Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
In with an out with a bang. If you’ll remember the closing minutes of last week’s episode, Aqua promised to make his performance in the final episode of Sweet Today count. And, implicitly, that was the show also promising to dazzle us. So, the question of how exactly it goes is what’s on our minds as we enter this week’s episode, and rain drips in to the leaky, abandoned warehouse that serves as the site of the shoot.
As we open, we actually lead with Kana’s side of things. A quick recap of her whole situation; former child prodigy-actor, now the subject of waning public interest, is given the lead role in a crappy live action miniseries adaptation of a beloved shoujo manga. She’s desperately trying to make her co-stars look decent in spite of their own lack of acting chops and nearly everything else about the series. This is something she cares about, she wants to be back in the spotlight and she wants to make a good show from this manga that, we learn, she loves too. It is just not happening; in particular her co-lead, played by the character Melt [Seiji Maeda], is an absolute cardboard cutout. She is getting nothing off of him, so she can’t give anything back.
This is when Aqua steps in. Improvising basically anything in a scripted performance—be it film, TV, whatever—is usually quite a bad idea. But Aqua does it anyway, in an admirable show of sheer audacity. He really leans into his role as the villain within Sweet Today, here, playing his character with an appropriate amount of sleazy grime and even deliberately antagonizing Melt just out of earshot of the camera.
Right or wrong, Melt’s sudden burst of emotion in response gives Kana something to actually play off of, and suddenly the child prodigy who can cry on command is back. Some of the show’s staff are a little annoyed (honestly, they’re not wrong to be, this isn’t the sort of thing one should try at home), but the series’ director isn’t, so it stays in, despite the alterations to the program it ends up necessitating. The staff aren’t the only people who’re charmed; this is the last shot of Kana while she’s being filmed that we get. Look at that blush!
Another group of people are grateful for the step up in Sweet Today‘s finale; the actual manga staff themselves. Not the least of which is the series’ actual mangaka. There is some palpable irony in the discussion she has with her assistants—about how manga artists often tell each other to keep their expectations in check when it comes to adaptations—being had in an adaptation of a manga. And indeed, the necessities of the format curtail a bit of the emotional punch. Still, it’s an effective scene, and we learn that the Sweet Today miniseries develops a small cult following on the internet off the basis of its strong final episode. (Previously mediocre shows suddenly and inexplicably becoming a lot better happens in anime, too, although it’s rare.) The mangaka ends up actually thanking Kana specifically during the show’s wrap party.
That party is also where we get our next plot thread. Kaburagi, who you’ll remember is the show’s producer and one of the many people on Aqua’s suspect list, ends up talking to him about Ai after casually remarking that they look rather similar. Aqua, who’s already crossed Kaburagi off the suspects list, presses him about how he knew Ai in the first place. Assuming Aqua to be more of a simple stan than anything else, he offers to trade a piece of little-known gossip for something; an appearance on a reality TV show that he’s the producer on.
We don’t get to see that just yet. The episode’s final third actually revolves around Aqua and Ruby’s new high school, a performing arts academy where Kana is their senior. Here we split off and mostly follow Ruby for a while. This is good, because it lets us get, say, her impressively bisexual reaction to entering her class for the first time.
She also makes a friend in the form of effusively pink gravure model with a fake Kansai accent Kotobuki Minami [Hina Youmiya]. In general, Ruby’s side of Oshi no Ko will tend toward the light and comedic for a good bit yet. She is very much the secondary protagonist after her brother, although this does mean we get to see more of her silly wild takes when something funny happens.
We also meet Shiranui Frill [Asami Seto] here. Regarded in-universe as a top entertainer even in high school, Frill mostly serves as the indirect conduit for the other upcoming plot line. (And as fanservice for Kaguya-sama:Love is War! fans. She’s the younger sister of minor character Shiranui Koromo.)
Ruby, a huge fan of Frill’s, feels insecure about not having a job in the industry yet. This leads to her pressuring Miyako to get her idol group together more quickly, but just as Miyako retorts that unaffiliated showbiz-grade cute girls are in short supply in Japan—precisely because of things like idol auditions—Aqua pipes up that he might know somebody who’s looking for an opportunity.
Namely, Kana.
Once again, though, that’s a development for next week, as the episode cuts there.
Until then, anime fans!
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 Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
We open last week’s episode of Oshi no Ko on a smiling face and some cold, hard numbers. Ruby is applying to join an existing idol group as an add-on member. Her chances are literally one in hundreds of thousands, but nonetheless she swings into the episode’s opening moments in a whirl of joy and determination. Ruby is easily the more upbeat of our two leads (which is probably why, sadly, she’s the one who tends to get less screentime), and these first couple minutes are a cheerful pastiche of the past decade and change of idol anime. Juxtaposed, of course, with a reminder of the grim fate of Ruby’s mother / oshi in a past life / it’s complicated, Ai. A few of her friends at school razz her over the fact that she can’t sing, as though that’s ever been an obstacle to being a star anywhere in the world.
More pertinent are her brother Aqua’s objections. Idols, he points out as though Ruby doesn’t already know, make relatively little money, live under constant scrutiny, and are mostly pushed out of their line of work by their early 30s. Ruby does know all this, of course. But in a little exchange that cuts to the heart of why people do this stuff in the first place, she asks Aqua what his point even is. People do not chase the kind of dream Ruby’s chasing because they want to be rich or because they want job security. The dream is, itself, the point, for better or worse. This is something Oshi no Ko comes back to, underscoring and undercutting it in equal measure, throughout its whole story as part of its larger themes.
Something else that recurs not just throughout Oshi no Ko but throughout Aka Akasaka’s work in general is that simply wanting something badly enough does not make it happen. Ruby eventually gets the phone call responding to her audition, and is flatly rejected. She’s comforted by Miyako [Lynn], who is now serving as the twins’ mother figure as she runs the revamped Strawberry Productions by herself (they manage net talent these days, we’re told), but the comfort is a cold one. And as it turns out, Ruby hasn’t really been rejected on the basis of her own abilities in the first place. The person on the other end of the phone was actually Aquamarine, who, we learn, has been going through incredible lengths to keep his sister out of the industry. Being so deceptive about it is pretty shitty (to the point where the phone call “from the idol agency” was actually Aquamarine himself, he’s got quite the vocal range), but one does, in an abstract sense, understand his trepidations. You’d be paranoid about the whole thing too if your mother was stabbed to death by a stalker. Still, he’s clearly going about this entirely the wrong way, and this is absolutely going to come back to bite him somehow.
None of it ends up mattering; Ruby is promptly scouted for a different group—this one an indie—just days later.
Miyako and Aqua are rightly concerned that this might be a sketchy situation (which would not be a first for an underground idol group), and Aqua handles it in a rather unscrupulous way yet again, pretending to scout one of their idols and, with a little effort and a false promise of possibly hiring her himself, manages to squeeze all kinds of reasons to not let Ruby join out of her. (Incidentally, this character, Lala, is pretty cute, but I don’t think we ever see her again, unless I’m forgetting something.)
In the end, Ruby does sign with an agency; Strawberry themselves, who, under Miyako’s guidance, are putting together a new group for the first time in a decade. Both she and Aqua reason that if Ruby is really going to insist on this, it’s better for her to be managed close to home. In a different sort of show, this would be where things pivot back into a heart-pounding underdogs-race-to-the-top narrative, akin to something like The Idolmaster or last year’s surprisingly great Shine Post. But that is not what Oshi no Ko is, and that’s not where our story (or even the episode) ends.
Aqua has been helping the Director out as an editor and general assistant since his mother passed away, but when the Director approaches him (not for the first time) about becoming an actor as well, Aqua brushes him off, saying that he doesn’t have any true talent and doesn’t have what his mother did. This leads into the only real miss of episode 2, a gag where the Director keeps trying to give an inspirational monologue but is interrupted by his mom barging into his room. This is decently funny, almost Simpsons-y, the first time it happens, but it happens several times before the scene is over, and by the end it just feels vaguely meanspirited. (Which is also pretty Simpsons-y, now that I think of it.) It’s easy to miss that despite being interrupted, the Director’s speech is actually a pretty good one. He touches on how Aqua, who’s only a teenager, is way too young to be giving up on his dreams and clearly wants to be an actor. Aqua is so focused on finding his mother’s killer that he may be blind to his own love of the craft, which is pretty tragic in its own way and explains no small amount about his character.
