does, you look like a prophet. (Or, at least, someone who knows their Japanese history, in this case.) The honest answer though is that we won’t know if it feels “worth it” until we get there, and I think looking to divine the future is, in the case of something so freewheeling, probably doomed to frustration. The Elusive Samurai‘s visual element alone gives me more than enough to chew on to want to come back next week, but combined with the plight of Tokiyuki, fleeing into the night with his whole world in smoldering splinters behind him, it becomes magnetic. I have to know more.

1: Although it does experiment in its own way, eg. a raised sword jutting through one panel to pierce another on the opposite page.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: 404 Blog Post Title Not Found – What The Hell is Going On in QUALITY ASSURANCE IN ANOTHER WORLD?

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.

Let’s start at the end. Dragons—huge, blue, frog-like creatures—attack a humble hillside village. A man, Haga [Ishikawa Kaito], despite a lack of any traditional heroic powers or skills, fights them off with his wits, a large amount of pre-prepared equipment in the form of some barrels of oil, bows, and arrows, and the help of the rest of the village. Everyone thanks him, he’s a hero, a legendary “King Seeker” of popular rumor in the flesh, clearly. One in particular is Nikola [Yano Hinaki]. An inn worker whose everyday life was disrupted—to her terror, but also her excitement—by the attacks. She thanks him. She asks to come with him on his journeys. He says that no, he can’t bring her along, with a voice full of far more sorrow than seems to befit the situation.

Then, she bursts into flames.

Quality Assurance in Another World has some extent of its twist spoiled by its title. What’s more striking is this specific event, and the tone that the series takes after it happens. Haga seems cagey and slightly paranoid throughout the entire first episode. It’s only at the end, as Nikola ignites, that we learn why that is, and what exactly QA-sekai1 here is trying to do. In a riff on the old Sword Art Online setup, it is attempting to recast a simple debugger, imprisoned apparently deliberately within the VR video game he’s supposed to be quality checking, as the protagonist of a quasi-time loop-based tragi-comedy. (Or perhaps a comic tragedy.) That’s a tall ask! I’m not sure if Quality Assurance can pull it off, but seeing it even attempt it is admirable.

Nikola, at the end of the episode, shows up, staggered, at Haga’s hut as he ponders whether or not he’s ever going to get out of this bizarre digital purgatory he’s found himself in. We don’t learn how or why she’s survived, but the questions this leaves us with are obvious. Is Nikola going to come to understand the artificial nature of her reality? Will Haga ever find a way back to his own world? Is the show attempting to directly draw a line between the feudal lords that Haga works for in the game’s universe to his uncaring bosses, exploiting him, in the real world? In a very smart move for a premiere, Quality Assurance raises a lot of questions, a lot of questions that can be answered in many different ways, and which raise more questions of their own. The more you think about it, the better it gets. A friend2 described it as a “disempowerment fantasy.” Time will tell if that descriptor holds up, but when we consider Haga as he is here in episode one, it definitely makes sense. The man’s been broken by his experiences, and in spite of some lighter moments throughout the premiere, I wouldn’t be that surprised if this gets pretty dark.

It’s worth pointing out that the show’s plot firmly notches Quality Assurance within the isekai genre. Which really does drive home the point that the issue with the genre as it stands is not its fundamental underpinnings but just a general lack of desire to do much with them. I have watched the premiere of, and subsequently dropped, several other isekai this season (and far too many over the past six months on the whole). What Quality Assurance has that they do not is some apparent desire to earnestly engage with its own concept. Yes, it’s still funny to hear someone try to voice act a line that calls for the word “debugger” to be delivered with gravitas, but QA-sekai is trying, and I think it deserves credit for doing so.

We should briefly mention the visual style here as well. The show’s looks are solid, and I appreciate the imaginative “dragons.” I am interested to see how convincing the in-game world of Kingseeker Online actually is, once Haga and Nikola venture outside of the village we meet them in here, but I’m optimistic, both in regard to the visuals specifically, and overall.

1: I only found out after writing this article that the series is apparently known as “KonoFuka” for short. I think my abbreviation is better! Oh well.

2: Specifically, sometime-podcast cohost Julian M., of THEM Anime Reviews.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Otaku Hot Girl Summer in 2.5 DIMENSIONAL SEDUCTION

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.

Something’s in the air. Maybe Dress-Up Darling was the warning shot, but to hear Megan Thee Stallion tell it, the era of the Otaku Hot Girl is upon us. If we are not prepared, that’s probably on us.

Look upon your god and despair.

2.5 Dimensional Seduction, another entry in the “girl with a gimmick” subgenre of romcom, opens with insert narration. Here, our female lead, in voiceover, waxes rhapsodic about cosplay as the ultimate form of transformation and devotion. I don’t know about all that, but it’s certainly a very involved hobby. I don’t have the figure for it, myself, but I can imagine someone caring this much about it pretty easily. When we meet this person a few minutes later, we will find that she cares this much about basically every aspect of otakudom, so it’s certainly in character.

