Posted on January 1, 2023January 25, 2023 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

Ranking Every 2022 Anime I Actually Finished from Worst to Best – Part 4: The Top 5 Anime of 2022

Here it is, the top 5.

I have to be honest, for whatever reason, much more than the past two years, I feel actively nervous about posting this. I’m not sure why? It’s not like my picks for last year were uncontroversial. Regardless, after a very extensive regime of writing, re-writing, editing, and re-re-writing(!), I have settled on a form for this list that I am mostly happy with. Hopefully you enjoy it, as well.

#5. SHINEPOST

Yeah, I like SHINEPOST more than BOCCHI THE ROCK. I almost feel the need to apologize for that opinion, but I can’t lie to y’all. Between the two, I liked this one just the slightest bit more, despite it being arguably the more conventional of the two. It is what it is, I could’ve gone either way. (And as mentioned yesterday, I did. SHINEPOST and BOCCHI switched places on this list several times.)

But enough handwringing, why’s it actually good? Well, SHINEPOST is rather unlike its genre-fellows on this list. It’s not utopian and relentlessly pleasant like Love Live, and it’s not a candy-surreal kids’ anime dream sequence like Waccha Primagi. Instead, SHINEPOST‘s best and most defining moments chronicle the stomach-flipping knots of anxiety that come from being a performing artist, the demons that can eat a performer’s psyche alive if left unchecked, and the very real camaraderie to be found in those fields anyway, in spite of all that. (In that sense, it’s actually slightly more of a piece with BOCCHI, although they, too, are fairly different.) SHINEPOST, in its brisk single cour, manages to touch on the pressure to succeed, how even modest fame can both weld new friendships together and cleave old ones apart, the fear of never being good enough and the burden of being too good, plus the ticking clockwork of the industry itself. The goal is simple and straightforward from episode 1; TINGS, the protagonists, must fill Nakano Sunplaza to its pleasantly symmetrical 2,222-person capacity for their first anniversary concert. If they can’t, their time with their agency, and as an idol group, is over.

I’m loathe to even float the word “deconstruction” in my writing, especially in its latter-day TVTropes-y usage. But it’s worth pulling up here, not because it describes SHINEPOST but because it neatly defines what it isn’t. All of this, frankly, pretty heavy shit, comes not from some desire to criticize or pull away from the girl group idol anime genre, but from a real love of it. Something that was trying to put distance between itself and its genre’s foundational texts would not be mythologizing something as mundane as a venue in the way SHINEPOST does.

More than that, though, the series’ real strength is that by laying its characters bare; showing their insecurities, their weaknesses, the complexes that gnaw away at their very psyches, it can really make you root for them in a way that something comparatively fluffy (such as again, Love Live) can’t manage to the same degree. If anything, SHINEPOST reminds me a lot more of that series’ perennial rival, Idolmaster, whose 2011 TV series remains the definitive golden standard for this genre. SHINEPOST is a true underdog; a scrappy series about a scrappy idol group from a still relatively-young studio (Studio KAI. Their second entry on this list after Fuuto PI), and all of those hardships, no matter how serious or melodramatic, are buildup to the absolutely electric immediacy of its finale. Even the absolute corniest plot details, like the etymology of the show’s very title (it’s a portmanteau of “shining guidepost”), hit like pure bolts of lightning.

And that kind of momentary transcendence, where you forget that you’re watching a silly cartoon and feel the energy? That is why it’s the best idol anime of 2022. TINGS kill it; accept no substitutes.

#4. CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS

Few anime come with this mixed a pedigree. Sure, Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a TRIGGER series directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, a fact that comes with a hell of a lot of goodwill, but pretty much everything else about this thing would give anyone good reason to be skeptical; start with the fact that it’s a tie-in to the rightly-polarizing open world game Cyberpunk 2077, skip over to the fact that it’s got a Franz Ferdinand song as its OP theme, and roll on from there. I won’t lie, there’s a part of me—and it’s not a small part!—that wanted to boot Edgerunners from the list entirely. I considered deliberately putting off watching it until next year so I wouldn’t have to rank it, and even now that I have seen it, there remains a temptation to dock points less for what it is and more for where it came from. I’m not sure I want many anime to be globally-released tie-in promos for broken-on-release AAA video games. Certainly, the fact that you still, months after the anime’s been out on streaming platforms worldwide, can’t reasonably watch the Japanese audio track with English subtitles (well, you can try, but the sloppy dubtitle track doesn’t really work with the JP audio at all. Thankfully the dub is excellent; this is the only release on the list I watched dubbed, in fact!) is case enough that this probably isn’t how anime should be made.

