Anime Orbit Weekly is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.
New title, same old format. I don’t have too much to say, this week, despite the title change. I’ve been going through some medical stuff (which I’ll not bother to recount in detail here) over the past two weeks, so I’ve been a bit tight on time. Nonetheless, I hope the below writeups will slake some of your curiosity as to the current goings-on in the more esoteric corners of the seasonal anime universe. And beyond, as you’ll see.
Weekly Anime
Birdie Wing
Birdie Wing‘s second episode is surprisingly, almost disappointingly, tame compared to its utterly ridiculous first. Expecting it to top its premiere would’ve been unreasonable, but I don’t think the same is true of hoping it’d keep that same energy up throughout the course of its run. The second episode, unfortunately–and to paraphrase a friend–is just golf. The presentation still leans into the absurd and showy, but the actual shots here are not anything that defies description. They are just golf shots; very good golf shots, golf shots that would be notable if they were pulled off by a real person. But there’s no passing betwixt train cars or bouncing off of rakes here. Most of the episode takes place on a regular green course. (Albeit, one with an admittedly nasty L-shaped design.)
Fly true, Pac-Man.
Instead, Birdie Wing makes the puzzling decision to get a bit more psychological. This isn’t an idea wholly devoid of merit; throughout the episode, our protagonists Eve and Aoi are contrasted in numerous ways. In their literal playstyles, yes, but also their entire personalities. Eve is cynical and mercenary, her only real motivators are money or the rare thrill of a genuine challenge. Aoi is studied, formal, and has a genuine love of the game. (Tellingly, her mother is a CEO.) The two are total opposites. Consequently, they fascinate each other, and that is what Birdie Wing‘s second episode chooses to focus on, not the theatrics of its first.
We do still get a lot of shonen-y, sports anime-adjacent guff here about how Aoi is an “innocent tyrant” who “crushes people with her smile.” Read: people find her sincerity disarming. Most of this comes from her manager. (If Aoi herself is even aware that she has this effect on people, she doesn’t really show any sign of it.) But the thing is this; all this stuff is kinda funny. It’s not actually interesting. Those are different things, and I think Birdie Wing may be confusing the two. It might become genuinely interesting later on, but Birdie Wing hasn’t earned this kind of self-indulgent character study yet, there are a lot more basics to be snapped together about what this show is even about, and frankly Aoi isn’t a complicated enough character to warrant all this. It really feels like the series is getting ahead of itself. Although, it should be said that Aoi’s fangirling is at least cute.
In its final third or so, after Aoi and Eve’s match, things take a turn back toward the more pleasantly ridiculous. Eve busts up a rigged trick golf game (sure) and then confronts another wonderfully absurd character; new addition Rose Aleon (Toa Yukinari). Rose is….a golf mob boss? I guess? Continuing the show’s already-a-tradition of affixing “golf” to the start of various professions and pretending that that’s a thing. Rose and Eve’s banter is fun, but the end result is that she sets Eve up in a tournament where she can play against Aoi. In my view, this makes Rose something of a golf lesbian wingman.
My hope is that when we get to the actual tournament(s?), the show will regain some of its visual oomph. Until then, this is a decent but only marginally compelling episode to bridge two parts of the story. Hopefully, Eve and Aoi can bring each other happiness. You know, through golf.
Golfing!
Estab-Life: Great Escape
One show that has not had any issue keeping up the WTF factor is Estab-Life. The peculiar Polygon Pictures product premiered and then released two more episodes almost immediately. It’s been two weeks since then, and as such, we’re already up to episode 5, almost halfway through the run of what is easily the season’s weirdest show. Previous episodes have involved yakuza bosses with dreams of magical girldom, KGB penguins, and a whole lot of lesbianism on the part of little Martese. This week’s episode continues the tradition of being unmistakable for any other show airing right now.
Unfortunately, this is probably also the weakest episode of the series so far. It’s the farthest Estab-Life has ever leaned into comedy, which feels odd to say, because the entire show sometimes feels like a prank being played on the viewer. If it is, this week is a bit of a mean turn. Have you ever wanted to watch an entire 22-minute episode of TV based around the fact that some people think the word “pantsu” is really funny? I haven’t either, but apparently one of Estab-Life‘s writers did.