The first character we meet after the OP plays isn’t her, though. It’s Okumura Masamune [Enoki Junya], the president and sole member of his high school’s ‘Manga Research Club.’ Which is to say; he spends his free periods holed up in a club room watching OVAs by himself. In introducing himself to us, he tells us, charmingly, that he doesn’t like real women and only cares about anime girls. In telling us this, he recounts a remarkably quick series of mini-vignettes of romantic rejection and ostracization from his peers. This is as good a place as any to pause.

I already talked at length about the girl-with-a-gimmick setup on the 4th when I wrote about Roshidere, so I won’t repeat myself too much. But it’s worth briefly contrasting these shows to bring up a main difference between them. In Roshidere, the male lead seems to have a reasonable amount of self-esteem, despite being a huge nerd. In 2.5D, this is clearly not the case, or is only the case in that sort of weird sideways way that nerdy people tend to do where we convince ourselves we’re somehow better than everyone else for having slightly unusual interests. The geekboy persecution complex is a whole thing I don’t have the space or desire to get into here1, but there are two key things we should take away here. A. Given everything else we see in this episode, Masamune talking about how he only likes 2D chicks is clearly a coping method for managing rejection. B. Related to that, he is not a reliable narrator of his own feelings. This makes him a bit interesting, because it means, despite his misogynistic sentiments which they are clearly meant to be able to relate to, that he is not just a cipher for the audience to project onto. You’re not as much supposed to think that you are this guy, and more that you’re at least kind of like him. (Even if you’d handle the situation better. Maybe especially if so.) We’re led to both empathize with and look down on him, a perspective that bears some distant relation to the strange, schadenfreude-driven ethos of manga like Rent-a-Girlfriend. Thankfully, despite that, there’s nothing so heavy here. Our main boy is mostly just kind of a twit, and I’m pretty confident that we’re supposed to be laughing at him at least a little, even if the show does assume you’ll also root for him as a sympathetic (and presumably also nerdy, teenage, male) audience.

This becomes more obvious when our female lead, and in many senses our actual main character, Amano Ririsa [Maeda Kaori], barges into the clubroom and into Masamune’s life. They quickly bond, to Masamune’s own frustration, over a shared love of the character Lilliel, a magical girl from a series called Ashword Wars. From Masamune’s own point of view, this is a perfectly Shakespearean tragedy. Here he is, having proudly sworn off real women, only for one that he can’t ignore to crash into his life. Even without that other element that I’m deliberately dancing around this far up the page, this would already be a perfectly serviceable romantic fantasy for this show’s target demo. The two talk about minutiae in the Ashword Wars OVAs. Ririsa compliments Masamune’s frighteningly extensive collection of Lilliel figures, including the one with an exploding outfit. They play a fighting game together. What’s not to love?

In fact, if Masamune were more confident and well-adjusted there almost wouldn’t be a story here at all. There’s a real “Man vs. The Self” element to his inner monologue, which runs throughout much of the episode, in which he denies any attraction to this girl. He acknowledges that she’s attractive, and can even bring himself to say that “despite her gender” (goodness), she’s a true otaku. Were it not, he thinks, for the fact that she just has one too many dimensions, she’d be perfect.

Thus enters the cosplay angle.

I might describe the overall plot of the first episode as “guy gets incredibly freaked out upon learning a girl is way, way more of an otaku than he is.” Ririsa, you see, loves the same sexy heroines that Masamune does, claiming she projects herself onto them. This is—I hope I’m not shocking anyone by saying this—a real thing. Tons and tons and tons of girls, the world over, love and adore female characters who are, in some sense, made to cater to some kind of male fantasy. The world we live in is, unfortunately, patriarchal, and thus dominated by male fantasy. One plays the hand they’re dealt, and active reappropriation of these characters is a thing that any woman engaging with a male-led fandom2 learns to do. It’s second nature at a certain point. I found myself vibing pretty hard with Ririsa here, essentially proving the show’s own point! We’re not otherwise particularly similar people, but I love magical girls a lot, too! If I looked good doing it, I would probably cosplay at least occasionally. All of this is taking the long way around of saying; it is not actually surprising or unrealistic that Ririsa is who she is and loves to cosplay. Her sheer boldness in undressing in front of a male classmate is surprising and unrealistic—as is her taking him at his word when he says he’s not attracted to actual girls—but we can excuse that, as you please, as either naivete on her part or just a necessary narrative greasing of the wheels to make this setup work at all.

