Tag: Wistoria

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/11/24]

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

Hello, folks! The season continues to roll on, and we’ve got a nice batch of writeups today that reflect that.

Anime

Code Geass: Rozé of The Recapture – Episodes 6-8

I think on some level, Code Geass has remained Code Geass. I’m struck by how despite sharing very few characters in common with the original series, this feels so much of a piece with it in all possible ways, good and bad. We’ve got our female lead tied up in bondage throughout most of this episode with the camera dead-eyed on her ass, we’ve got kamikaze attacks in huge urban battles, we’ve decided to randomly throw a cybernetically-enhanced supersoldier into the mix. Honestly, none of this is a complaint, per se. This is just what the series does; goofball shit at its finest.

On another note, I’m honestly kind of not sure that Sakuya has the temperament to be a Code Geass protagonist. Lelouch was a fairly shameless manipulator and was willing to screw over basically anyone even if he might angst about it later in some cases. Sakuya having these deep regrets about manipulating Ash feels like an overt attempt to make her more sympathetic which, ironically, makes me like her a little less. She’s still good, but, you can let the protagonist girls be bad too, you know? We’ll see how things go, there’s definitely still time for a pivot, here.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 6

I have to be honest in that student politics plotlines almost never do anything for me, but the interpersonal dynamics were on point again this episode. I like that we’re seeing a slightly darker or at least more serious side of Yuki now that she’s trying to actively push Alya into either being honest with her feelings for Kuze or backing off. The entire restaurant scene in the episode’s back half is also pretty cute, and is a nice proof-of-concept that you can still play very old romcom tropes like indirect kisses really straight and have is still be decently good TV. The reaction shot where everyone else at the restaurant had their eyes bugging out of their head was quite funny.

Also, the new girl! What’s up with her? This show isn’t as good as Makeine but it’s giving that series a run for its money in sheer number of eccentric girls in the main cast.

Oshi no Ko – Season 2, Episode 6

Rarely am I left at an active loss for words by an anime. Yet, I think this is the third or fourth time Oshi no Ko has done that to me. I will, of course, try explaining anyway.

The opening part of this episode takes the form of an unbroken excerpt of the Tokyo Blade stage play. Those first couple of minutes are pretty incredible on their own, leaving the entire actual plot of Oshi no Ko itself in the margins to express a clear love for this completely fictional shonen manga and this equally fictional adaptation of it. In doing so, Oshi no Ko, and everyone working on it, express love for the shonen anime as an art form and a worthwhile format. (And, indeed, for 2.5D plays as well.) Their pastiche is pretty damn fantastic. I won’t go so far as to say that I’d rather be watching Tokyo Blade than a lot of actual shonen anime airing right now (Elusive Samurai has been great, after all, read on for more on that), but the series makes a very good case for it as a compelling piece of art. Also, in having Oshi no Ko‘s characters portray Tokyo Blade‘s characters so well, it makes a compelling case for them, too. Kana is utterly enchanting as the hot-blooded Tsurugi, even when she’s quelled by being bested in combat, and everyone else here puts in a great performance, as well. One of Oshi no Ko‘s great magic tricks is making you think about how well the characters are acting, as though these were actual people.

Which leads us nicely into Oshi no Ko‘s actual greatest accomplishment this week. Getting You, The Viewer to shed tears over Melt.

Yeah, Melt. Remember Melt? He was introduced in the first season as an actor in the Sweet Today TV drama, there instantly pegged as a good-looking but talentless piece of cast filler. He kind of ruined the whole show, it was a big thing. Melt has had a pretty compelling, semi-redemptive supporting arc in the second season, and it comes to a head here during a scene in the play where his character fights the character played by Sakuya [Kobayashi Yuusuke]. Sakuya, for his part, is a relatively recent addition to our cast, and has been previously introduced as a frivolous womanizer who likes to pick on Melt because Melt is a bad actor. In a sense, he’s Melt’s foil, being someone just as handsome but who’s had to work harder to get where he is. The two’s clash is thus both very literal but also very much a struggle for the audience’s approval, and I don’t just mean the audience watching the stage play.

During his part of the episode, Melt’s on-stage performance is cut with backstory. In a sense, this is cheating. Obviously, we the audience would have sympathized with Melt much more from the beginning if it were made obvious to us from the start that Melt’s general lack of drive is the result of a lifetime of people fucking him over because he’s pretty and assuming that he must also be vapid. At one point, brought up in passing as though Melt himself doesn’t want to dwell on it, he even mentions that he was taken advantage of when he was younger. A heartbreaking and sadly true-to-life detail that really recontextualizes a few things about the character.

Nonetheless, this is not an episode meant to make us feel bad for Melt. Honestly, there was already room to do that if you were so inclined. Instead, it’s meant to explain where the inner reservoir of conviction he draws on here comes from. Melt’s key scene in the play is a minute or two long at most, but over the course of the last several months, and at Aqua’s advice, he’s been pouring his entire heart and soul into preparing for it. Blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights, into this one moment.

Aqua’s advice also raises an interesting point. If everyone in the audience already thinks of Melt as a poor actor—and certainly, that seems to be the case—he can use that to his advantage. If they’re underestimating him, they’re set up to be surprised, and that is precisely what happens during the episode’s climactic scene. Struck down, Melt’s character scrambles to his feet and makes a heroic last stand against his enemy, summoning a magnetism that no one knew he had. This blindsides everybody; Sakuya, Tokyo Blade mangaka Abiko, the Sweet Today author who’s also watching in the stands, the rest of the cast, the rest of the audience, and also, you know, the rest of the audience. Us.

Again, part of the magic here is that Aqua’s advice doesn’t just explain Melt’s methods in-universe, it explains how he’s been written up to this point, as well, as everything Aqua says here applies on a meta level to Melt’s own character arc just as well as it does more literally in-universe. This is the kind of thing you can only pull off if you’re both very confident and incredibly skilled at understanding how stories work; a magic trick that seems to explain itself as it’s being performed, only for that damn rabbit to pop out the hat anyway, to your and everyone’s complete surprise. Akasaka Aka’s done it again, god damn it.