Most of the episode is frankly not worth recapping, at least not in detail. The gist is that the undergarments-forbidding cluster is the location of their new client; a priestess in the religion of “the Goddess” who rules over the cluster. That goddess? The Statue of Liberty in a bath towel. Obviously.
Unfortunately, a lot of this just gets put toward the end of making Feres uncomfortable because she doesn’t want to go commando in public. At one point she is publicly shamed for this, at another she is felt up by robots. It’s not great!
Me too, girl.
The episode is home to some solid action scenes though (where Feres is at her best), and we find out upon the episode’s conclusion that the cluster administrator changed their mind about the “no underwear” rule. This is absurd, of course, but the idea that administrators even can change their minds is a new one to our cast. Including to Equa, who’s otherwise seemed to know just about everything. Things like this save the episode from being truly inessential, and I doubt this marks any kind of serious downturn, but it’s definitely the least fun of Estab-Life‘s episodes so far.
The Executioner & Her Way of Life
Executioner remains one of the most purely compelling shows of the year so far. For an action anime, its production values lean more toward “solid” than groundbreaking, but Executioner’s real appeal is in its intrigue-laden story. Since we last spoke about Menou and her way of life, she’s picked up a co-protagonist, the otherworlder Akari Tokitou (Moe Kahara). Akari’s “pure concept”—the show’s name for the magical superpowers every otherworlder has—is time manipulation, although as far as we know, she doesn’t actually know that, believing that her powers relate to healing.
There’s reason to be suspect of that assumption, but before we get to that, it’s worth mentioning this episode’s actual plot. In concept it’s not anything new; terrorists intercept a train for dubious reasons, are killed by the heroes in the process. The execution is fairly interesting, though. In particular, the show sidesteps having to show any actual terrorist tactics by giving the terrorists….poison gems in their stomach that merge them all into a blood monster when they die. That’s a new one to me.
The train is nearly crashed by the terrorists’ plot, and a mysterious ripple of magic ends up helping Menou out. She later openly muses on the possibility that she actually failed to stop the train and Akari rewound time. I found the direct pointing of this out a little on the nose, but the idea itself is interesting. Akari in general is a bit of a riddle; she seems too genuinely cheerful to be out-and-out manipulative, but her body language—particularly a tendency toward owl-eyed, watchful stares—and some of the things she says hints that there is more to her going on than simply being a naive new arrival in the show’s world. I look forward to learning what, precisely, is going on with her.
The bloodthirsty princess Ashuna (Mao Ichimichi), introduced last episode but given more of a spotlight here, is also worth highlighting. She and Momo end up squaring off atop the roof of the train and eventually fall off it entirely. Executioner is perhaps not an amazing-looking anime, but the action setpieces are solid, and in particular the magic effects look quite nice. Momo manages to make a, I suppose, chainsaw-dagger? Out of a length of metal chain.
That’s pretty rad, and it’s hard to too harshly criticize a show that’s willing to go that ridiculous in spite of being otherwise pretty serious in tone.
This is very much a minor episode for Executioner, but I wouldn’t be surprised if much of what’s brought up here comes back around eventually. So far, the writing has been tight enough that I’d be more surprised if it didn’t. If you’re not watching this one, I’d really recommend picking it up.
Non-Weekly Anime
Wow, there’s a heading I haven’t broken out for a very long time. In fact, I think I’ve only ever used it once before? In any case, I do occasionally find it pertinent to write about a show I’m watching “on my own time,” at least a little bit, in spite of its marginal or nonexistant relevance to the seasonal hype cycle.
Witch Craft Works
A romance-action-comedy-drama anime apparently originally salvaged out of a rejected yuri manga pitch, Witch Craft Works is really something else. It’s an interesting illustration of how much the anime zeitgeist has changed in just the short time since it originally aired (the show is from 2014, so it’s not quite yet 10 years old.) It’s also noteworthy for being helmed by a true puzzle-box of a director; Tsutomu Mizushima. The man’s works are frequently separated by light-years in terms of genre, theme, and even just quality. Some of which is explained by most of his stuff being adaptions, but still, his credits include everything from Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan to ANOTHER, CLAMP adaptions Blood-C and xxxHOLIC, modern ecchi landmark (for better or worse) Prison School, banner “girls and military hardware” show Girl und Panzer, even also-ran early ’10s slice of life hit Squid Girl….the guy’s an enigma, a sort of curious anti-auteur. I find him interesting, even if he seems to bat 50/50 on whether or not the stuff he adapts is actually good.
