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Upon making my first serious effort to approach this season and see what people were watching, and what was thereby worth reviewing, I was disappointed by how little shock I felt when seeing an idol show not only among the most popular anime of the season, but among the most highly rated anime currently listed on MAL. I was disappointed by how easily my mind filled in the blanks in my understanding as to how a series belonging to a genre hardly anyone takes seriously or seems to enjoy, at least last time I checked, found itself in the center of such limelight, because after ... all, I shouldn’t have had a clue. I should’ve been excited, thinking, “Oooo! I wander what makes this idol show different! I wander what makes people feel so comfortable putting all their eggs in such an ostensibly boring looking basket! Surely there must be something interesting and innovative to make this one really stand out and earn all this hype!” And at first it seemed like these questions would find themselves resolved with something resembling satisfactory answers. Claims endorsing Oshi no Ko’s alleged uniqueness, realism, and honesty, among other things, appeared to reflect the consensus view of the vast majority, with the only coherent dissenting opinions I could find reading like pre-written arguments one could feasibly fling in the direction of any anime daring to feature idols—which to me didn’t feel like serious argument. I mean, if the show was different enough to stand out like this, then the least its detractors could do would be to find something equally different to say against it, right? How sad I was, almost immediately, to have my brain, all too accustomed to this seasonal fever, remind me that no. The answers to all those previous (hypothetical) questions (I didn’t ever actually bother asking) would simply be “nothing.” Oshi no Ko just happens to be on everyone’s screen, as if by some sort of coincidence.

The reception of Oshi no Ko reminds me a lot of Fumetsu no Anata e. Episode one of season one was pretty good, and it made a lot of people cry. Audiences then proceeded to overpraise it massively, but as the show went on and people started to detect and subsequently grow tired of its formula, and not to mention after its decent animation became not-so-decent, the hype died, with season two feeling to many like little more than the producers failing to get the memo. When people recommend Oshi no Ko, they often preface their praise with phrases like, “Don’t even read what I’m about to write. Avoid spoilers at all costs, and go watch episode one yourself before reading ANYTHING.” And as they do this, they implicitly suggest this first episode is some kind of bombshell which one has to see to believe, or at least an episode containing ideas and details difficult enough to offer comment on such that telling one’s reader to form their own opinion seems like an easier option than simply asserting their own. But this turns out to not be the case at all (and it assumes episode one isn’t followed by the rest of the show). If you kidnapped me, locked me in your dingy basement, tied me to a wooden chair, gagged and blindfolded me, and threatened to do to me whatever creepy stalker rapist murders do when they similarly capture their favorite idol if I didn’t give the premise of Oshi no Ko points for creativity, then fine. I give it points for creativity; it’s a show about two idol otaku who get reborn as the twin brother and sister of their favorite idol, who herself has secretly become a teen mom, and who grow up attempting to follow in their celebrity mother’s footsteps…which is admittedly creative, assuming you want to use more euphemistic words than “fucking weird” or “laughably bizarre.” However, this premise doesn’t change the immediate and continuous trajectory of the series—which is nowhere.

The horribly overlong, eighty-two-minute behemoth that is episode one concludes by suggesting to the audience that the series would proceed in thrilling and unpredictable directions, with one of our lead characters devoting his reborn life to solving a grand mystery and hunting for revenge (for reasons I’ll leave unstated), but what follows is *literally* nothing more than the same dime-a-dozen, boring-as-fuck highschool anime dramedy which you and I both have seen a hundred million times each. Everything even slightly idiosyncratic about episode one, from its intelligent talking baby memes to its teen mom idol “I can’t believe the author is writing THIS story” wow-factor, instantly finds itself a more generic direct replacement within minutes of episode two’s beginning, and episode one itself is constantly screaming that—for what little I’ll admit it did differently—the story is written by the same type of person, for the same target audience, as every fucking piece of rancid roadkill every season of anime for some reason feels morally obligated to leave in its tracks. As I’ve explained, my new two-job, seven-day-work-week schedule has made it so I’m having to watch, think about, and write about every anime I’m attempting to review over night—a time of day when I should be getting through what little sleep I can—and holy fucking shit, trying desperately to stay awake while watching Oshi no Ko while already exhausted, chronically depressed, and sleep-deprived is a kind of torture I would not wish on any but my deepest, darkest, most personal enemies. Within minutes we’re being treated to lolicon humor and a character dynamic indistinguishable from Subaru and Ram’s from Re:Zero, and if this motherfucker wasn’t reincarnated as a baby, he’d have been the same self-deprecating, generic-looking, otaku self-insert we’d get from shitty light novel adaptations of that exact same unenviable ilk.