Episode 2 ends with a fun little diversion. Aqua and Ruby enter the integrated middle / high school where Ruby will be getting her performing arts education. Here, we’re reintroduced to Kana, who Aqua doesn’t initially recognize. She gets the last line of the episode; initially relieved that Aqua’s returned to acting (crush much?), she flips out when Aqua tells her that he’s actually taking the general education track. Cut to credits!
All told, despite a few minor missteps, episode 2 is an essential bit of scaffolding, establishing both Ruby and Aqua’s respective personalities and motivations and their (rather lopsided) relationship with each other. I imagine Aqua’s serious, manipulative characterization might lose some people, and I’ll admit that the already-great series might be even better if we perhaps swapped the personalities around here, but really, these are petty complaints at best. And we’re not even done! Since my life has been in a bit of a shamble lately, I didn’t get to cover episode 2 last week, which means we’ve got two to talk about this week. Cut to (opening) credits!
We pick up right where we left off, with Aqua and Ruby meeting Kana again for the first time. Initially, they essentially lightly bully her, which gives us a feast of Good Kana Faces to kick off the episode with.
This quickly take a somewhat more serious turn, though, and it becomes clear that while the previous episode focused mostly on Ruby with an Aqua segment in its last third, this one is going to be Aqua’s show. (Ironic, given how much of the episode he spends still denying that he wants to act.)
We should talk about Kana first, though. This is our first real look at her post-her child actress era, and while her star has dimmed, it hasn’t gone out. She’s happy to leverage the fact that she’s the lead role in the fictional shoujo manga drama web-miniseries adaptation Sweet Today to attempt to get Aqua back in the game. (If Sweet Today sounds familiar, that’s because it also shows up in Kaguya-sama: Love is War. This and a few other connections make it clear that the two series take place in the same universe. Is this relevant to anything at all in either of them? Not to my knowledge, but it’s a fun fact.) Kana herself spends much of this early part of the episode bouncing around the screen and just generally being lively and engaging. I realize I’ve really hammered this point home over the last two columns, but this kind of charisma is deadly important if you’re trying to sell a character as a performer, and Kana is yet another Oshi no Ko cast member who has it in spades. (For that matter, Aqua does too, although his is more of a cold and dark kind of compelling. If he were a real person, I imagine he’d have quite the fandom over on tumblr.)
Aqua’s not interested until he hears the name of the drama’s producer, Masaya Kaburagi. As for why, we here swerve over to the show’s darker side once again. We learn that in his search for Ai’s killer, Aqua’s compiled a list of candidates. How? Well, he found his late mother’s secret personal phone, and spent four entire years trying to guess the correct passcode. (He’s lucky it only used numbers, frankly.) That gave him a list with a good dozen industry people on it. Masaya Kaburagi was one of them.
This in mind, he accepts Kana’s offer. Although because Kana happened to have just mentioned that the male lead in the production was attractive, she suddenly gets the wrong idea. (To be honest, the fact that she cares, even in a girlish “ohmigosh” sort of way, slightly bugs me. It’s not like Aqua would be the first gay actor in the world, and Kana’s been in the industry since she was a child.)
We actually get to see a minute or two of Sweet Today, and it is truly dire, with canned, wooden acting from not only Kana herself but also her co-lead. On Kana’s part, she’s deliberately acting well below her level, since most of her co-stars are male models, not actors, and without someone with equivalent chops to play off of, she risks barreling over the rest of the cast if they can’t keep up. Thus, she tries to act the same way they are, and hopes to at least present the series as “watchable”, if not great. She points out that acting well and making a good show are different things, and we get the point again here of acting being primarily about communication. This is a lesson she had to learn the hard way; the reason her roles dried up as she got older was that she was initially so difficult to work with. Things are different now, and she makes a point of being a good coworker.
All this said, Sweet Today‘s production is still a disaster. The main reason Kana wanted Aqua for the job, any personal feelings aside, is that Aqua genuinely is a great actor. All of the off-camera stuff—initial script run through, full rehearsal, etc.—is being blended into a single practice take, and that’s all the practice anyone gets. With Aqua onboard, Kana finally has someone at her level that she can play off of. If acting is communication, these are two people who speak the same language.
As for Aqua’s actual role, he is, irony of ironies, playing a stalker villain who appears in the show’s finale. (Aqua in fact mentions this directly, which I’d qualify as a minor weakness. Rarely do you need to actually point irony out!) During the rehearsal, he does fine, and Kana compliments him afterward. Her little speech here is actually quite nice overall, and conveys the strong sense of kinship that she feels with Aqua, someone else who was also a child actor, left the field for a while, and is now trying to come back (Aqua has his own reasons for doing so, but she doesn’t know that). The animation—in fact, the kind of animation often known as character acting—bumps up here, and Kana’s broad smile and her huge, wide hand gestures are really something lovely.
They are contrasted quite a bit by a something Aqua overhears. The producer, Mr. Kaburagi, says to the director that Kana is great to throw into “any random role” because she’s so easy to work with, and says it’s great how they can leverage her remaining name recognition for such little money. In fact, his only complaint is that she’s so focused on acting in the first place, dismissing the entire show—his own production!—as little more than pure promo material. This seems to get under Aqua’s skin in a major way, and as he collects one of Kaburagi’s discarded cigs (remember, he’s trying to catch his mom’s killer at the end of the day, and the cigarette serves as a possible source of material for a DNA test), he decides that even if he’s already done what he came here for, he might as well make a strong impression on the way out the door. “Out with a bang” as he puts it.
On that note, the episode closes, so we’ll have to wait until next week for Aqua’s actual performance. It’s great to be back, and since I haven’t gotten to say it in a while, I’ll relish saying it here; see you next week, anime fans.
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 Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.
Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
This has been a weird season, particularly for speculative adventure anime. The two original frontrunners, Hell’s Paradise and the unrelated Heavenly Delusion, have respectively gotten kind of boring and completely unhinged in a way where I, personally, am holding off on covering it for now. That leaves a gap, and where there’s a gap, other things will step up to the plate. If you’re asking about what adventure anime I’ve been enjoying in a comparatively uncomplicated way, there are two answers, neither of which I would’ve expected giving just two weeks ago; Magical Destroyers (which was unhinged from the start) and this, Dead Mount Death Play. Neither are flawless by any means, but the nature of expectations is sometimes such that you end up enjoying things that you expected less out of in the first place more than things you had high hopes for that may or may not live up to those hopes.
As for DMDP itself, the gist since we last checked in with our necromancer boy Polka and his funky phantom friends is this; he’s joined the organization that was hunting him down back in episode one. He’s a coup, really, for this shady group of assassins, and their leader, the mysterious Clarissa [Atsumi Tanezaki]. (A side note, we’ll be calling “Polka” “Kabane” from this point out, referring to his character bio, because distinguishing him from the guy who used to be Polka Shinoyama is going to be important shortly) Misaki, predictably, is also around again, having been revived at the end of episode 2 following some exposition about Polka’s past. I was not crazy on the show’s attempts to sell both Kabane and Misaki (who seem to be co-headlining as leads at this point) as “sympathetic bad guys”, but the rest of the episode was quite good, including a sequence where Kabane rescued some kids from a fire in an unlicensed orphanage via summoning their parents’ souls into skeletons. He even caused a huge social media firestorm in the process, setting up a lurking background plot thread as we roll into episode 3 here.
Episode 3 quickly confirms that, regardless of whether or not he’s truly “villainous”, we are going to get to see Kabane properly fuck some people up. It’s really pretty straightforward; for as much as he might want to live a peaceful life in his new home, he does need money, and his talents point him toward assassination as a possible career path. He doesn’t even hand-wring over it, really, and his only token objection is shot down by Misaki pointing out that he was competent enough to kill her, and, after all, she’s a professional assassin too. Kabane and Misaki get a good dynamic going here when the time comes to smack around some yakuza. (Or something. They sure seem like yakuza to me but the show never uses the term.) Misaki, now basically a zombie, is immune to minor inconveniences like gunshots and such, so she handles all of the rough-and-tumble physical aspects of fighting. Kabane, the necromancer, finishes things off with his magic.
It’s also because of Kabane that they end up in this situation in the first place. One of Dead Mount Death Play’s recurring tricks is to set up a scene in one way—here, by making it seem like Kabane is talking to a guy who comes to Misaki for protection—and then reveal that he’s actually been talking to ghosts. In this case, that means deliberately leading himself and Misaki into a trap to get some vengeance for the many children-spirits that haunt this particular group of bad guys. These aren’t really meant to be twists, exactly, but it’s still a cool way to convey the narrative. It’s especially helpful when the show’s visual chops are otherwise more functional than great. (Although there is a really wonderful moment here where Misaki Naruto-runs for a couple seconds. That can make up for a lot of so-so cuts.)