As for Witch Craft Works itself, the premise is a light novel-esque unfolding origami box of absurdity. Our main character, Honoka Takamiya (Yuusuke Kobayashi) may be a meek and average high school boy, at least at first, but his love interest, the high school “princess” Ayaka Kagari (Asami Seto), is anything but. What starts as a fairly simple “how did she fall for him” premise, a la this current season’s Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie, quickly reveals itself to be something way weirder when we learn that Ayaka is a witch embroiled in a simmering war between two factions–her own Workshop Witches and their rival Tower Witches. Full disclosure; it’s actually a manga adaption, but I associate this sort of rapid-fire proper noun machine gun approach more with light novel adaptions. Perhaps just a personal bias.
The witch factions are where the action element kicks in, and the show is excellent at this. Every episode crackles with energy, and the magic is made to look truly wild and dangerous, backed up with the sort of super blown-out, loud-as-fuck, almost dubstep-ish sound design that I sorely miss from this era of anime. Ayaka’s magic in particular is given a lot of attention, which makes sense, she’s a fire witch, and fire is an ideal showcase for flashy visual effects.
Eventually, Honoka takes a more proactive role in his own defense—oh yeah, that war between the witch factions is over him, we only know the vague reasons as to why at the point I’m at in the series—and dons a witch outfit as well. In general, Honoka and Ayaka have an absolutely great dynamic, and it really feels like almost nothing has been changed from the pre-draft lesbian versions of the characters, down to Ayaka calling Honoka her “bride,” “princess,” and a number of other pretty explicitly feminine terms, with Honoka only occasionally and wealky protesting. Ayaka herself makes the icy-cool kuudere archetype seem fresh again. She also gets a lot of funny lines, delivered in total, profound deadpan.
In general, Witch Craft Works is great at pulling off character concepts that sound middling or even outright bad on paper. Even the annoying brocon character—a trope I normally cannot stand—is pretty good here. It’s hard to hate someone who’s as much of a loopy firecracker as Kasumi Takamiya (Ai Kayano), and her crazy magic (she can summon giant teddy bears, what’s not to love?) helps too. In general, the costuming is also excellent, with almost every important character—and many non-important characters, like the Tower Witch quartet who serve as the show’s Team Rocket analogue—having absolutely ridiculous fits that perfectly telegraph their personalities..
All in all, the show is a ton of fun. I don’t know if it’s going to keep that up as it heads into its more serious second half (I’m at the exact midway point, having watched episode six previously), but even if it doesn’t, it’s worth recommending off the strength of its truly outrageous opening half alone.
Elsewhere on MPA
I spend a lot of time thinking about Kaguya-sama: Love is War! in basically any season it airs in. Maybe overthinking it. The result is rather wordy columns like these where I often spend as much time on individual episode chunks as I do on whole episodes of other shows. Still, I hope y’all appreciate the writeups. I enjoyed this episode a good deal, and I’m interested in the long-term implications of its character development for Kaguya and Hayasaka.
Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 2 – “Secure a Wife”
This is a weird comparison that I doubt anyone else has ever made, but Spy x Family actually reminds me a tiny bit of the aforementioned Witch Craft Works. Mostly just in the fact that both are action-comedies with a romance angle that are tons of fun and deliver a steady stream of thrilling absurdities every episode. The styles are different—Spy x Family is a lot slicker and is comparatively more subdued than WCW—but I feel like the similarity is there. I love covering this show and I hope to continue to for quite some time. Also; the OP, formally introduced this week, absolutely rules. I link it in the article above, clearly you should go read it just for that reason alone. 😉
That’s about it for this week, everybody. I can’t promise what the size or distribution of next week will look like, given that I’m still going through the aforementioned health stuff. Still, I hope you enjoyed this week’s AOW. See ya starside.
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