It should go without saying that this applies to the entire Doga Kobo team working on this series as well. There is absolutely nothing in their back catalogue that could’ve prepared anyone for how well they’d handle Oshi no Ko, and this is visually one of their best episode’s yet, as Melt’s sudden surge in charisma is presented as a swirled, painted acid trip. In the audience, Abiko bounces with enthusiasm that someone truly understands her work. In another audience, another mangaka cries. He is chasing after the one thing he’s been missing up to this point, depicted literally as it happens figuratively; star power. When he seizes it, he shines like a supernova.

Wistoria: Wand and Sword – Episode 5

Every episode of Wistoria has the exact same setup.

  1. Some magical feat or trial is introduced, which is difficult for even normal wizards to overcome.
  2. Will, either through his own volition or circumstance, confronts the trial
  3. One or more characters loudly expresses disbelief in Will’s ability to complete the trial. Because Will Has No Magical Talent, you see.
  4. Will overcomes the trial, either via Sword Stuff or with the help of his friends (that’s his True Source of Strength, you see).
  5. Everyone is astounded that Will has done this.
  6. End plot.

In this episode our grand twist is that the trial leads immediately into another trial afterward since this is our first proper two-parter. I don’t know, man. I just have a really hard time getting invested in a show that’s fundamentally so disinterested in, like, not even challenging its audience because that would be asking for coffee at a Home Depot, but just being any kind of interesting whatsoever.

Danmachi, by the same author, has a bunch of silly shit with magical back tattoos that double as stat screens and is incorrigibly horny. That’s not much, but it’s distinct. What does this show have going for it on even that level, so far? The magic chants which are admittedly sort of cool? At least a little? The annoying announcer guy in this episode who uses a wand as a microphone? The Statler & Waldorf-ass hecklers in the audience?

If I rub my temples to stimulate my neurons I can just barely imagine how other people might enjoy this but I very much do not, and I have no idea what I was on about last week, as this might be the most draining and dull episode of this show so far. I’m not even sure why I’m still watching it at this point. Inertia?

The Elusive Samurai – Episode 6

A dynamic, at times harrowing episode that ends with a comedic relief bit where one of the characters pisses on the camera. Truly this is Kamakura Style.

The show’s sense of humor (which I usually think works to its benefit, but I found a bit intolerable in this episode) aside, I want to talk about a specific scene here in the episode’s second half. Here, minor character Prince Moriyushi, the son of Emperor Go-Daigo, confronts Takauji in an attempt to end his reign of terror early. Moriyushi has determination, strength, and good instincts for when someone isn’t what they seem. Especially if they’re, say, possessed of literal unearthly charisma and may well be a walking force of pure elemental evil. In a different, earlier era of shonen anime, this show would be about him, but it isn’t, and when he tries to confront Takauji head on it ends absolutely terribly for him.

I think one of the absolute best things about Elusive Samurai is the way it portrays Takauji, in fact. He moves with a decidedly inhuman grace when fighting (which doesn’t even really seem to be fighting, to him), the cuts of his blade rendered as cuts in the film.

Despite the hellish surreality of what Moriyushi witnesses, he and a tiny handful of his most loyal retainers seem to be the only ones who clock anything wrong with Takauji. Even with blood-sprouting spider lilies covering the ground, everyone else practically throws themselves at him, even as Moriyushi tries to warn them that something inhuman writhes within the man. It’s disturbing stuff, and I imagine the visual similarities to propaganda film are intentional. Takauji is something bigger and more sinister than the history he sprung from or the animation he’s portrayed with, he’s something supernatural and vast and dark. One can’t help but feel bad for Moriyushi at the conclusion of this scene, he’s trapped in a situation he must truly have no context at all for.

But ah, of course the episode ends with the aforementioned comedy bit. So far I’ve mostly taken Elusive Samurai‘s humor as an attempt to heighten its more serious elements while simultaneously providing some relief from them; the jokes are an attempt to push the smothering reality of what’s going on away. That doesn’t entirely feel like it works here, especially when one of the gags is a tossed-off mention of molestation. In some sense I think you could still argue that this is how Tokiyuki sees things—everything is just one big game of hide and seek to him, after all—but I’d want the show to be making that argument more convincingly before I entirely bought it. As-is, I’ve been told that the source material eventually gives up on this particular method of humor, which feels to me like an admission that the contrast wasn’t intentional. I suppose we’ll see, going forward.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! – Episodes 9-12

It is so insane that this young genre has already produced so many absolute fucking slaps. I want to talk about the whole thing, because MyGO’s whole story is legitimately great and I love it in its own right, but I’m sorry, my entire brain has been rearranged by the last episode of the show and I need to talk about that for a minute. What was that? Who the fuck ends a show like that?

Pictured: That.

I’m not upset! Quite the contrary, that’s got to be one of the craziest finales I’ve ever seen. Sakiko [Takao Kanon] and her new band Ave Mujica essentially crash the anime, as the last episode of MyGO is much more about their first concert than it is anything to do with the title band themselves, but who could possibly complain? Sakiko, my beloved, there is so much wrong with you. You need to be studied, but also given a very large hug, but also, a hug might risk making you less unhinged, which would be a net loss for art in the world. Such dilemmas, such paradoxes! Sakiko joins a long lineage here, of masked musicians with something clearly at least a little wrong with them. Step up here little anime girl, take your place next to the Phantom of the Opera and MF DOOM, you clearly deserve it.

I so deeply want to know how the people writing this got the go-ahead to end it this way. It kind of undercuts the rest of the show? Like, not directly, but we had all those big emotional moments a few episodes back and those moments were great and real and very cathartic but surprise! the entire time the girl you probably just assumed was bitchy has had this awful home life that has inspired her to do….this. What do you even call this? Goth rock theater shit wedged into an anime that gave zero indications it would ever go there. I kind of knew about the Ave Mujica thing ahead of time but no amount of hearing about it prepares you for seeing it. What the fuck dude, I’m speechless.

When I originally posted this a few people took umbrage with my use of the term “undercut,” so I want to clarify that I think this is a positive. It’s a kind of jerking you out of being focused on just MyGO specifically into caring about this other story being threaded through the entire show and thus implicitly the entire setting. I am definitely not criticizing the show here, just kind of in awe that they were allowed to do it in the first place. I’d also be remiss to not mention the actual music of Ave Mujica itself, as their theatrical goth metal is some of the best to come out of this entire wave of girl band anime so far. They’ve put out a decent bit of music since MyGO!!!!! ended, a lot of which is even better than what they play in this episode, and it’s all well worth checking out. The girls’ band century continues.