Speaking of Re:Zero, Oshi no Ko boasts dialogue bad enough to make me go crosseyed when reading the subtitles, and almost bad enough to make me regret learning Japanese so I stopped having to. Imagine a Re:Zero-esque teen drama where overdramatic, immature, unlikable crybabies stand around talking about their feelings for entire seasons of made-for-TV entertainment, only instead of placing the characters in a fantasy world with somewhat interesting concepts, place them in the single blandest realization of a preforming arts highschool humanly possible. If merely having that idea in your head gives you a fucking brain aneurysm, I don’t blame you, but if it doesn’t and you can actually take a second to form such an image in your mind, then congratulations. You’ve successfully imagined Oshi no Ko, and you no longer have to subject yourself to the real thing. Dry, endless exposition; loud, unfunny humor; boring, overdone drama. The one and only consistent element of the series which does actually set itself apart from its contemporaries, but which something tells me has nothing to do with how highly its being praised and rated, is how eye-wateringly hypocritical it is. We’ve all seen the type of show that tries so hard to be the “serious” one, and Oshi no Ko is definitely that. “It’s about teenagers wanting to become idols, celebrities, and entertainers, sure—but oh, no!—this ain’t no Love Live! This show is DIFFERENT! This isn’t just your typical highschool anime. This one takes a hard, unflinching look at the industry, and we get to witness these characters transform as they sober up and face the REAL WORLD.” Then you watch the show and it’s as juvenile as ever? Yeah, it’s that, but Oshi no Ko goes a step further. Not only does it shout “look how adult I am” while appearing completely generic, but it also shouts “look how self-aware I am” while appearing completely corrupt.

The actual reason I’d assume this show is so well-regarded by most people is how edgy it is. The selling point which is supposed to be oh-so ingenious is that the show looks like generic shit (and it is, but that’s not important). It’s supposed to look like generic shit with generic cute girls in generic school uniforms in a generic school setting with generic marketing strategies and pandering character designs all surrounding a generic pretty-boy MC, but just as you begin “tricking yourself” into thinking you truly are looking at generic shit, brooding edgeGOD protagonist hero savior turns around, looks directly into the camera, and beings to philosophize, “Everything we do is a lie. From idols to actors, all entertainers are liars, and audiences themselves *want* to be lied to, because the relationship they’ve formed with us is parasocial. Our job, and particularly the job of idols, is to act endearing and seductive enough to get our audiences emotionally invested in our fake personalities, so that way, they then turn around and start financially investing. At this point, the cycle of manipulation is complete, and our paychecks just get fatter and fatter. This is all cynical, this is all cold, hard, mechanical industry, and everyone who pays into it is being lied to.” You, the actual viewer in the actual audience, is then supposed to go, “Woah…that’s deep.” And I guess it is. The problem comes when the series finishes stating these statements only to act as if having stated them gives it some kind of moral high-ground or some degree of self-awareness that makes it intelligent AFTER it commits the exact same sins using the exact same strategies. This is an idol show, a standard teen dramedy about marketable waifus with whom to ship the MC. It is still sucking the golden tit of otaku culture, pandering to the same captive wallets and pocketbooks that pay for exactly what it is supposed to be criticizing, and therefore itself.