Death Play seems to be setting up this thing where Kabane is, in a sense, less of a villain than the real-world sorts he crosses swords with; hitmen and so on. There’s an intriguing bit in here where he and Takumi, the hacker who’s now serving as his mission control of sorts, have a conversation about the value of human life. Kabane likens human life to toys. But, he says, he’s fond of toys, because they make children smile. This prompts Kabane to reflect on whether the real disconnect in their thinking is not how they value people but how they value things. It’s an interesting little dialogue, although the larger points it might be trying to make have not really connected just yet. Oh, somewhere in here it’s also mentioned that Polka—the real Polka—is still alive, and his soul is bound to a small drone that Kabane took control of last week. Where is all that going? Who knows!
We also learn about “Lemmings” here, in a separate exchange, apparently some kind of assassin-boogieman with a codename that, personally, just makes me think of the computer game. “Lemmings” doesn’t really remain a mystery for long. The closing minutes of the episode introduce us to two new characters who’ve shown up before but not gotten any spotlight before now. These are Tsubaki Iwanome [Takuya Eguchi] and Kouzaburou Arase [Nobuhiko Okamoto], a pair of cops who work for a branch of the government that deals with the paranormal. They get on Kabane’s trail because of the aftermath of the yakuza fight; a massive knot of clumped-together earth and mangled bodies, all of whom are still alive, because Kabane is hardcore like that. Thus, our first major arc sets its wheels in motion, and Dead Mount Death Play seems to snap into focus.
This is not a flawless show by any means; it’s visually a bit too dark (enough that it’s occasionally hard to puzzle out what’s going on), and the sense of humor is markedly dated. Sometimes in a charming way (Misaki’s whole kooky murder-girl personality) and sometimes in a very grating one (basically everything else), and its use of totally shameless fanservice feels pretty out of place in something like this. Still, the show is solid fun, and I enjoy tuning in every week.
Of course, what I would really love is to see it take that extra step up and go from good to great. Will it? Only time will tell.
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 Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
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.
From a certain point of view, this, not Oshi no Ko or Heavenly Delusion or any new or returning Shonen Jump adaptation, is the most anticipated premiere of the season. All of those other anime premieres are anime premieres, at the end of the day. Big Magikarp in a small pond, so to speak. Anything to do with Pokémon is a global event; it just plainly isn’t playing the same game that everything else I write about on this site is.
Pokémon Horizons, which began yesterday, is essentially the second “main” Pokémon anime, succeeding the storied 1,200-some episode saga of Ash Ketchum (Satoshi, as you likely know he’s known in his home country). The fact that Horizons exists and can be watched—although only via fansub for those of us outside Japan at the moment—still feels deeply surreal. But this first episode, which primarily exists as a from-square-one character building exercise for brand-new protagonist Liko [Minori Suzuki], makes it feel a bit less so. Liko, as we’re introduced to her here, feels very much like she should be the protagonist for this sort of story. She’s much more soft-spoken and a bit more of a thinker than her often hotheaded predecessor. She’s also rather insecure, in particular harboring a complex about how people often say that they don’t understand what she’s thinking. Indeed, leading with the protagonist of the two that seems to be much less like Ash first is probably the smart move. Also, her two-tone hair is pretty cute, and is further evidence for my conspiracy theory that, eventually, all anime characters will have at least two colors in their hair at minimum.
The first episode (one of two that aired back to back, but we’ll only be covering the first here, partly to give it parity with other shows this season but mostly just because the second isn’t available in English yet) sees Liko attending Indigo Academy, a school in the Kanto Region far from her native Paldea. There, she’s partnered with her starter Pokémon; a particularly willful Sprigatito that she spends much of the episode trying to bond with. There’s a distant echo of the Ash/Pikachu dynamic here, but aside from the fact that a cat scratch is not the equivalent of the Thundershock-to-the-face running gag of the first anime’s earlier seasons, Liko and Sprigatito also get on much sooner. Basically, as soon as Liko starts trying to understand the funny green cat on its own terms.
There’s a nice little bit of trackable progression in the series’ own language, too. Early in the episode Sprigatito struggles to even use Leafage, a very basic Grass-type move and a staple of its very first few levels in the games. By the episode’s end, it uses that same move to temporarily blind a freaking Rhyhorn, which it also promptly puts to sleep (seemingly with Sweet Scent. Which isn’t how that move works, but the show has never precisely followed the rules of the games, so that’s fine).
It’s super effective!
Yeah, about that Rhyhorn; anyone concerned that this is going to be some kind of laid-back slice of life series should stick around for the episode’s final few minutes. There, the mysterious “good luck charm” pendant that Liko’s been given by her grandmother turns out to be much more important than she could’ve possibly imagined. Our evident first antagonist, a fellow with black-and-white hair and weird eyes [Shun Horie], shows up with an obviously-falsified letter from Liko’s grandma on the first day of summer break, where the school just so happens to be sparsely populated. (Liko seems to be one of the relatively few students hanging out in the dorms over break rather than going home.) She’s rightly very suspicious of all this, and the guy’s demeanor doesn’t help. Eventually, she gets so freaked out that she tries fleeing out her bedroom window, only to be stopped by a minion working for this fellow, leading to the Rhyhorn battle previously described.
Things end on a truly exciting note; a man on a Charizard (of course it’s a Charizard) swoops in to protect Liko after she’s faced down with a Ceruledge. We know from pre-release press materials that this is Professor Friede [Taku Yashiro], and that the group of people he leads fly about the Pokemon World in an airship. But all of this is left to the realm of thrilling cliffhanger here, and we don’t get much more than that in this first episode, beyond one small twist that I’ll not spoil.
Taken on its own, this episode does definitely have the disadvantage of feeling like just one half of a whole. But, even then, this is clearly building up to being something special. Anyone worried that the spirit of true Pokémon adventure was in danger of dying out need not fret any longer, it’s clearly going to be just fine.
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 Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are 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.
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.
This article’s header image comes from Insomniacs after school.
One consequence of a season being so packed is that I didn’t actually get to do a full writeup on everything I would’ve liked to cover. At this point, it’s impractical to do full columns on the eight other anime I started watching this season, so instead, here are some short mini-writeups, to give you at least a general idea of what I thought of them. Mostly, I think this season is pretty good! There are a couple exceptions, as you’ll see.
KONOSUBA: An Explosion on This Wonderful World! – I’ll be honest, 99% of the reason I didn’t cover this in full was because I don’t really know much of anything about the series it’s a spinoff of. Sure, I’m vaguely aware of KonoSuba, mostly in the form of heavily compressed meme images that kick around reddit, but that’s not exactly a fair impression of the show itself I’m guessing. In any case it doesn’t really matter, since Explosion is a prequel; the origin story of one Megumin the Witch, who seeks to become the master of the ill-regarded explosion magic. This is mostly a comedy, all told, and it’s one that’s more intermittently amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but if you dig fantasy settings and nicely-animated explosions (and who doesn’t?) this seems like a solid pickup to me.
Insomniacs after school – Now this is really just a lovely thing. A soft-hued midnight friendship between two actual chronic insomniacs who hit it off at school one day after running into each other while taking a nap in their school’s old observatory. As both a fellow person with a pretty serious sleeping disorder and someone who absolutely lives for lavish nocturnal scenery in my anime, this is an easy highlight of the season so far. (Honestly, there’s a touch of And Yet The Town Moves in here to me. A surprisingly relevant reference point this season, given that Heavenly Delusion is also airing.) Plus, the leads are really cute together. Enough so that when this takes its inevitable turn for the romantic, I’ll be cheering them on. Sidebar: between this and last year’s Call of The Night, the revamped Liden Films seem to be developing an incredibly specific niche for themselves. But if the shows keep looking this good, they have absolutely no reason to stop any time soon.
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury – I’ve been pretty open about why I don’t cover Gundam in more detail on this site. Somehow, I just feel underqualified. But the cold fog of betrayal that lingers over Witch From Mercury‘s first episode since its hiatus doesn’t need intellectualizing. More than anything, it demonstrates the space that’s grown between Suletta and Miorine. Hence the latter’s almost total absence from this episode until its epilogue. The two new characters—who aren’t really new at all, we met them at the end of the last cour—are steering things in a distinctly darker direction, and it’s not clear how long the façade that the school and its dueling system provides will last. It’s already creaking under the pressure; in Witch From Mercury‘s second season, we get to watch the cracks form.