All this in mind, it’s almost painful how fucking good this thing is. Edgerunners burns so bright that it leaves scorch marks: black as melted plastic and twice as toxic, pure neon, grime and dirt.

David, our protagonist, is a person stripped of his humanity both systemically, and, eventually, with violence. He loses his mother, his home, his status as a citizen, his sanity, his humanity, and, eventually, his life. In one sense, Edgerunners is a gradual sanding-down of his personhood until nothing is left.

Lucy, his co-lead, is an unscrupulous hacker who runs with a mercenary crew. Secretly, she harbors a dream of visiting the moon. It’s a poetic hyperbole; the stars we hang in the sky to keep ourselves going made very literal.

To home in on one specific example, no single moment in anime this year conveys the sheer amount of blasted-out trauma as episode six, which sees the character Maine completely lose his mind as a side-effect of his cybernetic implants. The result is harrowing; all gunfire and blood on the floor. That point is where I realized that putting this anywhere outside the top five would’ve required me to do some major mental gymnastics.

On the whole, the series is deeply discomforting and utterly visceral to watch in action. If this isn’t how anime should be made from a production pipeline point of view, it definitely is how they should be made in terms of having a strong creative vision and following it through to the end as thoroughly as you possibly can. RIP David Martinez; reduced to a tale for the next dreamer.

#3: Chainsaw Man

Forget, for a moment, everything else. Forget the rest of this list, forget that there ever was a Chainsaw Man manga, forget the very notion of ranking and reviewing and processing, debating, analyzing. Focus on one image; a chainsaw, covered in rust, and in blood – which itself will be rust soon enough. Now focus on the boy holding it, the boy who became it. And think, for a moment, about what it takes to travel the vast canyon between those two images.

I have called Chainsaw Man many things on this site, but if you strip everything away; the need to intellectualize the art we love, the fanbase, even the original material itself, you are left with those two images and the gap between them. A boy and his dog; a boy and his instrument of bloody fucking murder. Love twisted up and turned violent in the name of protection, in the name of needing to escape, in the name of trading bad for worse because you don’t know what better looks like. A frizzy-haired punk kid with a drawn knife; that, essentially, is Chainsaw Man.

A lot of other things are Chainsaw Man too, of course. Everyone Denji meets during his journey is or becomes part of him. In some cases, in ways the anime itself has yet to reveal. Death is ever-present, and any insinuation otherwise is a facade.

So, what form does this take? Well, young Denji is a devil-hunter, a professional mower-down of wicked monsters that spawn from humanity’s own fears, from the trivial to the deep-seated. He’s raised by a coldhearted yakuza, only to end up in the care of Public Safety, Japan’s own government-controlled devil-killer force. Along the way he strives for any kind of human connection, gleefully oblivious to his own desires. A recurring refrain from the character is that all he really needs or wants is a roof over his head, three meals a day, and maybe, ambitiously, to touch a girl’s chest before he dies.

Consciously, he probably does think that’s true, but it’s obvious from very early on that he’s looking for something deeper, and that un-articulated desire for true human connection lands him squarely in the palm of Public Safety’s obviously sinister head, Makima. This plot goes unresolved in the first season, but it is already obvious that she doesn’t have his best interests in mind. In this way, Denji is all of us, a hardworking guy being ruthlessly exploited by the system that provides him the few things that he can truly call his own. He makes and then loses his very first friend over the course of just these twelve episodes; how much more is in store for our boy, and how much more can he take?

That’s without even getting into the tangible specifics of the CSM anime as an adaptation. It is a markedly different experience from the manga; slick and polished but never sterile, engaged wholeheartedly in a deep emulation of the live action film that informs so much of original mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto‘s work. It also probably has the best soundtrack of anything on this list, with a truly ridiculous twelve separate ending themes—one for each episode!—all of which go ridiculously hard in their own way. On the whole, we can easily say that, yes, this is the best-case scenario for adapting this material. Season 2 cannot come soon enough.