Ever since transitioning from a young adult with no commitments or responsibilities to a real fucking adult with far too many of both, my life has consistently been defined by long, undisturbed status quos. My sister, on one hand, ran out of the house and abandoned all sensible decision making influences in her life as soon as possible; got situated in hostiles and apartments with unsavory roommates; got tangled up in lending and borrowing, student debt, and other money troubles; got knocked up by a guy she would soon grow to despise; got admitted into rehab, out of rehab, and soundly into AA—the whole shabang. But me, on the other hand, always planned in advance, monitored, and carefully operated every change in routine which my life would undergo, and I was never ever one to, as least in the big, scary, life-changing kind of way, “make mistakes.” This uneventful little life of mine really must’ve pissed off someone upstairs, though, because 2023 has completely, mercilessly upended this status quo root and stem. Ever since January 5th, my life has witnessed enormous fundamental change after enormous fundamental change, and the daily, weekly, yearly standard of always being able to predict what’s coming next, always having a back-up plan, and always having feet to land on found itself replaced with a seemingly endless series of rapid, blindsiding periods of stressful, terribly consequential change. This new normal has not only left me with no time to devote to my once-defining passions such as watching anime and being SingleH, but also with way too much unwelcome perspective to feel that doing so would even be worth it. I mean, with day-to-day life feeling so much bigger, it’s difficult not to view these loves of mine as being comparatively small. Luckily, though, this season had one truly worthwhile anime for me to watch and review…but it definitely wasn’t Oshi no fucking Ko.

This was an anime sold to me on its premise which failed me on the exactly same token. Isekai anime, for example, are often criticized as being completely and totally, 100% unrealistic on the singular grounds that their protagonists are poorly written for not seeming to care about their previous lives once reincarnated. Obviously every genre has its exceptions, but I’m sure we can all think of a protagonist who got isekai’d by Truck-kun and who didn’t seem to be too terribly bothered by the prospect of leaving behind their families, friends, and—ya know?—entire fucking lives and being reincarnated into a fucking video game. The two reincarnated protagonists of Oshi no Ko are similarly unbelievable for this same reason, but whereas the me of the past had kind of just accepted this trope as part of the genre, the me of the present refused to let it go. To me, Tengoku Daimakyou was the only show of the season truly worth watching and reviewing, but the problem with going to review *good* anime is that you never know how long the process of doing so is actually going to take. With the way my life is now, that thing I once called “spare time” has become alien, and keeping up with seasonal anime in a fashion that doesn’t involve pulling all-nighters has become literally impossible. Since I can’t really budget time for writing the way I used to, I just kinda have to hope life works out in such a way I can effectively last-minute anything I want to write for nowadays, but, just as I was finishing up that brilliant, beautiful, Production IG gem and getting filled with all this inspiration, my aunt died, and so I missed the competitive deadline. Having to pass up a show I was actually passionate about writing for was disheartening enough, but to have the next in line be such an empty husk…I just can’t empathize with characters who move on like an entire lifetime’s worth of experience beyond their interaction with their favorite pop idols is worth nothing of note, whether they left behind shitty lives or not. It seems like every day now I cry; I see something that reminds me of my old friends, and I cry; I see something that reminds me of my old workplace, and I cry; I scroll back through my camera roll, see how different things all used to be, and I cry. Everything these kids cry over…it all just feels as two-dimensional as they are.

But maybe I’m just fucked.

Thank you for reading.

[Originally posted on December 27th, 2022.]

I think little SingleH here is coming to a calm, slow, natural conclusion.

I think little SingleH here is becoming too much of a so-called “normie” to write like themselves anymore, or at least that of them you’ve come to know. I think little SingleH here is getting too much of a life, and I think that if left to continue on present course, the writing produced by this profile will increasingly lean towards the modern-day Hideaki Anno-style preaching and condescension. The writing output of an individual who was depressed and hyper-relatable at one point, but who got out of it ... and who, as a result, became out-of-touch and…I don’t know…old, for lack of a better term? Granted, I definitely continue to be depressed out of my fucking mind—no worries there, plus the fucking alcohol—but I’m still living WAY too much. I’m making too many real friends; I’m having to much success at work; I’m making too many connections; I’m having too much casual sex; I’m fucking around with things and aspects of people and society that, barely a few years ago, I couldn’t have ever possibly imagined. I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore, and as of the day in which I’m writing this, I hugged someone. A friend. Having a real, in-the-flesh “friend” is already fucking bizarre enough, but that I would be able to platonically and emotionally hug her??? Where the fuck am I? WHO the fuck am I??? She asked if I needed a hug during my lunch, and I just straight-up took it as a joke. When I was walking away to clock back in, I turned around and said, “You would hug me?” And she just laughed. Later, when I was getting ready to leave, she tells me to “check back in” with her before I left, and I was like, “Okay…? Am I in trouble?” To which the answer was no. She just wanted to have another impromptu therapy session to make sure I wasn’t collapsing completely, but at the end, I said, “Also, I take it back from earlier. Can I have a hug?” She puts on this big, stupid smile, and then we hugged, for like, a while.