Otaku Elf – Going by this first episode, this is a cute—if maybe a bit slight—magical realist goofball comedy anime, of a kind that used to be very common, went away for a while, and is now making something of a comeback. It’s a solid first showing, even if the core concept of a JRPG-style blonde elf taking up residence in a Shinto shrine (because she used to be friends with Tokugawa, even!) might strike some as a little strange. References to assorted geekery abound, bolstered by honest-to-god product placement in the form of a Redbull plug. In addition to all of the Otaku Humor™, there are some nice emotional beats, too. Enough to at least suggest that Otaku Elf has legs and isn’t purely a procession of gags with no further point. A decent one to keep an eye on, if you want a more lighthearted pickup this season.
THE MARGINAL SERVICE– Well, they can’t all be winners. We have here an almost impressively shitty action anime from the usually good to great Studio 3Hz. I don’t mean that in terms of its production values, which range from fine to exceptional over the course of its first episode. I’m talking about the writing, a hateful, vitriolic ouroboros of xenophobic rhetoric smeared twice over with two incongruous sets of storytelling tropes. One from American police procedurals and the other from tokusatsu team shows (and the latter really only shows up in the episode’s final few minutes). There’s the seed of a marginally (ha) interesting idea here, but it’s wrapped in so much “what if the phrase ‘illegal aliens’ referred to like actual space aliens” garbage that it’s impossible to disentangle from the problems. When we get into some primo anti-Semitic dogwhistles like our utter prick of a protagonist calling the episode’s villain of the week a “lizard bastard”, we’re well removed from my ability to evaluate anything “on its own terms.” I just can’t do that when the terms in question are clearly so awful. Oh, and it manages the impressively awful trick of introducing a named Black character and then killing him within its first sixty seconds. In some seasons, the “boring” is worse than the “bad.” This is not one of those cases, as this easily limbos below Kizuna no Allele for the season’s worst premiere by a massive lead.
Tokyo Mew Mew New, Season 2 – The kids’ magical girl pastiche that isn’t actually a kids’ show returns for round two. Honestly, there’s not a ton to say here. It’s more Tokyo Mew MewNew, following roughly the same contours as both its first season and (presumably) the original. New to its triumphant return are some minor plot twists and yet another potential love interest for Ichigo. That and some updated environmental talk make it at least worth watching if you’re a fan, but if you’re not already onboard the Tokyo Train, this is probably a skip for you. You’re not missing nothing, but you’re not missing too much, either.
TOO CUTE CRISIS – Picture the headlines! An alien assault on our planet stalled indefinitely, not by heroics or diplomacy but by the sheer overwhelming adorability of our planet’s animals. Yes, TOO CUTE CRISIS imagines a world where Earth’s cats and dogs are impossible, irresistibly adorable by intergalactic standards. For the most part, this is a zany comedy without much further thought to be gleaned from it, but not only are the protagonist’s gleeful freakouts over the cuteness of dogs and cats pretty relatable, they also give way to a few moments of actual sweetness. (Punctuated by more gags of course. Dig the orbital malnutrition beam she calls down to punish a jackass ex-cat owner that left his little guy in a box on the street.) Comedies like this tend to be overlooked, but for my money this is one of the season’s stronger premieres. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and it does it well.
World Dai Star – Contemporary ‘actor girl’ anime are barely plentiful enough to be called a genre. Yet, when I used that phrase, you almost certainly knew what I meant, given the existence of the likes of Kageki Shoujo (not to be confused with Revue Starlight) or, on the other end of the quality spectrum, CUE. There aren’t a ton of these things, but they’re distinctive. To most, what will jump out about World Dai Star isn’t its premise or writing but its hyper-detailed, almost uncanny character animations. This is a series that truly puts the “acting” in “character acting,” as it were. And that’s important, because after a very dry setup, the show abruptly springs to life as soon as we get to an actual stage. A glowering veteran actor plays a wicked witch and frightens most of the young auditioning aspirants off the stage, and our lead unexpectedly blossoms into competence by capturing and perfectly recreating her best friend’s take on the prince from The Little Mermaid. (Somehow, “can effortlessly copy anyone else’s performance but struggles to come up with her own takes on things” is a plot point that both this and Kageki Shoujo from a few years ago came up with independently. Unless this is simply copying that, which would be so outrageously meta that I almost hope it is true.) Props for having a lead that’s not a total amateur (even if she is annoyingly self-deprecative) and for the bizarre “Sense” talk that reminds me weirdly strongly of Revue Starlight‘s conceptualization of star power. Unfortunately, this and Kizuna no Allele form a duo that’s not unlikely to get totally buried by Oshi no Ko, which touches on some of this same subject matter in a very different way. For Allele, I couldn’t really care less, but Dai Star surely deserves at least a supporting role in the season.
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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.
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.
What a ridiculous act of total, colossal, gutsy arrogance.
I am talking, of course, about the sheer length of Oshi no Ko‘s first episode. Nothing else, just its pure runtime in minutes. 90 of the suckers, basically a shortish movie or longish OVA. Things like that have never been super common, but anecdotally, I feel like they’re even less so these days. And it’s not like this is the Unlimited Blade Works anime here, while this is definitely a highly-anticipated manga adaptation, it doesn’t have the previous history of an existing franchise that something like that did, so the mere act of having a premiere clocking in at over an hour feels like some thrown gauntlet or line drawn in the sand. A statement that, really, this is Oshi no Ko‘s season; anything else that’s around just happens to be airing during it.
Were this almost any other series I’d not give the simple length of the first episode this much thought. (Honestly, I’d probably write it off as a pointless indulgence in most cases.) But Oshi no Ko gets to strive for blockbuster status like that. It is, after all, a story primarily about the vicious gnashing of the pop machine. It only makes sense that it would try to trump every competitor in its field at the moment. That’s how the business works; go hard or go home.
I’ve already spoken at length about the actual staff involved here, so I won’t rehash those points again. Most likely, the question you all have on your minds is more what Oshi no Ko actually is. After all, if you haven’t read the manga and are only keeping up with what I (and similar writers) are saying, you might be a little lost. Isn’t this just a dark take on the idol genre? Kind of like what 22/7 was trying to do? (But hopefully, you know, better than that?)
Well, yes and no. There are really two main stories in Oshi no Ko, and the entertainment industry stuff is definitely the main focus for most of it, but we actually start over on that other plotline instead. And while that one is certainly also caused by the dark underbelly of the entertainment industry, it’s a bit more extreme. Enough so that I’ve seen it written off as shock value, a point of view I don’t remotely agree with but which I do understand. A general word of warning: we’re going to get into some gnarly territory both over the course of today’s column and over the course of me covering Oshi no Ko in general.
But first, let’s lay out where all of this begins.
Here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine you’re a countryside doctor named Goro Amemiya [Kento Itou]. That must be a pretty tense, high-stakes job, right? Imagine that, perhaps, as an escape from the stresses of your position, you get really into this one singer. You love her songs, her look, just her general charisma from head to toe. In modern internet pop parlance, we’d call you a stan. The person who got you into all this stuff was a chronically ill girl named Sarina [Tomoyo Takayanagi]. She’s gone now, and you admit that perhaps taking up her own obsession with that singer, Hoshino Ai, of BKomachi [Rie Takahashi], is you in some way conflating the two in your mind. With more of a reason than most, perhaps, given a conversation the two of you once had where she asked what you thought about the idea of being born into fame and status; maybe it was just idle fantasizing from a sick girl, but it’s stuck in your mind. And maybe, too, none of this is exactly healthy—despite being a doctor yourself, you aren’t really sure—but you aren’t hurting anyone, and you seem to be a decent doctor, so this is tolerated as an eccentricity of both you and your practice. Things are, broadly, going fine.
You’re this guy. (In the context of this rhetorical device.)
Then, one day, your favorite idol walks into your practice. She is 20 weeks pregnant. You’re a professional, so you keep your emotions—the childish glee of seeing your favorite singer in person, the shock of this particular development—pretty much entirely out of the waiting room. You don’t want to make things worse for her, after all. She seems pretty chipper about the whole thing, and intent on keeping the twins(!) she’s carrying. Her manager and legal guardian is a lot less so, and seems to think that this would cause a scandal that’d end her career (and his own agency). Unfortunately, he is probably right.