So yeah, all that poetic nonsense and it’s still only at #3. Look! I hate feeling like I have to justify every placement on this list, but this one does warrant at least a little explanation, I think. Part of it is that the show does have a tiny amount of minor flaws—a handful of very minor production gripes in a few specific scenes in a few specific episodes. On a narrative level you could also maybe make the case that Himeno dies a little too soon—but mostly, it’s just that incredibly, the Chainsaw Man anime has not actually gotten to the truly unhinged parts of its source material quite yet, and I’d feel a little bad for putting the cart before the horse. What point is there in giving out a gold medal to a rookie athlete? Even the very best have room for improvement. If I’m going to rank Chainsaw Man as the best anime in a given year, I want it to be a season where it is at the absolute fucking apex of its powers, something I can’t deny. Until then, it can settle for the bronze.

So, on that admittedly shaky logic. Yeah, still just third place. I could have put it at #1, and I would’ve felt just fine about doing so. To be honest, I like this, my #2 and my #1 pick about equally (I could maybe even argue for Edgerunners back in the last entry). But the following two anime are a little more undersung, and they’re also more self-contained, two things that do matter to me. I have to confess a certain irrational fondness for the underdog, too. So just wait, Chainsaw Man. Your day has yet to truly come.

#2. Vampire in The Garden

To be honest, I so badly want to just tell you to read my review of this, where I was reduced to clumsy poetry in an attempt to convey, if not necessarily describe, what this series means to me. But for one thing that’s lazy, for another thing, would it really help? I am still not done processing Vampire in The Garden, an achingly beautiful piece of fiction, and perhaps an important one as well.

The real truth of the matter is that queer stories that treat queer characters as people are still far rarer than you might assume. There are plenty that are cute, or that use us as tear-jerking props in a cynical way, but there aren’t really that many that feel lived-in, studied, like they were made to resonate with an audience of proper fucking queers first and foremost, with anyone else as a secondary concern. Vampire in the Garden really does feel that way. Is it intentional or just a staggering coincidence? If it is intentional, as far as I’m aware, no one’s ever said as much, so ultimately, I can’t really say so. What I can say is that Vampire feels important, if not to “queer people” as a group, then at least to me, personally. Somewhat frustratingly, though, it is such a shining, glistening thing that it falls apart like gossamer if you try to grasp it too tightly. You can describe its plot, but describing why it’s great is much harder.

In basic terms, Vampire is a story about two people who fill a void in each other’s lives. Both protagonists, the human factory worker Momo and the vampire queen-on-the-run Fine, have lost someone close to them. Through the struggle of eventually connecting with each other and healing through this shared loss, they are beaten down again by the world around them; both the vampires that seek to return Fine to her throne and the humans who hunt Momo down as a traitor, to be returned to her dreary existence in the city-tower-prison that much of humankind now resides in. Along the way, they seek an ineffable “paradise”, somewhere they can coexist in peace. Will it surprise you to learn they never find it? Not really, anyway. They pass through Fine’s own dilapidated manor, a segregated town where vampires and humans live side by side in only the most literal of senses, a village run on blood sacrifice, and so on. Fine ends up dead long before they find this mystical paradise, and there is more than a little suggestion that it doesn’t really exist.

But does that render Fine and Momo’s time together moot? Absolutely not. And that is what makes Vampire feel so vital (and so vitally queer) to me; the world sucks, and it often conspires to rip us apart whenever it can. It is absolutely crucial that we appreciate our time together, while it lasts.

So! That’s most of the list. There’s only one entry left. As with last year, I put up a tweet about a month before this went up, where I asked people to guess what they thought my number 1 pick would be.

This year, two people got it right.

What can I say? Congratulations to Blue Dash. And hell, I’ll throw in a shout out to my good friend Josh, too, since he mentioned it out loud while were talking at one point.