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 The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/5/24]

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

Hello, anime fans! I don’t have much to say this week, so I won’t belabor the point. Let’s get into things.

Anime

Mayonaka Punch – Episode 4

In a development I definitely wouldn’t have predicted even a week ago, the title of “first anime to make me cry this season” goes to Mayonaka Punch.

This is very different in tone, structure, and even subject matter to every prior episode of this show and, judging by the previews, probably many of the later ones, too. Rather than focusing on the main group, this is a spotlight episode about Fu, probably the least-focused-on member of the group so far, and an old friend of hers named Aya. It’s much more poignant and heartbreaking than funny, and I think MayoPan, somewhat surprisingly, manages to make this massive shift in mood completely work.

Before now, the series hasn’t really grappled with what it means to be a vampire. It’s been an obstacle or inconvenience or a role that comes with a set of rules or even a prop for some of Masaki’s videos earlier in the series. With this episode though, MayoPan drills down on one of the oldest tropes in vampire fiction; the tragedy of immortality.

Fu met Aya when the latter was, going by her appearance, roughly a high schooler. She got Fu into western rock and pop music, and the two played music together, with Fu singing and Aya providing guitar. Aya eventually gets the idea that Fu is such a good singer that they could even go pro. Fu knows—and Yuki tells her this much—that this cannot possibly work. She can’t go out in the sunlight and doesn’t age, so people will start talking at some point. The entire thing is a foolish dream, and Fu knows this. But she can’t bring herself to tell Aya, and she ends up stringing Aya along right up until the very moment that they’re supposed to debut as a duo on an outdoor stage. The sun catches her outstretched hand, which briefly alights, and scared and confused, she runs away.

Back in the present, Masaki finds out about all this from the other vampires and gets it in her head that she should record Fu singing covers. Fu is initially very reluctant, but after a somewhat strained heart to heart she ends up seeking Aya out upon learning that she moved to New York some years ago. Then, upon meeting a friend of hers, the episode delivers its solemn last twist; Aya is dead. Fu will never see her friend again.

All of this loses something in the retelling, but in the moment it’s really, truly heartwrenching. (I love Masaki and Fu’s conversation, too. Fu goes back to this idea several times that she doesn’t deserve to sing, since she abandoned her friend, but Masaki contends that there’s nobody who doesn’t deserve to do the things that make them happy. There’s something really powerful in that, and I think it’s a theme the show will come back around to.) Fu makes a kind of peace with Aya’s passing, and the episode has a semi-happy postscript in that she does end up singing for the channel, pouring her passion into a new version of her dream in her friend’s memory, but it’s definitely bittersweet as opposed to just straight-up happy.

With this episode I think Mayonaka Punch has firmly placed itself in roughly the same category as Zombieland Saga, another show about undead entertainers that is fully willing to mine that status for both comedy and pathos. ZLS was, until now, a one-of-one, so I’m really happy to see something picking up its torch in this way. I don’t know if it’ll ever touch this territory again, but I’m glad that it did. Not only does this do an amazing job of making Fu immediately one of my favorite characters, it’s just also a frankly incredible piece of character work top to bottom, a story so self-contained that it’s almost a great anime all on its own.

Wistoria: Wand & Sword – Episode 4

Full credit: giving Will literally any other motivation beyond his vague crush on a character who’s barely on screen is probably a good move, and overall I liked the tavern showdown scene at the end of this episode, since it was the first time in this entire series that it has felt like there’s something riding on anything that’s happening. Also, hey, Wistoria recognizes that racism is bad! The subject is handled pretty poorly and with all of the inherent problems of the “fantasy racism” proxy, but at least it knows it’s bad. That’s something. That’s more than you get from some fantasy anime. Also we have our first actual arc set up now, which is good, too. Maybe I’ll end up liking this show by the time it ends after all! Who can say?

The Elusive Samurai – Episode 5

I was a little worried after last week but we fully bring it back here with a return to properly interesting visuals and a new character to round out the cast. The new guy, the master thief Genba [Yuki Aoi], I quite like him! It’s interesting that he’s something of a foil to Tokiyuki himself and how the series plays that up by having him actually morph into Tokiyuki with his magic mask in the last scene here.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! – Episode 4

A lovely and lightly meta episode this week. Let’s ask a question, does being a boy prevent Nukumizu, our lead, from being one of the “losing heroines” of the title? I would venture—even setting aside shenanigans from a few episodes back—that it does not. This episode sees him prematurely “dumped” by Anna as the two go through a fairly protracted series of misunderstandings as they more clearly work out what their feelings for each other actually are. Nu-kun clearly likes Anna, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if she liked him too on some level, but things are not lined up at the moment for our leads to get together. So they don’t! They’re just friends instead. At least for now.

In their final rooftop conversation—the second of the series—Anna mentions that as part of the lit club’s whole composition assignment she’s started writing, and that she also likes the books that Komari has recommended her. This is interesting to me because it’s a direct reference to Makeine’s own status a romance novel about romance novels, a romcom that is in part about how romcoms themselves tick. A lot of this episode is actually fairly somber because it’s in the midst of Anna and Nukumizu’s sort-of disassociation from each other after the latter overhears some popular girls talking about how Anna’s out of his league. The show represents this visually by repeating a key shot three times, once during an ordinary day, a second time, during all of these misunderstandings, in the middle of a downpour, and then a third time the day after the rain breaks as summer vacation lurks just around the corner. It’s a great visual trick in an episode full of them.

On that note. I read something earlier today which, to put it mildly, I did not agree with, about how considering an anime’s visuals and story separate is something only people who don’t consider the artform particularly seriously would do. A better and more true way to rephrase that sentiment, I think, would be to say that when the visuals and story work together this well, you tend to not be able to see the seams. I can only imagine how thorough the adapting process must’ve been for this series, it doesn’t seem like it’d be an easy thing to turn a light novel into an anime that’s this visually sumptuous, but Makeine keeps pulling it off.