I’ll kill the second-person narration here, because I want to make an important aside. To those of us in the US or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, the aspersions cast on an idol who gets married and has kids might seem kind of weird. But, this is how J-Idol culture operated for a very long time and to some extent continues to operate, and while we don’t have the time or space here to get into an entire digression about how deeply fucked up that entire system is, it is worth putting a pin in that fucked-upness, because illustrating that; turning this whole industry over and poking at it all the while, is essentially what Oshi no Ko is about. (Idol culture isn’t actually unique in this way, in any case, and the US has been puritanical about these sorts of things in a similar way far more recently than I think most realize, but we’re getting into asides-within-asides territory at this point, so that’s a discussion for another time.)
Someone who does not abide by this dichotomy; idol or parent, virgin or whore, is Ai herself. Ai gets her first spotlight scene about ten minutes into the episode—yes, we’re not even a half hour in yet—and she is stunning, a lodestar of cheery charisma, and so obviously the kind of person who can make you feel more important just by talking to you.
One of the hardest things to do when creating a story about any kind of entertainment is to sell the entertainers themselves as entertainers and performing artists. Real people can have natural charm, a character within a narrative must be given charm, and it generally serves some purpose. Ai spouts off a monologue about how idols are talented liars, how she loves her job because she gets to put on this façade for people, and how she isn’t going to go public with her kids. She’s going to be both; a good parent and a popular idol. We could never hear a single note from the young woman, and this scene alone would make it obvious how incredibly magnetic she must be. Even as, it must be noted somewhere, HiDIVE’s video for American viewers absolutely fuzzes the hell out of the nighttime backdrop here. It’s pretty unfortunate, but it can’t smother the dusky magic of the scene.
Goro takes his work very seriously. Doubly so, given the status of his patient, and works with her during the remaining 20 weeks of her pregnancy to ensure the best conditions possible. He even starts to think of this as the entire reason he became a doctor. Destiny, in a sense, leading him to help out his—and Sarina’s—favorite idol in her time of need. But if that is destiny at work, then destiny has a strange sense of humor indeed.
One night, after preparing Ai for her delivery, Goro steps out, only to be confronted by a strange man in a gray hoodie who angrily asks him if he’s Hoshino Ai’s doctor. This is alarming for several reasons; the guy’s angry tone, the fact that he’s appeared out of nowhere, and the fact that Ai’s surname has never been a matter of public record. (It’s a Madonna situation but to an even greater extreme, one supposes.) Goro and this man have a brief confrontation, and it ends with our apparent protagonist getting shoved off of a cliff. He doesn’t make it, but as he lays dying, something truly strange happens as his consciousness begins to slip away. His mind flashes back to that conversation with Sarina years ago, about what one would do if they were reborn as a celebrity’s child, and the series gets ambitious in depicting the moment of death-of-consciousness as the truly surreal thing it must actually be; stuttering video, rapid flash cuts to crows and ultrasounds, a hazy, bright filter all over everything.
And then, the moment of Oshi no Ko‘s first big swerve, as Goro dies, and the cycle of reincarnation works its magic. There is no delicate way to put it; yes, the man has been reborn as his oshii’s own son. Yes, it is absolutely a fucking wild way to start this story, a sort of brilliant-bizarre head check that’s given a moment to settle in by the title card drop. But we’re not done yet, not by a long shot.
For a while, after that particular reveal, it seems like Oshi no Ko might become a different anime entirely. Most of what immediately follows is pretty lighthearted, following the misadventures of Ai as she tries to get back on her feet career-wise while taking care of her kids and concealing them from the public at the same time. As Goro—now Aquamarine [Yumi Uchiyama] for the remainder of the show, alongside his twin sister Ruby [Yurie Igoma]—points out, she’s not really equipped to be a terribly effective mom. But rather than criticizing her, the series does paint her as sympathetic. (It also, interestingly, points out that she’s essentially faceblind, possibly the only anime character I can think of who canonically is so.) More generally; this section of the episode is a lot more lighthearted, and is more in line with some of studio Doga Kobo‘s other work. For a few minutes, you can kind of talk yourself into thinking we might have another Helpful Fox Senko-san or something on our hands. Basically, a story about a guy who gets pampered by a woman through contrived supernatural circumstances. Or, at the very least, a zany comedy that just happens to have a stunningly bizarre setup.
The antics that occur during this part of the episode won’t pop that notion, but the pretty gross talk that some of the staff engage in while BKomachi are staging their big comeback performance might. It really is nothing but a parade of denigration; one staff member insults their music, another makes plans aloud to try to hook one of the girls up with his manager, a third makes a leery comment about one of the other girls’ chests and wonders if he can get her to do pinup work. ETC. The intercut of this and baby Aquamarine back at home obsessing over how talented his mama is—and make no mistake, Ai is talented, if she’s charismatic off-stage she turns into a total fucking supernova while actually on stage—is intentional and instructional. These are two sides of the same coin. With a third, even darker aspect coming into focus when we briefly flash aside to the stalker, muttering to himself in a room papered over with Ai posters.
That aside, the show takes some time to add some levity here, sure, and it’s actually intermittently pretty funny in general, although prone to maybe crossing lines it shouldn’t. There is a whole digression here, in fact, between Aqua and an also-reincarnated-from-someone Ruby, about the ethics of babies that host reincarnated souls breastfeeding, that could probably have been cut and no one of note would really have missed it. On the other hand, the whole segment with Aqua and Ruby psyching out their babysitter when she starts plotting to expose Ai to the press is pretty amazing, with Ruby claiming to be an incarnation of Amaterasu and such. That particular scene is even better in anime form than in the manga, so maybe some of the less-great humor is worth it. But the important point here is that OnK does not become a fluffy comedy series. This is still Oshi no Ko we’re talking about, and all of that is followed up by a moment where Ai, namesearching herself on Twitter while already in a low mood about a lack of money (terrible idea, folks!) stumbles onto an account accusing her of being “strictly professional.” That is to say, a performer without any kind of soul or spark. When she performs in concert not long afterward, the tweet sticks to her vision like a filter, literally tinting her thoughts and preventing her from truly being in the moment.
And even the more lighthearted moments have a bit of bitterness to them. To wit; the twins’ babysitter takes them to that concert at their insistence. There, they pretty much wild out in their strollers and, understandably, the sight of two little kids doing idol fan dances catches eyes and someone records it, and it ends up going viral. So does Ai’s big, proud, broad smile when she catches sight of them, and the knock-on effects of the good publicity make her turn toward the rather cynical again; if the people want a specific smile, she can give them one. This is a pro we’re talking about, after all.
Mind you, Ai’s newfound success on stage does not necessarily translate to success elsewhere. She’s given a role in a TV drama, but it’s a bit part, and most of it ends up cut. More important in this scene is a director character [Yasuyuki Kase] who we’ll meet many more times before this series is over, who talks with the quite-precocious Aquamarine about the different kinds of actors and eventually hands him his business card. That becomes relevant when Aqua finds out that Ai’s been so heavily chopped out of the show; he actually calls the director to complain! Even more astoundingly, this actually works out for him. The director explains his side, but does offer Ai another job, this time on a film.
On the condition that Aquamarine be in the project too.
The film is one that calls for a pair of creepy child roles. And it’s here that we’re introduced to the arrogant, crimson-haired child actress Kana [Megumi Han], another character who will become important to this story as it plays out. Initially dismissive, Kana casually insults both Aqua and his mother, assuming that they’re a pair of non-talents that were only added to the film as a favor. When she has to actually act beside Aqua, she’s floored. Less because he’s a great actor for his age and more because he’s able to intuit that what the director wants him to do isn’t really act at all. It’s to just be himself. He imagines the director saying something like “you’re plenty creepy already”—honestly not an entirely unreasonable reaction to a two-year-old who’s this self-assured—and in the process he totally shows Kana up, and she blows up at him, crying for a reshoot because, well, she wants to be the center of attention.
This entire part of the episode is quite good, but it does feel rather like an aside, and it ends with a timeskip. Evidence that perhaps these were originally conceived as three separate episodes and then later reworked as one singular chunk? Who can say. Either way, the format works for what Oshi no Ko is trying to do, marketing ploy or no.
After this, Ruby gets some focus. She is, perhaps unsurprisingly, revealed to be the reincarnation of Sarina, the disabled girl who got Goro into Ai in the first place. We do get into some admittedly dicey territory here; Sarina, it’s clear, wanted to not just admire idols but to be one in her past life, and it was something her disability kept her from. As someone who, for various physical reasons, has also had to forego the performing arts, I do sympathize. I am not sure how others will feel, especially those with conditions that more closely mirror what Sarina actually had. If someone were to tell me they found this a little offensive, I wouldn’t tell them they were wrong to. These things strike different chords—good and bad—for different people.