#1. Healer Girl

I am keenly aware of just how transient what I do here at Magic Planet Anime truly is. Anime criticism as a medium is still essentially in its infancy—most of us aren’t much more than consumer advocates, telling you to either spend or not spend your precious leisure time watching some particular series or another—and it would be very, very naive to assume that anything I write here will ever persist throughout the ages. If anyone writing in this field now makes anything that endures, it’s unlikely to be me.

I write anyway because when something really does touch me on a deep, personal level, I end up feeling like I have to scream it from the mountaintops. This doesn’t happen often—I like most anime, but the amount that I truly love, in the way where I know I will come back to them five, ten years from now, is much smaller, and rarely does a given year produce more than one or two such pieces—but when it does, I really feel like little else in the world matters to me, in those moments. 2022, astoundingly, produced four, and we’ve just met three of them. This is the fourth. Healer Girl, my favorite anime of 2022.

It is a font of genuine, deep light and warmth. It’s really all in the name; Healing. The iyashikei genre rarely gets the credit it’s due over here in the anglosphere, but in Healer Girl, the genre has found its best representative in many years.

I have to confess; I spent much of 2022 so, so, so tired, and so, so, so sick. I have gone through more than one total emotional breakdown, caused at least in part by a ten-car pileup of illnesses I have been battling and continue to battle. I won’t go into details because to be honest it’s not anyone’s business but my own, but know that it has sucked. Many days, I have gotten up and wondered if I’d really be able to continue writing like I have been, even though this site, for better or worse, is the project I’ve started in my life that means the most to me, by an order of magnitude. Without embellishment, 2022 was a profoundly shitty year for me. Probably the worst I’ve had since moving to Chicago in 2018.

Through it all, Healer Girl, perhaps improbably, has remained a source of genuine comfort. In a year where I had been having less of a bad time overall, maybe I would’ve been more comfortable putting something darker at #1. But I didn’t, and I can’t truly see into those possible parallel presents. So Healer Girl it is, because I need it—because we need it.

Part of it is the music; the opening notes of “Feel You, Heal You”, tap into some deep, rarely-touched part of my psyche, perhaps it’s the part that used to fall asleep listening to Wilson-Philipps and Faith Hill on a grainy radio when I was very young, perhaps it’s the same part that, when I was a younger anime watcher, cemented Kamichu!, which I saw on a bootleg streaming site that no longer exists, as one of my very first favorite anime. Whatever it is, and no matter how corny I’m sure it may seem to anyone who isn’t me, that connection is real, and extends not just to the music, but to the series built around it.

Healer Girl’s premise promises a cross between a “magical girl“ series of a variety unknown ’til now, a medical drama, and a slice of life anime. In practice, it’s all of these and none of them. It has all of the magical girl genre’s storms of massive feeling and emotion, a medical drama’s focus on literal lifesaving, and the school life genre’s easygoing warmth, but even as it feels born of these genres, it stands apart from them. Its great visual trick is the “image song;” literal conjurings of the magic music that the series’ world runs on. This is not something that would exist in a lesser series, and I’ve seen similar things only a handful of times. Almost on its own, this is what elevates Healer Girl into a truly rare artistic achievement. (The show is so good that while it has probably the year’s single best episode, its fifth, the Night on the Galactic Railroad-referencing “Blue Skies, Green Mountains, River Battles and the Galactic Station“, this is almost an afterthought compared to its more general brilliancies.)

Healer Girl’s magnetism is difficult to explain in this way, because the series was not—is not—an event. There is no “Healer Girl fandom”, or at least, not a particularly large one. The show inspired no complicated thinkpieces or vigorous debates on its nature and true meaning. The impression I get is that the show was mostly liked, but just liked, by those who saw it, and I am something of an outlier for loving it as much as I do. Fundamentally, it’s a very simple anime, and whether or not it resonates with a given person is, I imagine, largely down to the old intangibles of feeling and mood. In this sense, I can imagine picking it as my #1, putting it in The Top Spot, might be contentious. (I doubt nearly as much as my #1 pick for 2021, admitttedly, but that’s another conversation.)