I haven’t even talked about the whole Komari <-Tamaki-> Koto setup that is resolved in the first part of this episode and is, in some ways, a pre-reflection of what happens with Anna and Nukumizu (and their mutual friend, Anna’s crush Sousuke). It’s really quite astounding how a show that’s so simple at first blush has so many layers to it.

Bye Bye, Earth – Episode 4

As always, Bye Bye, Earth feels more like a highlight reel of its source material than a real adaptation, and as a result the story strains against awkward runs of internal narration and exposition. Nonetheless, because the setting of the series is just that odd, it’s still a compelling watch. This episode is an outpouring of odd, fascinating ideas; flower-cats that the solists test their swords on, question marks as symbols from “the age of the gods” that can render swords inert, a literal battle of the bands that sees our protagonist conscripted into a militarized marching band and sent to the slaughter.

It’s not nonsense; there’s an obvious extension of the theme of finding a place where one belongs, here, but it’s all a bit opaque. I can’t help but wish this had gotten more episodes or even just been adapted at a slower pace so it really had room to breathe. Nonetheless, it’s one of the season’s weirdest, most underrated anime, and I do think it’s worth keeping up with.

Oshi no Ko – Season 2, Episode 5

I don’t know how to explain it but watching this show is legitimately intoxicating. I need more anime where the entire cast are just complete maniacs, man. We don’t have enough of that.

Obviously, at this stage of this season’s plot, tensions are running really high as everyone has a ton of emotional investment in how the Demon’s Blade play does. The way this episode makes you feel that by plunging you into all of this huge spiderweb of entangled neuroses is just the absolute best. Half of the cast completely hate each other! Akane and Kana consider themselves rivals, obviously over Aqua, but arguably more importantly as actresses with wildly diverging styles and with a personal history that goes back to their respective childhoods. They spend so much of this episode openly taunting and seething at each other, it’s great. It is some Grade-A Toxin.

If you told me they were the eventual endgame couple I’d completely believe you. (I’d only even be skeptical because of Akasaka’s generally lacking queer representation in his works.) They genuinely look like they wanna kill each other by the end of the episode, it is the best.

This, too, is yuri.

Melt, who would be a complete nothing of a character in almost any other series, has an amazing scene here where he tries to tell off one of the other actors—who is acting like a complete scumbag, mind—only to be insulted by him because of his poor performance on Sweet Today last season, so he spends the whole episode, appropriately enough, melting under the pressure and angry with himself for lacking talent.

Aqua, of course, is trying to wring a good performance out of himself here because of his own ongoing goals. Aqua has spent a lot of these past two episodes wrestling with his demons (almost literally, given that his past life self is represented as a flickering mass of shadows) but somehow the most “ha ha, yes!” moment of the whole episode to me was him casually dropping to Akane that he plans on murdering someone and her just rolling with it. Does she think he’s just floating a thought experiment? Who knows! Akane is so fucked up that it’s hard to guess! Everyone in this show is so fucked up that it’s hard to guess!

Anime – Non-Seasonal

BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!! – Episodes 7 & 8

Speaking of messy, emotionally driven storytelling in a cast full of complete wrecks, hey, remember It’s MyGo!!!! ? One of my favorite anime premieres of last year? Yeah, it feels a little silly to whip out that whole subheader for a fairly short writeup but, hey, one of the anime I really liked from last year that I didn’t finish! I’m finally getting back to it! Honestly y’all, why did I ever stop? The drama, holy shit. I love every part of this show that feels like two ex-girlfriends arguing in the middle of a tumblr moodboard, which is, thankfully, much of the show.

I could write a whole article comparing Girls Band Cry‘s emotional realism to this show’s incredibly melodramatic, over the top theatricality. I don’t have that article in me today, but maybe someday.

Again, I’ll have to beg your patience with the lack of pictures again this week. Things will be hectic here at home for a while going forward, and I’m trying not to burn myself out by worrying too much over details like that. I’m also going to again gently plug my Ko-Fi, I have a doctor’s appointment in a few days and those can jumpscare a person with unexpected expenses sometimes, so it seemed like as appropriate a time as any.

I hope to see you next week. Until then, please enjoy this Bonus Thought, a shot of Komari from Makeine munching.

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 The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/22/24]

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

Hello anime fans. I’m going to keep things brief and without too many pictures this week. I’ve been under the weather, so I didn’t have as much time to put this together as I’d have liked. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better when next Monday rolls around.

Anime

Mayonaka Punch – Episode 2

Mayonaka Punch‘s second episode gives us a pretty good notion of the show’s strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, it’s still very funny, there are a lot of good gags here (mayo-garlic turning out to be a hallucinogen for vampires is probably my favorite of these), and the character dynamics work well when the show isn’t trying to overexplain itself. The art and animation are also top notch, which is good, because it’s always difficult to forecast ahead of time whether or not there will be a fall-off after the first episode.

On a lesser note, though, what the show isn’t as good at is the broad-strokes plot points. This entire episode sort of feels like a weird detour; Masaki, Live, Ichiko, and Fu start a channel called the Chu Chu Girls, find some surprisingly early success, but are then forced to delete it via the intervention of a red-haired vampire named Yuki [Kayano Ai], who Live has some prior history with, and who threatens to rat them out to a figure identified only as “Mother.” This is all well and good, but our girls end up making a second channel—this time without using their vampire abilities—at the end of the episode, so this episode essentially ends in the same place as the last. It feels a bit like we’re skipping ahead and resetting to avoid having to depict these characters getting to actually know each other. There’s a lack of specifics here that I find frustrating, especially when Masaki flashes back to meeting the other two Hyped-Up Girls, and they bond over liking the same kinds of Youtube videos. What those videos are and how they brought them together is left unstated (although I suppose this tracks with the show’s general depiction of Youtube as a thicket of content-for-content’s sake. Not an inaccurate depiction, but certainly not a complete one.)

Still, I’m optimistic. There are strong character moments here, too, like when Masaki returns to her now-empty house after the Hyped-Up Girls have moved out and spends yet another night egosurfing negative comments about her. Additionally, the next episode looks much more gag-focused, and I think if the series sticks to its guns in that way, it will serve it well.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 3

Less comedic episode this time around. Mostly a flashback so we can learn how Alya and Kuze met. Pretty cute! I like that all Alya really wants is someone to recognize her hard work, that’s cute, and I think it works for the character. Again, this show is firmly still on my “just pretty good” list, but there are worse things to be.