Ririsa explains that she truly fell in love with cosplay when a nascent fascination with the idea led her to attend an in-person event. Seeing all the other beautiful girls there dressed up in sexy outfits awakened something in her (I have rarely so quickly decided a character is bisexual), even after she was gently shooed off for being too young to attend. (To give you an idea, one of the cosplayers describes it as a “softcore” event. These girls are selling photoCDs filled with suggestive pictures of themselves, and that’s not something the show avoids talking about.)

Driven by the, ahem, beauty and passion on display she saw that day, she’s determined to eventually sell a photo CD of her own. Honestly, despite the ostensibly saucy subject matter, her attitude toward the whole thing is mostly just cute, but her passion for the hobby is clearly genuine. She ropes Masamune into taking pics of her in not one but several Lilliel outfits, and predictably he gets really into it. Enough so that he conks out from Ririsa calling him “Ashford-sama” (another character in the manga, you understand). Some further developments aside, the episode ends with Ririsa wondering why her heart is pounding so fast when remembering the photoshoot later that day, thus setting us up for future romantic adventures that will presumably involve a lot more photos of Ririsa in kinky outfits.

The fairly straightforward resolution may make one wonder. All of this subtext, the stuff about reappropriation and whatnot, that I’m reading onto the show, is any of it actually intentional? Without a direct line to the mangaka, it’s hard to say, but it also only half matters. A funny side effect of the show’s focus Ririsa is that, despite everything I said earlier about Masamune not being a simple audience stand-in, and despite not being the one with a running inner monologue, she actually comes off as having more interiority than he does, especially given that the interiority he does have is not particularly flattering! Ririsa is certainly the more sympathetic of the two, and I would not be at all shocked if this series picks up a decent-sized periphery of female fans who relate to Ririsa in some loose sense, even as the show, going by various promotional materials, gears up to get racier. This wouldn’t even be the first time such a thing has happened in recent memory.

My Dress-Up Darling, the other hot 2020s property about a guy and his hot cosplayer gf, is the obvious point of comparison here. But what’s striking to me is how different the shows feel. Dress-Up Darling has a lot of delicate character work, but it’s also actually more salacious than 2.5D has been so far. (In terms of the respective anime at least. I’ve read neither manga.) The two halves of that show can, in fact, feel like they fit together uncomfortably, when it’s doing closeups of lovingly-animated boob sweat in one episode and melancholic-romantic train rides home in the next. I can only speak for myself, but when watching that anime I often wished it would settle down a little. It really sings in its more character-driven moments, so the ecchi elements can feel like a distraction except in the rare occasion that they gel just so with everything else that show is doing. Even so, Dress-Up Darling is pretty straightforwardly the better series, and not just because Gojou is a much more likable male lead. I would be very surprised to see 2.5D even attempt to access some of the more complex emotional currents that MDUD consistently manages to, even in its weaker episodes.

2.5D is a series of much more limited ambitions, in general. The goals here, as of now, are to gently push Masamune and Ririsa together and have them engage in Convoluted Horny Situations, goofy antics, or both—in alteration or combination—the entire long way. There’s still a character arc visible from the start here, but Masamune is a much simpler character than Gojou from MDUD, and because he is also an otaku, he and Ririsa are instantly much more on the same page than Gojou and Marin are. Masamune denying his attraction to Ririsa, and then justifying it by claiming she’s a “2.5D girl”, is a bit. Something to make You, The Horny Teenage Boy Watching This Show, think he’s a lucky bastard but laugh at the same time.

A less cut-and-dry way it’s less ambitious lay in its visuals. 2.5D’s first episode has essentially one standout moment—the “headshot” when Masamune sees Ririsa in costume for the first time—against a general temperature of looking pretty good. But it’s not quite as striking as Dress-Up Darling or even Roshidere, so that does count against it a little. Even then, it’s hard to care too much when even “not as good as those other two shows” still looks pretty good. It also doesn’t seem nearly as interested in the finer details of cosplay and costuming as MDUD is, so I could see that being a negative for folks who want an authentic depiction of the experience. Certainly, I found myself missing it.

Overall, though, while I don’t know if I’d call 2.5D a particularly great show, I’m forced to respect its craftsmanship, as an honest critic. I can appreciate that, on some level, it is doing everything in its power to get these two dating. I will also admit to just having a weak spot for shameless audacity, and because 2.5D’s audacity isn’t tying a romance narrative I like a lot more down (so far, anyway), I am more charitable toward it than I might be if it were trying to do more things at once. Is that unfair? Yes! But that’s just how these things go sometimes. I think this show is alright; long may the Otaku Hot Girls reign.

1: For one thing, it’s not unique to otaku, at least not in the loanword sense of that term. When I was in high school, people were just as willing to get this kind of defensive over liking comic books, D&D, fantasy literature, alternative music, even video games well past the point where those had gone firmly mainstream. I imagine the boys at the younger end of Gen Z are fighting this particular fight even still, as we speak.

2: Which is most fandoms. Because the patriarchy privileges men in any given hierarchical system, you see.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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