To me, Healer Girl doesn’t even really feel like a contemporary anime. It feels at once like a relic from a lost past and a transmission from some far-off, idyllic, solar future. A broadcast from a different universe; a softer world, one where the soothing tones of gentle music really can heal the sick. It is the endless everyday implicitly promised by all slice of life anime warmed with a gentle heat and decorated with floral blooms; an outstretched hand, whenever you need it. That, to me, is 2022’s best anime. If you feel it, it’ll heal you, a panacea in the darkness and the sickness.

Thus, the list—and the year here at Magic Planet Anime, although by the time you read this it’ll already be the first day of 2023—comes to a close.

I am very curious to hear your thoughts. Did you love it? Did you hate it? Were your picks similar or wildly different? I’m interested to know, so don’t be afraid to drop a comment or hit me up on any of my many social media locations below, I recently re-did my article footer with links to basically every site I maintain a presence for this blog on. Feel free to look around!

Let me take a moment here to also thank everyone who’s read this list—or any of my articles here over the past year—it really, truly means the world to me. While I’m at it, let me thank my good friends on the following Discord servers with funny names; The Magic Planet Anime server, the original The Magic Planet server, the Satellite Night Anime Block server, the Secret Scrunkly Server, Mugcord, and the Lesbian Radiohead Fans server. All of you have made ’22 so much better than it would’ve been alone, and I appreciate y’all a lot. I need to also give a shout out to my repeat commenters: you guys are the best, and make this blog feel so much more alive than it would if it were just me writing with no responses.

And lastly, just before I go, and as mentioned back in Part 1 of the list. If you can do so, and found the list worthwhile, please do contribute (either on Ko-Fi or Patreon), it was extremely effort-intensive. For your reference, I am writing this at about 8PM on the 30th. Crunch in writing is real, friends! Be careful out there! I’ve certainly learned some lessons about how I’m going to handle this for next year, now that I know there’s a real audience for the end-to-end breakdown rather than just a simple top 5. And for those who have already recently contributed, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Again, it’s hard to articulate how much that means to me.

As for the site itself, I don’t plan to do regular seasonal coverage for the upcoming season, but I may drop occasional articles here and there on the more interesting stuff and will probably do at least a small few first impressions. (I’m very interested to see what’s up with the Nier: Automata anime, for example.) More than that, I have a lot of commissions to get cracking on! Hopefully you’ll enjoy those reviews when they go live.

Until next year (which is already this year for you) Magic Planet Anime fans!

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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.

Posted on November 2, 2022November 7, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) To Die Amidst the Azalea Bloom – VAMPIRE IN THE GARDEN and the Modern Queer Tragedy

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

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Wynne. Thank you for your support.

“There must be a paradise waiting for us somewhere.”

The image of a vampire in a garden is a pleasant one. Consider it for a moment; the bloodsucking creature of folklore allowed to sit in peace, the Sun gently lighting her face in the way it does for the rest of us. Throughout Vampire in The Garden, we examine this visual metaphor, jewel-like as it is, from several angles. Some of these are surprisingly literal, others symbolic, but it’s clear from the outset, and throughout the miniseries, that the primary meaning is not that of a greenhouse or anything of the sort. It is of a garden of Eden. An imagined, perfect paradise beyond this world, in which there is no strife, violence, or hatred. In which two people who love each other can be together, even if they are from vastly different circumstances.

Even if the whole world is arrayed against them; arrows aimed at the throat.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Vampire in The Garden is yet another anime this year to focus on vampires and romance, following after the second part of The Case Study of Vanitas, but presaging summer seasonal hit Call of The Night. It has a bit in common with both of those, but its real roots lie much deeper; back in the era of 90-120 minute OVAs. Vampire is a little longer, the five-episode mini-series clocks in at about 2 hours, but it is very much a single, self-contained story. And what a story; this is easily one of the year’s best anime, no mean feat in 2022, which has been absolutely swamped with great shows. As for the production-side of things; it’s a Wit Studio project, helmed by director and series compositor Ryoutarou Makihara, his first time at the helm since the obscure Empire of Corpses.

