Tag: webtoon

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Back to the Bottom in TOWER OF GOD SEASON 2

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.

“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”
-Friedrich Nietzche quote, decontextualized and used as the blurb for my original review of Tower of God‘s first season.

Rachel pushed Bam. That’s what everyone remembers, that was the defining twist of this section of Tower of God’s story back when it was originally written and when it was adapted for anime. Bam was yanked from his quest to climb to the top of the mystical tower by a woman with complex motivations that we were only half-privy to. Naturally, the dark depths of Shonen Twitter crucified her, and she’s become one character in a long lineage to be declared A Total Irredeemable Bitch by a certain genre of anime fan. Tower of God Season 2 picks up several years later, with an older Bam [Ichikawa Taichi] alongside a new co-protagonist. Rachel was my favorite character, and still is, but we don’t learn what happened to her after her betrayal of Bam here. Not yet.

The intervening years have been unkind to this IP. Slave.in.utero, the author of the original webtoon, had a health scare, and the comic was put on hiatus for a while as a result. Rumors persist that the anime was jammed up in production issues, changing studios and directors in the process. The Tower of God that arrives to us in 2024 is a very different animal than the one we first met in 2020, when I called it a “contender for the Shonen Crown” in my in hindsight just slightly hyperbolic praise of the show’s first episode. Tower of God‘s history is tied up, in a minor way, with my own as an anime critic. It’s a truism that if you write criticism for long enough, you’ll eventually start talking about yourself, so why fight it? Let’s talk about my brief personal history with TOG.

Tower of God was the first series I was ever paid to cover, and I reveled in the opportunity to energetically break its episodes down week-by-week for GeekGirlAuthority, who I worked for at the time. I even, at one point, got to do a brief email interview with some of the voice actors for the English dub, including Johnny Young Bosch, a hero to my teenage self for voicing Lelouch Lamperouge. I remember this period of my life pretty fondly, but the intervening years have been unkind to this writer, too. I left GGA amicably, refocusing my efforts over here to Magic Planet Anime. Things have been tough, I started my own Let’s Watch series, ended it, caught COVID, which I am still dealing with the aftereffects of, spent a lot of time cooped up by myself, and on. And on.

None of this is Tower of God‘s fault. There’s a lot to be said for persistence, and watching the first episode gave me an odd feeling of camaraderie. “Yeah man, it’s been a tough four years for me, too.” Maybe that’s why new main character Ja Wangnan [Uchida Yuuma] gives himself a little pep talk about not giving up when we meet him. Maybe that’s why I was endeared to the guy even though he’s kind of a dick. Here’s a short list of things he accomplishes over the course of this first episode:

  1. Promises a little kid that when he becomes king, he’ll give him a super awesome ramen stand. This promise is made because the kid gave him a ramen coupon.
  2. Signs his organs away to a mob boss.
  3. Says multiple conflicting things to multiple people in the survival exam room (more on that in a second), while they’re all within earshot of each other.
  4. Makes a little girl cry.
  5. Tries and utterly fails to act tough in front of the older, edgier, much prettier 25th Bam.

All this to say, he’s a dick, but an entertaining and charismatic dick. I like him and had fun following him here, and he seems to have good intentions underneath it all. I’m sure the Tower will test them mightily, as it is wont to do, but it puts him on the right side of the “jerk in an annoying way”/”jerk in a funny way” divide.

His goal is graduating the survival exam, which you might remember from an early episode of the original series. Visually speaking, the action on display here is what saves the first episode from just being a straight visual downgrade of season one. Whatever you thought of Tower of God‘s first anime season, it had a distinct visual identity that really attempted to convey the look of the comic in motion. That’s a lot less obvious here, especially with the environments, which have what a friend described in a recent post of their own as a “seasonal-style” look. That is to say; they’re definitely drawn by professionals, but lack much in the way of personality. This is clearest with Wangnan’s apartment, which looks dreadfully generic.

“Are you sure we should just be using the same woody gradient for every interior wall?” “Yeah, it’ll be fine.”

So the action scenes (or scene, really) having as much focus and direction as it does is good. That, combined with the strong character writing, makes me want to keep watching, which is an achievement all its own in a season as strong as this one. Tower of God may not be the same show it was 4 years ago, but it’s still here, and that does legitimately count for something. Score one for surviving.

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