For me personally, the sheer joy that Ruby explodes with when she discovers that now, finally, she can dance connects with me on a pretty deep level. The show gets very abstract for a little bit here to convey that joy, too, dissolving into ribbons of pure figure and color as Ruby hits idol steps in a mirror. If nothing else, it’s an impressively ambitious bit of visual work.
But, the happiness is short lived, because as the episode closes in on its end, so does something else.
Ai has one other person in her life aside from her family and her manager. We never see him directly, and only know he exists from Ai talking to him through a payphone. But it’s clear from these conversations alone that the person she’s talking to is her ex. Unfortunately, Ai seems to be a pretty terrible judge of character, and her ex also seems to be the person who gave that stalker her hospital address years ago.
How do we know that? Because here, he does it again. The stalker shows up to Ai’s brand new apartment, which he mysteriously knows the location of, and stabs her in the gut.
In the manga, Ai’s death is shocking. An exclamation point, a hurried page turn. Here, given the breadth and depth of this team’s full production weight in the anime, it becomes absolutely heartwrenching. Ai’s slow, pained monologue, wherein she wonders what kind of people Ruby and Aqua will grow up to be, imagining them as an idol and an actor respectively, as she’s literally bleeding out onto her apartment’s floor, is the kind of thing that one cannot really recapture in other words. It’s a tragic, mesmerizing thing, and voice actress Takahashi Rie, herself an idol, deserves every accolade she’ll get for this performance twice over, delivering Ai’s final words in a strained, teary yelp. Ai’s last words to her children are that she loves them—something she has struggled to say, because she’s so used to saying it and not meaning it. Then, content that she was at least able to sincerely tell someone, her kids, that she loves them, she passes on. The stars in her eyes literally black out and vanish. She’s gone. Just like that.
In the days that follow, a bleak, grey wind blows over the lives of those that Ai has touched. Most notably her kids of course, but also her many fans (one of whom, in a moment that for some reason really got to me, is waving a little heart-shaped paper fan that says “Ai Fan for Eternity” on it). The news cycle is less kind, and Ai’s tragic passing is exploited as a public interest story, with Twitterites—in a way that is frankly pretty on-point for that website—gossiping about how it’s not actually surprising that she was killed, given that she was an idol who started dating someone. (Ruby, completely correctly, reacts with a fiery rant about how people who say things like this are usually disaffected lonely people who take out their own lack of luck in love on women in general. Igoma Yurie expresses the character’s bitter anger to a perfect tee, another excellent vocal performance in an episode full of them.)
After only a few days, the public moves on, and a quiet snow blankets Tokyo.
We end on Aqua swearing vengeance; it occurs to him that someone must’ve tipped off the stalker about where exactly Ai could be found, and given Ai’s very narrow social circle, this person—again, probably her ex, and therefore Aqua’s own father—is directly responsible for not only Ai’s death but also that of Aqua’s previous self. Maybe it’s not so strange that the kid basically cracks. The art style changes to accommodate, going into full moving-painting mode as a black flame of revenge is born in his heart, and he asks the director who gave him his first role to raise him in Ai’s absence. Years later, as he and Ruby set out for their first day of high school in what will become the remainder of the series’ “present day”, Aqua [Takeo Ootsuka, in this last scene and for the remainder of the show] still has vengeance on the mind.
This—all of this; the bad jokes, the reincarnation shenanigans, the legit comedic chops, the extensive attention paid to the ins and outs of the entertainment industry, the spotlights so hot they burn holes in the stage, the tragedy, the heartbreak, the death—is Oshi no Ko, a bizarre blockbuster that resonates with everyone and no one. It is an army of one. I have never run into another series that’s truly like it, and I’m not sure I ever will. But in all of its wild mood-swinging glory, Oshi no Ko is also kind of transcendent. That’s not the same as flawless, but but this is the sort of drama you can let yourself get caught up in, if you’re the type. (And I very much am.) That’s why it can pull off things like an hour and a half-long first episode. The show itself has a star quality.
As for our real leads, it’s not really a spoiler to say that, in spite of everything that happens here, both Aqua and Ruby will pursue careers in the industry. Aqua with the hope of finding the man truly responsible for his mother’s death, Ruby to fulfill her and Ai’s dream of her becoming an idol. It’s a long, twisted road, one no one is guaranteed to get out of alive. And all told, we’re only at the start of it. The entertainment industry is a voracious beast that eats its own young, littered with the corpses of those who burned out at the top and those who never made it. Hoshino Ai is, here, in true tragedy, reduced to one of those skeletons. One answer to the question; what does it really mean to be famous?
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 Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
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.
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.
Picture this; two-faced, self-absorbed little girl who goes out of her way to make people think she’s a total angel gets strong-armed into working at a yuri-themed café as compensation for minorly injuring one of their actual employees. This premise sounds like something straight out of a yuri series itself, because that’s exactly what Yuri is My Job! is (note the title), but it’s an unusually meta and self-aware one. Yuri, in as much as it has a mainstream, tends toward more domestic stories these days except on its absolute outside edges (eg. Otherside Picnic), so something like this that’s a little different from the norm is an interesting way to shake things up. In a sideways sort of way, its premise also makes it an anime about acting—albeit in a distinctly different fashion than, say, its contemporary World Dai Star or anything like that—and in particular, about someone who is kind of bad at acting.
That’d be our protagonist, Hime [Yui Ogura], who is the one roped into working at this place, and it’s no ordinary eatery. The cafe workers, in addition to the minutiae of actually running a café, act out a sort of perpetually-ongoing play about their imaginary lives as students at an all-girls’ school called Liebe Girls’ Academy. The business of running the establishment and the narrative are tightly interweaved, with the café itself being flavored as a “salon” that the students work at. The particular style that Yuri is My Job! is reaching for here is called Class-S. I’m sure I don’t need to explain that one to my yuri soldiers, but for the rest of you, to greatly, greatly simplify; it’s stuff in the same broad vein as Maria Watches Over Us, a kind of romantic schoolgirl life series / drama, in varying mixtures depending on the series, usually featuring what are pretty explicitly wlw romantic relationships but with an air of plausible deniability about them. This style used to be very popular but has since largely been supplanted by other sorts of yuri. Nonetheless, it retains a fanbase, and certainly retains one within the world of Yuri is My Job! itself. Hence the theme.
The actual narrative and backstory of the fictional academy is fairly complex, and all of the girls play specific characters with defined relationships to each other. Hime, who spends much of her time in her own day to day life convincing people that she’s basically an angel, does not really understand this. During her first day, she tries to charm the cafe’s customers and her coworkers alike the same way she charms other people in her everyday life, and it doesn’t really work. In particular, she makes a genuinely pretty massive slip-up by calling another girl, Mitsuki [Sumire Uesaka], onee-sama. To Hime, and, I’m sure, much of the audience, this is a best-guess as to what the sort of character who’s involved in this setting might call an older girl she finds reliable. But she fails to account for either the rules of this whole ordeal or for the potential reactions of the customers, and this simple act of being a bit overly-familiar becomes a whole thing. Mitsuki gets quite annoyed with her, and the cafe’s manager has to consider adjustments to the cafe’s ongoing narrative to accommodate what the customers heard her say. (Will it surprise you to learn that the café has a fan website and that people gossip about the goings-on in the fictional school there? It shouldn’t.)
One might think I’d find Hime sympathetic here, but to be honest, her “façade” as she frequently calls it makes it a bit difficult to actually like her terribly much this early on. And, well, I’ve gone off enough times this season about how important it is to be able to “buy” someone as a talent when seeing them involved in an even fairly minor performing art. Hime tries to barrel through all of these dramatic motions with nothing but a relentlessly princessy sort of aura, and it just doesn’t work. It’s not Hime’s fault that she ends up having to work at this place, but she is making everyone else’s job harder. Mitsuki has every right to be annoyed! Things get even worse when the manager proposes possibly having Mitsuki and Hime’s characters become Schwestern—German for “sisters”, plural, and a term here used for a sort of heavily romantically-coded upperclassman/underclassman relationship—and exchange the traditional cross-shaped pins (called Kreuze) to demonstrate their devotion to each other. Mitsuki is pretty against the idea, given that Hime’s only just started working there and she doesn’t particularly like the new hire in the first place. But Hime, unfortunately, sees this as another opportunity to try to pour on the charisma, which leads to her second day at the cafe. One even more disastrous than the first.