There are two main things one must understand about Vampire in The Garden in order to properly appreciate it. 1: it is an intensely queer story. While it is true that the themes found within it could be generalized out to apply to other situations, there is a reason that both of its leads are women, and the story simply makes far less sense if you try to rationalize your way into believing that our protagonists, Fine (Yuu Kobayashi), and Momo (Megumi Han), aren’t in love. 2: it is a tragedy. Gay romances that end in heartbreak get a bad rep these days for understandable reasons, but such a thing should only truly be objectionable if it doesn’t have something to say, and Vampire in The Garden has plenty to say. Throughout, it demonstrates a keen eye for imagery and paints a very emotionally honest portrait of life as a queer person in a society that is not very accepting of those.

Consider our protagonists. On the one hand, we have

Momo; a hardworking factory girl with a talent for tinkering, who lives in a massive compound called the Tower, run by her authoritarian, abusive mother. She longs for an escape, and a flight of fancy—fixing a broken music box, forbidden, as all music and art are, in the Tower—spirals into a tragic adventure. Her close “friend” Milana is shot during a raid on the Tower by vampires, the eternal enemy of mankind in the bleak, frozen, post-apocalyptic world that Vampire takes place in. But, of course, if things were as simple as “humans vs. vampires”, we wouldn’t be here. In a combination of panic, confusion, and the urge to seize the chance to escape, she meets–

Fine; queen of the vampires. Flighty, constantly neglecting her duties by choice. She too longs for escape, and it’s a chance encounter with Momo that sets them off, together, on an adventure far from the Tower and far from Fine’s own ostensible demesne, ruled as it really is by her consort/vizier Allegro (Chiaki Kobayashi). Together, Momo and Fine are star-crossed lovers in the most classic mold possible; a Romeo & Juliet of the modern age. You already know how this story ends; amid a field of moon azaleas, somewhere deep within a cradle of earth, all graves, shed petals, and teardrops. But that doesn’t make it a journey not worth going on.

That journey sees Fine and Momo searching for that mythical paradise. Initially, they seek such a thing solely to escape the shackles of the human/vampire war itself, but before long, they’ve grown close enough that it’s clear that the promise of somewhere where humans and vampires can live together in peace, and thus where Fine and Momo can live together in peace, becomes their primary motivator. At the start of this story, Momo loses Milana, who she is clearly quite close to. We learn much later on that Fine lost someone she was quite close to, Aria, a long time ago. Momo and Fine’s relationship, as deeply upsetting as the circumstances it was born in are, is one that springs from mutual loss. They find comfort in each other in a way that feels truly human.

Their first stop is the catacomb-esque opulence of Fine’s manor, where Fine helps a wounded Momo recover. It’s here where they first start to trust each other and their relationship goes from something uncertain and tenuous to something very real and immediate. The good times are fleeting, of course, but they have meaning.

At one point, Momo stumbles into a cinema, and is so rattled by the film idly left playing—probably the first she’s ever seen, mind you—that Vampire itself dissolves into a nightmarish patchwork of loss and traumatic imagery, and it is Fine who must calm her down. For not the last time in the series, Vampire is astoundingly lyrical, a tapestry of images both in the forefront and background that imbue the world with tactility and meaning;

a bath,
a record player,
an opera singer
whose voice, spilling
out of the player
laments the loss of those
she loved

There’s a garden – a beautiful, green, lush, literal garden – where Fine grows all manner of plants, in defiance of the Sun itself. She teaches Momo to sing, to appreciate art and music. For this, she is rewarded by the pursuing humans of the Tower, and then, separately, the vampires, raiding her mansion. Both of our protagonists are pursued–

Momo by her mother’s forces.

Fine by her own subjects.

–and the mansion ends up in flames as they flee, starting a pattern that will repeat several times over the course of Vampire‘s five episodes. Momo and Fine arrive somewhere, settle there for a short time, and then are driven away by these twin forces independently pursuing them. It is worth noting that they never directly do anything we’d understand as wrong, it is simply that the very act of a human and a vampire living together is unconscionable to the people of this world.

Throughout, as these entwined swathes of fire pursue its protagonists, Vampire is able to capture a gripping, rare feeling. On the one hand, you can appreciate much of these more action-oriented scenes for what they are on a technical level, and say that Vampire, especially its first half, is a kickass action-post apoc-sci-fi-fantasy adventure. This is true, but on the other hand, it is also a near-hallucinatory torrent of love and loss; trauma, laughter, music, snow, iron, blood – mixed together, and adjoined end to uncomfortable end, a feeling evocative of memory itself. Much like the music box that serves as a leitmotif throughout the series.