Wistoria: Wand & Sword

Every minute I watch of this I have a nagging thought in the back of my head. Something like “this is fine, but I kind of wish this production team were working on something more innovative.” That’s unfair, because it’s not like if this show didn’t exist all of this polish would be magically going to Tower of God or something else airing right now, but it feels a bit hollow. You could probably get most of what’s genuinely worthwhile out of this show by watching gifs from it on sakugabooru.

I’m going to make a strange extended metaphor, please follow me down this path. Todd in the Shadows, noted Youtube Music Guy, once put forward the theory that there are two categories of pop stars, there are those who get the public interested in their personas and points of view and who will probably be at least somewhat famous forever, and there are those who will only remain in the public eye until their hits run out, and not a day longer.

Oomori Fujino, author of both the manga this is based on and more notably of the Danmachi series is, if we’re comparing creatives in this industry to pop stars—an admittedly dubious comparison, but bear with me here—the second one. His work has craft and fluidity and skill, and those are not by any means worthless things to have, but I am always at least a little cognizant of the fact that I’m seeing the sausage be made as he’s making it. More than just the fact that this series is a pretty direct riff on two other more popular IPs (Harry Potter and Black Clover), I just sort of can’t imagine someone caring all that much about this story on its own terms unless they have severe light novel poisoning. Even then, it mostly sticks out because it uses a number of basic storytelling techniques that actual narou-kei light novels tend to try to shortcut their way through. In other words, he is a consummate professional in a section of the industry presently dominated by amateurs.

This might seem like a weird turnaround because I think my first post on Wistoria came off as much more positive, but this is kind of just a different (arguably more cynical) way to frame what I thought upon finishing the first episode. Whether I phrase it as “wow, this is way better than the other narou-kei fantasy stuff going around right now. The main character has an actual motivation, clearly laid-out obstacles to overcome, and there’s not a pop-up stat screen in sight” or “It’s pretty grim that this is so much better than the other narou-kei fantasy stuff going around right now just because the main character has an actual motivation, clearly laid-out obstacles to overcome, and there aren’t any pop-up stat screens in sight” is kind of a matter of semantics. We will see if I manage to actually develop a strong opinion on this show by the time it ends, assuming I finish it.

Code Geass: Rozé of The Recapture

I don’t have a ton to say here. I appreciated the further ties back to the original series and the ever-more-absurd mecha action.

I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the contrast drawn between Toumi’s [Chiba Shouya] successful sacrifice, framed as heroic and worthwhile and even met with a salute, vs. the (failed) sacrifice performed by the bigoted Britannian commander whose name I’ve already forgotten. Obviously, within the literal text of the narrative Toumi is completely in the right while the commander is completely in the wrong, but it does draw attention to Code Geass‘ nationalist overtones, which are as much a part of the work as the things I actually like about it (most other parts of it, honestly. I’ve gone on at length before how weak I am to campy bullshit) are.

Bye, Bye Earth – Episode 2

Two episodes in, in what I suspect is probably the more indicative of the two we’ve had so far. My main takeaway from this episode was how much it reminded me of, surprisingly enough, Kino’s Journey.

Here, Belle journeys to Park City on the first step of her quest to become a Nomad and find her people. The Kino comparison sprang to mind because there’s an odd morality play sort of setup here. The City is divided in two, the good Topdogs and evil Underdogs, who live in different sections of it, but something about the specific use of “good and evil” here is….funny. Especially since the Priestess-King Rawhide [Tsuda Kenjirou & Satou Setsuji], who Belle eventually meets and forms a contract with, seems to embody both of them, there’s a sort of duality thing going on here.

My overall impression is honestly just that this is a very particular series going for a very particular thing. This is probably down to the age of the work—the Kino’s Journey analogue is less ridiculous than it may seem given the vintage of the original novels—and where this genre, the traveler story, has gone since. I am interested to see what the next step in Belle’s journey looks like, since it seems she will have to duel a centaur next week.

SHOSHIMIN: How to Become Ordinary

If I could identify any coherent thesis behind SHOSHIMIN Series, it’s how the world is often unfair and cruel to those who don’t fit in. Implicitly, then, it is also about how the world is often unfair and cruel to neurodivergent people. In fact, if I can identify a commonality among the conversations here, it’s that none of these people are “normal,” and they are continuously striving for a normalcy that they don’t have. Often by trying to impose it on others. Such a thing is common among friend groups with a lot of neurodivergent people in them, unless care is taken to avoid it.

The extremely mundane “detective work” provides something of a hook (and while I haven’t seen it, I believe it also calls back to the author’s previous series), but these are only indirectly, I think, related to the show’s actual point. Who can say, though? It might have some other cards to play, SHOSHIMIN remains an intriguingly circumspect work, the kind to make you resort to two-word chestnuts like “intriguingly circumspect.”

My Deer Friend Nokotan – Episode 2

How do you raise the stakes when your character dynamic already consists of a complete weirdo and the comparative straight-man forced to bounce off of her? Why, you add another weirdo of course. Thus, we meet Koshi-tan’s little sister Anko [Tanabe Rui] here. Anko is a bit less fundamentally unknowable than Nokotan (who accordingly has her implicit eldritch-ness toned down a little here, since it doesn’t work with the structure of this episode so much), but she’s about as much a force of nature.

I like Anko. Siscon characters are way overdone by now, but having one fits with the show’s ’00s comedy vibe and Anko is significantly scarier than is the norm for her archetype. She spends the (weaker) first half of the episode swearing revenge on Nokotan because she has it in her head that the deer has somehow stolen her sister’s virginity, a misconception that Nokotan herself of course does nothing to dispel. I am sad to report that whatever else may be said about me, if you have an anime character accuse her sister of making a “love nest” for herself and a deer, I will still find it pretty funny.