Before we get to that, though. Let’s pull back for a second and consider what the show is doing with all this. Because all interactions within the cafe are inherently just performances, there is the temptation to ask; is Yuri is MyJob! criticizing yuri audiences? Are we being accused of just wanting to watch girls pine for each other without dealing with any of the real ramifications of two women in love? If we are, the show’s not particularly picky about who it’s aiming that shot at. The cafe’s customer base seems to consist of about an even split of men and women (although the former are the only ones to vocally complain when Hime comes on too strong, an interesting thing to note).
To be honest, no, I don’t really think that’s what the series is trying to do. With the obvious caveat that I’m only going off of one episode here, I think the show’s position is more that this whole space that the café creates is, of course, a performed fantasy, and one that must end at a certain point each day. But, it also seems to take the view that this fantasy is important. It’s certainly important to Mitsuki, who becomes ever more frustrated with Hime over the course of her second day at the cafe specifically because she doesn’t seem to recognize this importance. Hime treats this as a job and an obligation. For Mitsuki, it is pretty obviously a passion.
Frankly, for anyone who—like yours truly—gets secondhand embarrassment easily, day two is a rough watch. Hime seems pretty used to her little charm routine getting most people to like or at least tolerate her, and when it doesn’t work during her café shifts she doesn’t really know what to do. She doesn’t even seem entirely aware that her pushiness is unwelcome as she glibly tries to steer the narrative toward her character and Mitsuki’s becoming romance-buddies. And she does not get it when both Mitsuki herself and the other café girls try to walk her away from that idea, despite their increasingly-obvious frustration. (I would describe watching this as akin to watching someone walk, unbothered, into a blazing inferno. Hime’s obliviousness and ego reach some truly stunning levels here.) Eventually, she actually succeeds in making this so, within the “lore” of the café. But at the cost of Mitsuki now absolutely hating her guts, which is, frankly, a pretty understandable reaction. The episode ends on her telling Hime as much, to Hime’s confusion.
If I pull back from the embarrassment, I get what’s going on here. Hime doesn’t really understand how the café works at the end of the day, and doesn’t understand that it’s such a big deal to Mitsuki. Presumably, her learning to do so—and learning to see the value in what the café does, as a maintained, creative narrative space—will form her arc over the course of the series, and we the audience will eventually be collectively in Hime’s corner. (If you like overconfident failgirls I imagine some of you already are.) Me though? Right now, I’m in Mitsuki’s corner, and I kind of hate Hime.
But, I must emphasize, that’s not actually a criticism. Being able to elicit emotions this strong is actually a very good thing for something like this, and what’s impressive is that Yuri is My Job! also proves itself to be surprisingly multifaceted here. I can’t wait to see what else it has in store. Even if I have to watch Hime march into that inferno a dozen more times to get there.
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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.
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.
You can probably picture it from the word “isekai” alone, but humor me here; somewhere in a nondescript, grim fantasy universe, a stoic antihero named Sir Shagura closes in on his greatest nemesis, the dread necromancer known only as the Corpse God. The two trade displays of immense power; Shagura, as both a master swordsman and sorcerer, has both literally bone-cracking physical strength on his side and a rune-spamming sort of instant spellcraft that Dead Mount Death Play inherits from an older, pre-isekai boom, strain of narou-kei. (It wouldn’t look too out of place in A Certain Magical Index, if my memory’s serving me right.) The Corpse God, of course, has his necromancy, and conjures whole hordes of skeleton soldiers and a pretty badass undead dragon to stop Shagura’s heroic rampage. As the two fight, it becomes clear that this cool-looking but profoundly D&D-ass setup is just one layer of something deeper and stranger. Shagura, it turns out, has an “evil eye” that lets him see the ghosts of those he’s killed, from monsters and bandits all the way down to birds and bugs. So does the Corpse God. They put this power, it’s fair to say, to pretty different ends.
But just as it seems like “what if an isekai protagonist had necromancy powers” might be all DMDP is working with, it flips over its first card. The Corpse God, near destruction, casts some bizarre spell that Shagura’s never seen. Shagura, apparently, dies, as the actual video starts to glitch and sputter out like a damaged VHS tape. After his death, Shagura awakes in yet another strange and wonderful world. You’ve probably heard of it, because it’s ours.
Shagura opens his eyes in the body of one Polka Shinoyama [Yuki Sakakihara], dazed and confused as memories of both his own past life and that of his new body’s come back to him in a slow trickle over the course of the rest of the episode. This whole “memory bleed” phenomenon has been explored in a lot of isekai, so it’s interesting to see it inverted (if not necessarily disregarded) here. Polka is set in a state of gentle wonder by Japan, where he finds himself, noting that the children he sees seem to be happy, that there’s little violence, and, more to his chagrin, that there isn’t really much magic either. He’s so taken by all this, in fact, that he doesn’t notice the huge gash in his own throat that he’s somehow surviving just fine. He certainly doesn’t notice the mysterious man monitoring him via drone-cam, shocked that this guy is up and walking about. It’s pretty clear from even this fairly early stage that something is going on, but what remains a mystery.
The usual isekai protagonist footnotes do still apply; he pretty quickly regains the ability to speak Japanese after waking up (despite a cool segment where he can’t understand the police officers who try to ask him about that huge cut across his neck, who get subtitled with keysmashes in the English sub track), and he deduces a whole bunch of things unreasonably quickly. This dude is still an isekai protagonist, while he’s notably less obnoxious than many examples of the genre (and DMDP is notably less so in general, no stat screens here so far, thank god), he still is one.
Thankfully though, it’s not all isekai genre clichés. Some of Dead Mount Death Play is other genres’ genre clichés. Which, to be honest? Is kind of welcome at this point. Here’s one I never get tired of; the initially friendly girl who turns out to be a gleefully murderous assassin. In DMDP, that’d be Misaki [Inori Minase], who provides us with one of the season’s most Twitter-ready oneliners as she yanks Polka away from the cops. As she does so, DMDP flips the script twice more.
Surprise #1: she’s actually the girl who killed Polka the first time, and now she’s back to finish the job. (And it must be said, she looks great while doing it; that jacket with “GET HOOKD” written on the back? That’s a killer fashion statement.) There is a fight that takes place in a building that the yakuza have been using as a body-disposal facility, which turns out to be flooded with ghosts.
Surprise #2: “Polka” is not actually Shagura. The guy we’ve been following since the transition to “our” world is actually the Corpse God himself, who we learn cast some sort of spell on himself mere moments before Shagura offed him. (I like to think it has some equally D&D-ass name like Isekai Self or something.) He disposes of Misaki by drawing on the power of the spirits in the building in an admittedly pretty badass little sequence where he impales her on an enormous skeletal appendage. He tosses down a quip/vague mission statement about how this will help him lead a truly peaceful life (I would love to know fucking how, but that’s a question for next week I suppose). Roll credits.
All told, I like Dead Mount Death Play so far, but I wouldn’t quite say I love it. And as far as its relationship to its parent genre, DMDP is not a piece of frustrated hatemail like last year’s The Executioner & Her Way of Life, so I’d advise against going in with the expectation that you’re going to see isekai as a format ripped apart or anything of the sort. A lot of the standard isekai beats are still here, but they’re mostly inverted by the change of scenery, and that alone is worth something in a genre this oversaturated. (This is the second one I’ve covered this season and I don’t even seek these things out.) But the fact that they are here at all makes me wonder how much staying power this thing truly has, even given that it has two cours to fully explore its potential.
On the other hand, the show works in two pretty effective twists in its first episode. If it keeps doing that sort of thing, it might be pretty hard to predict where the hell this is all going. DMDP, as a series from former Baccano! and Durarara!! writer Ryougo Narita, had a fair bit of hype behind it going into this season. I’m not going to claim I understand that hype yet, exactly, but this first episode was, at the very least, extremely entertaining, a few notably sour bits aside. (The show’s humor is very dated, something viewers will either find charming or incredibly offputting. I’m not sure where I fall yet.) It would be pretty easy for this series to lapse back into nothing but cliche without much effort. Misaki’s presence in the marketing as a main character makes it pretty obvious that she’ll be brought back to life at some point, which will put her in his debt in an abstract sort of way, or possibly a magically-enabled literal one, a truly draining tendency of isekai fiction to a far greater extent than it is in any other genre of anime. There are a lot of ways this could go wrong, and I’m sure the reappearance of the real Shagura in the episode’s closing minutes, which indicates that his world will continue to play a role in the story, will put some off as well.
But! I remain optimistic for the time being. Plus, we don’t get a lot of urban fantasy action anime anymore, and if one has to piggyback on the isekai boom to get made, well, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.
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 Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
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.
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.