Everywhere Fine and Momo go is a false promise, in a way. The manor, of stability. The segregated two-island vampire / human town they visit in episode three, of unity. The too-good-to-be-true village in the far north in episode four, of community. And finally, the blasted-out ruin of some long-forgotten metropolis in the final episode, an already-broken promise of civilization itself.

This extends somewhat to the supporting cast as well. Momo’s mother is portrayed as disturbingly, realistically abusive, swinging wildly from backhanding and berating her daughter and pleading for her forgiveness and asking for a hug. When Momo finally turns her away near the very end of the show, it’s hugely cathartic. Later in the story, we meet Elisha, the representative of the idyllic / winter horror village in episode four.

In addition to enabling the false promise of community and hospitality that the village itself represents, she’s also quick to attack Momo as a hypocrite when things go south. This is, of course, nonsense. There is a vast gulf between harming people accidentally, or in self-defense, and doing so as part of a convoluted scheme to live a life of privilege, which is what Elisha’s village is doing.

There’s also Momo’s uncle, who leads the human forces that seek to recapture her, and in the final episode it’s revealed that he too once fled from home with a vampire he loved in tow, only for that story to end on a harsh, bitter note. This recontextualizes his earlier actions; like Momo, he longed for an escape from the drudgery of a world defined by petty, pointless conflict. Unlike Momo, when that escape was ultimately denied to him, he turned his anger outward.

Which leads us to Vampire’s conclusion.

Just based on what kind of story this is, it will not surprise you that only one of our protagonists is fortunate enough to live through the ending. Fine’s death is a long, torturously slow process. At first, she seems to die rampaging amidst muzzle flash and rubble, but the truth of things isn’t that simple. A serum that turns vampires into berserk beasts—a plot point back from back in the first episode, and one which I should point out, basically causes them to transform into what humans think they are—can’t be countered so easily. She does save Momo, and her final confrontation with Momo’s uncle actually ends when she stops attacking him. What truly rattles the man is not the notion of vampires attacking him, it’s of them not doing so, because it means that there isn’t anything inherently stopping vampires and humans from living in harmony, it really is just all circumstance; grudges, old wounds, and unsolved problems.

Momo’s own last confrontation is the aforementioned rebuke of her mother, as she carries the still-dying Fine to her final resting place; a warm cave below the cold surface, where the queen of vampires finally dies, amidst a bed of porcelain-white flowers. The very last shot of the main body of the series is –

Momo,
kneeling in front of Fine’s body,
taking a sharp, deep breath;
preparing to sing.

She herself lives on, and Fine is gone, but not forgotten.

The main reason that Fine and Momo don’t both survive is that, unfortunately, that is rarely the case for real queer couples in these kinds of situations either. But we shouldn’t take this to mean that Fine and Momo’s entire journey was pointless. Instead, it is the very fact that Fine and Momo did journey, and journeyed together, that is, itself, the true paradise they sought, however fleeting it may have been. There is a real, resonant beauty in that notion, even if it is a very sad and tragic sort. Something like;

“If we don’t have each other forever, at least we had each other today.”

The series offers a single post-credits scene; a sunlit garden, where Momo cradles a young vampire child in her arms. This scene’s nature—real or metaphysical, future or afterlife—is left ambiguous. A ray of uncertain hope that pierces the gray skies of an even less certain present.

I have to confess, Vampire in The Garden has proven very challenging to “review”, in as much as this even is a “review” of anything. This is a work of uncommon grace and elegance, as even its ideas which sound, on paper, inadequate, or like they’re trying too hard, are executed absolutely perfectly in the miniseries itself. There are several other axes I’ve barely even touched on; the visual beauty of most of the show’s backgrounds, for example. Part of me does feel that I haven’t entirely done Vampire justice, but perhaps that is simply a limitation of my medium. Some things must be seen to be felt.

And of course, all criticism is, in the end, but a reflective prism of the original. Here, for the first time in a long time, I have felt honored to be that reflection; I am but a mirror to moonlight.

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