The second half of the episode is the real highlight here, though, as Anko and Nokotan compete in an absurd quiz show wherein Nokotan will have to be “deported” to a wildlife park if she loses. The subject of the show is, of course, Koshi-tan, and thus the episode once again gets most of its charge from humiliating its main character. Eventually, Anko, on the brink of losing, unleashes a flurry of kunai (where did she get those from? Who knows) on Nokotan, and while she dodges most of them with ease, she takes a bullet for Koshitan, and is promptly mourned by Koshi-tan and the rest of the cast with all the fanfare of Elmer Fudd weeping over Bugs Bunny. Meanwhile, she’s up in Deer Heaven, meeting with Deer God (not the subtitle group) and getting kicked back to Earth for unknowable reasons.

All told, a solid episode in a solid series, and I like the twist that Anko and Nokotan become friends at the end. My assumption is that life is not about to get any easier for Koshi-tan.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! – Episode 2

This was fantastic! Much more of a straightforward harem comedy than the first episode (except for that scene near the end), but a very good one, so I can hardly complain. Lemon [Wakayama Shion] is a wonderful character and I think she might be my favorite of the main 3 girls, I suppose we’ll have to see how things shake out with Chika, the short girl from the literature club. Some people will be put off by the comparatively horny nature of the first half of this episode. I can’t really pretend I care, much, personally. I thought it was pretty damn funny. (“But Nukumizu, it’s just us girls here!” can only be the result of truly intense heat stroke. Or maybe it’s foreshadowing and this will somehow turn into the first harem anime to star a trans girl. Anything is possible!)

Also, the nurse! Casually mentions having fucked in what is now her own office back when she was a student (possibly with the other woman who’s now her coworker?)! Wiretaps her office! Has a shipping chart! Most of the meta stuff from this episode came from her and she seems like she’ll be a great supporting character going forward.

The scene at the end of the episode where Lemon deals with her heartbreak by running laps after sunset is phenomenal, and I think if the show can continue hitting those sorts of emotional beats it’ll easily make my personal Top 5 by the end of the year.

2.5 Dimensional Seduction – Episode 3

I thought this was….fine, I suppose. I remain undecided on if the few things this show does well are worth putting up with the parts where it’s obviously lacking.

In this episode Mikari [Kitou Akari], the obligate normie girl in the harem who we met last week, does a cospaly shoot with Masamune and Ririsa. There is a little kernel of real feeling in how Mikari relates to Miriella, the character she’s cosplaying, because the character could never tell Ashford how she felt, and Mikari herself can’t be straightforward with Masamune, so she relates to her in that way. That said, sitting with it for a minute made me just think about how the various in-universe anime in Dress-Up Darling aren’t a contrived bespoke metaphor for part of the main plot in that series, and how they thus feel much more like real anime that could exist in some alternate timeline than the fairly thin picture of Ashword Wars that the show’s given us so far. I can also imagine the target audience actually finding the stuff in Dress-Up Darling hot, which, just to be super blunt, is not the case here. The visual chops just aren’t there, so the show is failing even in its intended basic goals.

A small point in the show’s favor is that I think this whole mana infusion thing is a crack about Fate/stay Night, which, hey, that’s something. Even then, that’s also kind of a weirdly dated reference point for a show in 2024, even keeping in mind that the manga is 5 years old.

There remains something broadly structurally impressive about most of the show being set in a single room with only a few characters, but it also makes the series feel kind of claustrophobic. This is a cousin of the same problem the Giji Harem anime is having right now. It’s not as severe here, but one does get the distinct sense that this probably works better in print where there’s not as much of a sense of place as in an anime. It’s also extremely languid in pace, and compared to how well-structured the other romcoms airing this season are that’s a very notable weakness. Although at the end of the episode, our leads stay overnight at school to get work on a cosROM done, which is a nice interruption from what has quickly become this series’ norm.

All this said, I think I am fairly close to dropping this. It doesn’t hold a candle to Makeine obviously, but it’s also not nearly as good as Roshidere, an equally low-stakes romcom with a horny streak that, despite its vastly different premise, is just handling itself with much more confidence and style than this has so far.

Wonderful Precure – Episode 25

This is a very fun and antics-heavy episode. I particularly like Mayu’s ongoing quest to play matchmaker with Satoru and Iroha (up to “narrating his inner thoughts” at one, hilarious point).

Mayu helping Yuki into the water is really cute until Komugi (intentionally) ruins the moment. I also quite liked their fight against the sea turtle garugaru and the nice “wonder of nature” moment with the normal sea turtle afterward toward the end of the episode.

Wonderful Precure has just kind of been quietly tossing off great episodes for a while now, and I’m a little sad that I haven’t always had the presence of mind to talk about them. This is not as hands-down excellent as the episode from a few weeks back where we finally get some hint as to who our main villain might be, but it was still very good, and next week’s episode promises to be so as well.

And that’s about all I’ve got for you, today. As today’s Bonus Thought, I’ll ask you to ponder this screencap, also from Wonderful Precure. I don’t know what it is, maybe lingering affection for that one OG Transformers episode? But something makes protagonists surfing inherently very funny to me. Maybe you agree.

“She will never be surfing.”
Spits out cereal.

With the bustle of premiere week firmly behind us, I’d like to again ask for you to consider making a small donation if you enjoy what I do here on the site. I don’t have a traditional job, so every penny helps.

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: Summer 2024 Stragglers, Part II

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 Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies: Bit of an unusual story with this one, as it’s an adaptation of a manga, the author of whom, Fujiwara Cocoa, passed away a good nine years ago. My initial understanding is that they signed off on the project before then, so there’s nothing scummy going on here, but having since looked around I can’t actually find a source for that, so I have no idea! I like to think she’d be happy about this but it’s hard to know. It’s always a complex thing when a work is an adaptation by a creator who’s no longer with us.

Anyway, this is an entry in two separate but related anime genres. Firstly, it’s a romcom with a heavy speculative fiction element—this time, as you’d probably guess, derived from magical girl anime—and secondly, related to that conceit, it’s also a show purporting to show the “behind the scenes” workings of a Saturday morning kids’ action cartoon genre. If you think of it as Demon Girl Next Door meets Miss Kuroitsu From The Monster Development Department you’re not ridiculously far off.

I quite liked this! The jokes are very simple, mostly they consist of the Evil Lieutenant [Ono Yuuki] seeing the Magical Girl [Nakahara Mai] (neither character is actually named in this first episode) be cute, and then having a crisis of conscience when he finds this endearing or attractive instead of wanting to blast her off the face of the Earth. But I think this works for the show’s half-length episode format, any longer and it’d be a slog, any shorter and we’d be left wanting. 12 minutes is just about exactly enough to get the point across without it feeling like it’s overextending itself.