Somehow, this is a genre. I can only think of a few off the top of my head—2021’s Rumble Garandoll, 2017’s Akiba’s Trip, 2015’s The Rolling Girls, arguably Anime-Gataris, also from 2017 counts too—but it’s a real, if small phenomenon, one without a defined name, at least over here in the Anglosphere. I tend to call them otaku action shows; anime that cast the social divide between the hardcore nerds of the world and “normal people” (no one is actually “normal,” but that’s another subject) as a real source of actual, physical conflict. What would happen, they often ask, if society’s dislike of people who are just generally weird or are into things considered unacceptable, turned truly ugly?
It’s a bit of a loaded question. And I’ve never seen one of these anime that properly grapples with it, although Rumble Garandoll, with its art-hating fascist antagonists, came pretty close. The general premise of these things always sounds like paranoid nerd persecution fantasy bullshit when you spell it out; yeah man, what if they rounded up people who liked anime or kinky porn or J-pop or whatever and put us all in camps? That sure would suck. Thankfully, it doesn’t really happen. Nonetheless, that doesn’t inherently make the question these things are asking worthless, and while they tend to be very campy, they’re almost never intended to just be jokes; something can be silly but still ask serious questions. And honestly, as someone who is both part of an actively under attack minority in the country I live in (I’m transgender) and who is also a huge nerd, I find the comparison to be less nonsensical and offensive than it might appear at first glance. That’s not to say that Magical Destroyers, the first anime from fashion designer, A$AP Rocky acquaintance, and aspiring auteur Jun Inagawa, is necessarily the first of its genre to actually successfully thread this needle, but it’s going to make an honest go of it. That counts for something, even if not everything here works. (I’ll say upfront I mostly really liked this first episode, but a small handful of the gags cross lines I wish they wouldn’t. Hopefully there will be less of that going forward.)
The premise here is dead simple, and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the second half of Akiba’s Trip or any part of Rumble Garanndoll. One day, out of the blue, an army of mysterious Bad Guys yanks all of Japan’s otaku media off the shelf and starts rounding people up. Despite their hilariously stupid owo masks, these guys mean business, and things get bad fast.
Naturally, this spurs the country’s otaku to revolution, hoisting a black-and-red flag over the next several years as their chief organizer and leader Otaku Hero [Makoto Furukawa], one of our protagonists and the only guy among them, turns the Resistance from dream to reality, and his people capture Akihabara from the tyrants, who go by the name “the Shobon Army.”
But that’s the past. By the time we’re flung back to the present, three years have passed, and the Resistance is in shambles. Things are looking bleak, and at his wits’ end, Otaku Hero quits his position as the informal rebel leader upon learning that an entire patrol, including one of his elite “magical girl” soldiers, Blue, has been captured. This does not sit well with Anarchy [Ai Fairouz], his de facto second-in-command, obvious love interest (yeah, this one’s straight. Sorry yuri soldiers) and another one of the magical girls in question. Minutes later, we find out that the government is launching an operation to snuff out the remnants of the otaku resistance. Things are bleak, and Anarchy and Hero have a bit of a fight over the future of the resistance.
It’s worth pausing for a moment here to consider the other genre that Magical Destroyers draws heavily from. It’s not a secret that the show is also working with magical girl material. Specifically, the genre’s latter-day format as being primarily about superpowered magical warriors fighting off the forces of evil. Some of the marketing pushed this angle hard enough that I can imagine some people being burned by the presence of a male co-lead at all, but Otaku and Anarchy get about equal billing, and despite a scene where she breaks down over his departure, it’s eventually her own act of courage—raising the otaku flag over the apartment complex that the resistance is camped out in—that convinces him to take up leadership again.
If that were all she did, I might still think Anarchy’s role in this story is a bit reduced from what it should be. But then, in the latter half of the episode, she basically takes over entirely, and Magical Destroyers goes from having a solid premiere to having an absolutely great one.
There’s a pretty amazing meta non-twist here, in fact. For most of the first episode we don’t actually see Anarchy use any of her powers, and given that the marketing was already a little misleading (much of it left out Otaku Hero entirely), it’s easy to assume that the “magical girls” here aren’t actually such at all, that magic doesn’t even exist in this setting, and that they’re all just cosplayers Batman-ing around with explosives or whatever. Then, we cut back to a scene we were shown devoid of context as a cold open, where Anarchy dives out of a plane to assault the otaku prison, and does so without a parachute. Then, this happens.
It is well and truly a moment, one of the year’s best so far, and if Magical Destroyers never reaches that high again, it would maybe still be worth it just for the 30 or so seconds that her henshin sequence lasts. Anarchy in all-business mode is an absolute powerhouse, and while Fairouz’ performance does a lot to sell the character’s more outlandish aspects, they arguably don’t need selling. After a solid 20 minutes where Anarchy seems, honestly, like all talk and no walk, it’s insanely refreshing to see just how much she’s actually bringing to the table. As she fights, her dynamic with Otaku Hero starts making a kind of sense; you can think of them respectively as the brawn and the brains of the Otaku Resistance’s operation. They’re complimentary forces.
They do eventually find and rescue Blue of course. (Who is tied up in bondage gear, one of the episode’s iffier jokes that gets pushed further over the line and back into genuinely funny territory when we find out that the reason she got caught in the first place is that she was catfished and wanted to hook up with someone she met online.) The episode’s triumphant coda leaves a lot of possible angles for the series to explore, and while it’s certainly always possible that something like this will crash and burn, I’m actually pretty confident that Magical Destroyers will remain worth watching. There’s a substance to this style, an order to the chaos, and a method to the madness.
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 Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
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.
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.
For a little while, it seemed like we might not even get more Birdie Wing. The announcement of a second season came late in the first’s run, and even after it was announced, it ended up delayed, being pushed from the early winter deadzone to, well, now, the feverish pitch of an absolute monster of a season. Birdie Wing is not one to shrink from the competition; much like Eve herself, the presence of those ostensibly bigger and badder just drives Birdie Wing to new heights. Is it still fundamentally the same mid-budget goofy fucking golf battle girl anime we saw back in season one? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Not even a little bit. Birdie Wing swings in like it never left, picking up immediately from the last minor plot line in Season 1, and establishing a whole host of new things in the process.
It’s tempting to go on about, say, Aoi being cranky that she doesn’t win a kiss from Eve, but honestly the real focus of the second season’s first episode is relative newcomer Iijima Kaoruko. Compared to Eve’s more out there opponents, she’s pretty straight-laced, and her motive seems to mainly be to show up her former coach (that’d be Reiya Amuro, the Gundam-themed hardass who serves as one of the show’s big references to that other Bandai franchise with lesbians that’s returning soon). Iijima is one of a few characters with proper “golf powers”, like what Eve has with her “Bullet” shots. She can enter “the Zone”—which she does by gravely intoning “In The Zone” in English—wherein an orange filter douses the golf course and a line of flowers sprouts up along the route she needs to take to her goal. You don’t need me to tell you this is silly. Silly is Birdie Wing’s bread and butter, but god damn is this silly. It’s also kind of great. (Presumably, the flowers represent The Power of Lesbianism. Iijima never actually says anything to strongly indicate she’s gay, but, come on, it’s Birdie Wing.) The Zone, and its more advanced version, In The Zone: Deep, are basically golf kaio-kens, in that they confer incredible power but burn through Iijima’s energy pretty quickly.
None of this really even remotely fazes Eve, who continues to treat golf of all types like a life-or-death situation that she’s nonetheless having a blast playing her way out of. This episode does not reach the heights of when that was literal back in Season 1, but I must imagine it’s going to head there before too long. Birdie Wing is not the short of show that knows much about restraint.
We also learn a little more about Eve’s backstory here, including the pretty incredible notion that Leo, the man who taught her to play golf and Birdie Wing‘s local Char Aznable xerox, seems to have thought she possibly had the potential to be some sort of Golf Chosen One. This isn’t elaborated upon here, but if Birdie Wing plans to aim for ever-greater heights—and it really seems like it is—there are worse ways to do that than to rope the flightly concepts of destiny and fate into your show’s narrative. For now, we mostly get some stuff about her unlocking a new bullet color (which seems to leave her dazed and confused upon use in the episode’s final scene). In the end, she blows Iijima out of the water; another victim to Eve’s golf-murder spree.
Golfing!
There are a few other things that come up here as well (whatever is going on with Aoi suddenly developing a headache certainly seems like it’ll be important going forward), but really, the main thing is just the relief that Birdie Wing is what it’s always been. Good old fashioned normal golf; from a universe much cooler than ours.
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 Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
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.
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