Visually the series is very pastel in a way I like (there’s an argument to be made that this is the better-looking between the two Bones shows I’ve seen this year. It might end up being the stronger one overall as well), and while the Magical Girl’s design is a little cheesecakey for my tastes it’s still pretty cute overall, and I love her hair. The Lieutenant has to settle for merely being passably handsome, so it goes! We also get lots of nice aesthetic touches indebted to the show’s latter parent genre; the Magical Girl has a henshin sequence (a very nice one, in fact), and the Lieutenant has faceless monster-person goons akin to the little ninja guys from Heartcatch Precure.

All around this is pretty fun and I enjoyed it a lot, it’s definitely filling that ‘Tis Time For Torture Princess niche of a character comedy with a nice warmth to it that I’ve been missing since that series ended a few months back.

Plus-Sized Elf: This is a fetish show for a fetish I don’t have, so, you know, I don’t really know what I expected here. I only watched this because a friend (who I will leave unnamed)1 roped me into it.

Some people might try to reach and say oh well it’s good to have any representation of different body types in anime, but that would require this to be representation and not a fetishizing joke, so I’m not really inclined to take that claim seriously. (Never has an anime made me so self-conscious about the thing I was going to drink while watching it.)

Also it looks bad and is paced like shit. This just makes me think of when Eiken got a TV anime back in the day. Even if you’re into this, what does it being on TV accomplish for you or anyone? I don’t get it.

SHOSHIMIN: How to Become Ordinary: This is….interesting. Specifically because it isn’t interesting.

The story, such that it is, is a pileup of artfully-arranged images. Images of normal, everyday things. Strawberry tarts, cakes, hallways, lost purses, street signs, bikes, grain, rivers.

Such that when things explode at the end, it’s by something as simple as someone stealing one of those images. (The bike.) There’s a strange elliptical quality to the whole thing, as though none of this really matters in any major sense, but of course, the case is always that if nothing in a situation matters, then everything does. This, I suspect, is some part of the point of SHOSHIMIN. Compelling stuff, in its own quiet way. I feel like I only half understand it at the moment, though.

Oshi no Ko – Season 2: I kind of wish I had never pledged to stop writing about this show on my site. It’s true that I have a lot of issues with the worst parts of the fanbase but the series itself is fucking brilliant and the anime is a compelling elevation of already-fantastic source material. Copying this entry over from my tumblr is a kind of half-compromise, since I’m still not giving it its own article. You can all feel free to tell me if you think this counts or not.

In any case, this Doga Kobo team should never be making anything but adaptations of excellent psychological dramas, I swear to god. If you had told me four years ago that Hiramaki Daisuke would be an easy A-List director, I would’ve laughed at you. (Which to be VERY clear, is an indictment of me, not him.) I have no idea how this guy went from directing the anime adaptation of fucking Koisuru Asteroid to this in just four years. (I have a friend2 who really likes that anime, maybe they saw something in his work back then that I did not. Who knows.)

The stunning trick they introduce here, okay. This arc revolves around Aqua, Kanna, and Akane participating in a 2.5D stage play for a popular manga. Whether or not a character is invested in their acting, whether or not they’ve actively got stage presence, is telegraphed by splattering paint around the environment, except instead of being a single color, the paint changes their entire character design, changing them from their mundane selves—the actors—to their transformed selves—their characters—it’s beautiful. I have no idea how hard this must’ve been to board and animate but it was completely worth it.

Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin: I was surprised that I did not like this that much? It doesn’t seem bad by any means, visually it’s very strong and there’s tons of atmosphere, but it’s also extremely exposition-heavy and the subtitles are very stilted, which hurts both my understanding of what’s going on and my ability to immerse myself in the world of the show. I’ll give it another episode or two, but unless the subtitles improve (or I can find a better translation) I’m not optimistic.

Wistoria: Wand and Sword: Another not-quite-isekai thing, yay.

This one is notable in that a lot of it is very clearly riffing on Harry Potter, down to character archetypes and even designs. Will [Amasaki Kouhei], our hero, is Harry (he even kind of looks like Harry) and other characters include a rude Draco-ish noble named Sion [Mizunaka Masaaki], a pretty clear Hermione stand-in, and an even clearer Professor Snape stand-in. Although the general premise, that our main character is the lone, magic-less swordsman in a world of sorcerors, actually borrows a fair bit more from Black Clover. No “boy who lived” stuff here, thankfully.

Most of this is fairly standard, but there’s a whole Wizard / Angel war in the backstory that comes up which is notionally interesting, as is the fact that the setting is basically a magic habitat dome. Will’s core motivation thus is to eventually become a Mage (I’m not using the show’s over-wrought titles) so he can see his childhood friend / love interest Elfaria [Sekine Akira] again. There’s some interesting visual symbolism in the flashback with Will’s arm literally dissolving to sand as he ponders that he’s “talentless” and can’t use magic.

The school he’s attending uses a numerical credits system. Which is of course solely a convenient plot device to get the ball rolling so we can get to our under-school dungeon and have a big ol’ fight break out. The fight in question is quite the spectacle. In content, it’s very basic, simply Will saving Sion, who’d stuck his nose at him earlier (and bullied him a long time before that) from a vicious, minotaur-looking thing, but the style is important here, there’s a lot of impressive action animation. It doesn’t have the most cohesiveness in the world, but conversely that means the individual cuts are compellingly expressive and if you’re a real sakuga-head type you’ll probably have a lot of fun with this one.

From that, you might think I was basically describing a shonen anime, and that’s because that’s actually exactly what this is. Unlike most examples of this genre-space which originate as amateur webfiction, Wistoria here started life as a manga, and the slightly higher barrier to entry of that format really does make all the difference here. Every single piece of this story has been done a hundred times before, from its xeroxed walled city setting, to the tsundere-ish girl who’s clearly crushing on Will, to Will himself, clearly based on the “has some innocuous skill that allows him to out-power his ostensible betters” sort of isekai protagonist, but the simple presence of flash and professionalism on the visual side, and basic storytelling competence on the other (Will has an actual motive beyond a vague desire for power, for example) make all the difference. I actually had a fair amount of fun with this overall, and I might keep up with it.

Bye Bye, Earth: This was an interesting one, it really grew on me over the course of the premiere and sitting with it after the fact, I think I kind of love it?

The decision to have the show’s very first scene of any length be our hero, Belle [Fairouz Ai], fighting and killing a majestic but destructive sea creature / plant animal called a fish flower is certainly something. If I could criticize it for anything here, the animation looks very nice and the show is solidly boarded and all, but backgrounds are a bit of an up and down thing. The first area we see is fairly nonspecific, but the forest we see later on is nice, and the interior of our protagonist’s house, where she lives with her mentor / surrogate father Sian [Suwabe Junichi] is cozy and meaningfully cluttered with esoterica.

At one point Sian and Belle talk about Belle’s “condition.” ie. she’s the only normal human in a world filled with anthros and kemonomimi. Somewhere in there, Sian drops the extremely Earth Maiden Arjuna-ass quote “Everything in this world tries to intermingle with everything else”, and this turns out to be basically the key to the whole episode. There’s a real running theme of interconnection (and our protagonist’s corresponding solitude) here. Sian describes Belle’s isolation as “homesickness”—for wherever she belongs, something she’s never really known—and advises her to go wandering in search of people like herself to cure it. She takes him up on that offer at the end of the episode.

I really like Belle, something about a powerful warrior who’s very philosophically-inclined and thoughtful is an automatic +1 from me in terms of protagonists. I had the thought in the middle of writing this that, oh my god, this is why they went with making everyone but the main girl an anthro, they all have ears, tails, something that marks them as being part of one animal tribe or another. very literally, they all have something she lacks. I’m an easy mark for obvious visual symbolism, what can I say?

She was also born from a stone, and in general her flashback to her strange childhood feels very esoteric and mythological. As a child, she attempts to steal Runding, now her sword in the present day, from the palace it’s locked up in, and this all happens under the glow of a massive, blue moon, a piece of visual iconography that feels intentional considering the series’ title. Runding talks, incidentally, and Belle seems to be able to communicate with it, which makes me wonder what it exactly is. Erewhon is written on it, which Sian claims means ‘utopia.’

At the end of the episode, Belle begins the trial she needs to undertake to become a wanderer, and in doing so, Sian erases himself from her memories as the two of them spar and he bestows her with a “curse” that she will carry with her for the rest of her life. There’s something deeply sad about the idea that Belle doesn’t even get to keep her one genuine connection with the man who’s basically her father.

And the episode just….ends, on that note! I’m actually very invested in this. I suppose you could criticize its narrative and symbolism for being obvious, but I like the journey Belle’s being set up to take, and I like how the world feels thought-out to some degree as opposed to being Generic ISO Fantasy Setting #7 (still got the ringed cities, though). All told I really liked this, I would rank it fairly highly among seasonal premieres.

ATRI -My Dear Memories- This, too, is an interesting one. I kept going back and forth on it while watching the premiere but I think I’d say my overall impressions are positive? It’s complicated.

What we have here is a future setting where massive flooding has sunk a good chunk of humanity. The state of things is telegraphed via the small-seeming islands that our protagonists live on; lots of overgrown buildings, using oil lamps for light and heat, that kind of thing. In the midst of all this we’re introduced to our lead, Natsuki [Ono Kenshou], who’s being lent a submersible by his “friend”, the generally scummy Catherine [Hikasa Youko]. While diving for salvage into what used to be the city he grew up in, he finds an android sealed in a capsule. This is the titular Atri [Akao Hikaru], and the rest of the episode is about Natsuki, Catherine, and innocent schoolgirl(?) Minamo [Takahashi Minami] interacting with her.

Their interactions are a bit fraught and this is where I started getting a bit skeptical. Catherine’s first instinct is to sell Atri despite the fact that the robo-girl is clearly human in all but biology, and the idea is taken seriously throughout the episode. Our characters go so far as to head to an appraiser. My immediate first reaction to this was very negative, and it’s definitely still possible that Atri (the show) will faceplant here, but I think what we’re actually doing is drawing a parallel between Atri herself and Natsuki with regard to the commodification of bodies. Natsuki, you see, is disabled, and only gets around with a prosthetic leg (which is noted to be old and finnicky; it locks up on him a few times throughout the episode and he has to break out an extendable cane). Natsuki needs money for a replacement prosthetic, something that will just allow him to live a comparably normal life, and Atri is considered a faulty machine—the appraiser outright calls her a collector’s item. There’s a difference in what kind of struggles they’re facing, but the connection is there, or at least the show seems to think it is. At the episode’s conclusion, Atri offers “I’ll be your leg!” to Natsuki. It’s definitely meant to read as heartwarming, but it’s a touchy subject to be sure, and I’m not sure how well the show handles it.

In general this seems like it could be a recurring problem. The series is definitely treating Atri’s status as a trade good as a bad thing, but there’s still something weirdly patronizing about the way she’s immediately super grateful to Natsuki for, say, buying her shoes. (I would argue that if you’re responsible for another human being, keeping them clothed is a pretty basic thing.) I think I’ll want to give this a few more episodes, seeing how it handles this whole setup, before I come down firmly on one side of liking its writing or not.

The visuals are a much less complicated thing to enjoy, though. They’re honestly just pretty great! I’ve seen a few people say that they’re bad which really puzzled me, the character animation is excellent throughout this first episode and the environments are fantastic. It may just be the title and the fact that I’ve watched it recently, but some of the shoreside scenes actually reminded me a little bit of AIR, another A-title anime based on a visual novel, just in how well they convey the feeling of summer, even if the overall goals of these anime are clearly quite different. The CGI isn’t the best, but it’s kept to a minimum and restricted to places where it logically makes sense, such as the submersible itself, so I wasn’t bothered. Also there’s a visual trick early on where some of Natsuki’s memories of living on the surface play out through the port windows of the sub, and that’s just really a lovely thing.

Enjoyed this overall I’d say, looking forward to seeing how Natsuki deals with the legacy of his late marine geologist mean butch grandma over the next few episodes.

1: You know who you are.

2: Hi Josh.

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.