These past few nights I’ve been religiously watching this trash, this gutter filth, perhaps the literal polar opposite of Bocchi the Rock!. It’s just twenty-year-olds, I mean totally teenage actors engagingly in endless sex and drugs. Sheer trash. Euphoria on HBO. But I like watching it at, I don’t know, what time is it? 3:37am? And the reason I do so is the same reasoning I gave for enjoying Kanojo, Okrishimasu. “I love allowing myself to get invested in trash like this just so it can frustrate me and force my cold, dead, icy heart to feel literally anything other than passivity and dejection.” And the scene I watched just a second ago, of this character texting her boyfriend while she was drunk? The manner in which her phone autocorrected certain typos and not others? That was EACTLY me. That scene, in this fucking braindead retard schlock teen melodrama, was without dialogue or music, deeply relatable. Ask any of these poor motherfuckers who talk to me via Discord regularly and who know how I type when I’m drunk, because that shit was precise. However, as much as I respect Bocchi the Rock!, and as little as I respect Euphoria, I’m fairly certain I can’t say anything like that about the former. This isn’t a disconnect exclusive to cute girl anime either. Like, if I were to throw on K-On!, a show to which this has seen much comparison, then I don’t think I would be saying this about any of their particular interactions. I don’t think I could see any of their particular moments and memories and think anything to the effect of, “I can’t see real girls doing this.” Because that was always the appeal of K-On! in the first place, their eccentricity almost paradoxically juxtaposed with the series’ realism. Maybe it was Yamada Naoko’s direction, maybe it was the super naturalistic color design, maybe it was something I can’t even put into words. But whatever it was, K-On! had it, and Bocchi the Rock! doesn’t.

You want a show about four or five cute moe girls with multicolored hair, multicolored eyes, and multicolored personalities? Because the anime community has a fucking ocean of options for you to choose from in that department. Some might argue a landfill to be a much more fitting analogy though, because, after all, quantity doesn’t always equal quality. There’s a lot of unexceptional sewage that flows through every season and every genre of anime, and Bocchi the Rock! is miles above any of that, but I’m quite positive we are not witnessing a modern classic in the making. The visual direction is impressive outright—no surprise considering the director’s association with Shingo Natsume, one of the industry’s currently active creative geniuses—but while it may be just enough to carry the series’ more unexceptional elements, it’s nowhere near enough to elevate it…which is kind of a picky distinction to make, but a distinction I would argue is more than a little necessary considering the wildly high mean score Bocchi the Rock! boasts as of time of writing. I apologize for failing to escape comparison, but keep in mind that from where I’m standing, you people started it, not me. You people were the ones talking about “the K-On! of our generation,” not me, and when I read proclamations such as these, I have certain expectations in mind, because the last time I heard such proclamations was in winter of 2018. A Place Further Than The Universe was a special anime. It had powerful performances, fantastic direction, a satisfying sense of progression and growth, and a heartrending emotional arc; it had a more-or-less high-quality production, a plethora of fantastic insert songs, and simply beautiful imagery. It at the same time, however, failed to hit that level of sheer believability and down-to-Earth realism that a K-On!-class masterpiece would, and if you ask me, Bocchi the Rock! falls even shorter.

“Wow, my latest video already has so many comments. [giggles] I’ve been racking up the views lately, too, and people are telling me I’m good… Yeah, maybe it’s okay if I can’t handle real life? There are tons of people cheering for me online!”

There’s a lot of blatantly obvious reasons why I, of all fucking people, would be compelled to call this series and specifically this character “relatable,” but relating to her isn’t my problem. My problem is believing in her. In winter of 2018, some anons on /a/ were criticizing a scene in A Place Further Than The Universe which they felt to have been a shameless rip-off of a scene from K-On!, and whether or not I agreed with their cynical assessment or not, I couldn’t help but entertain the comparison. The scene was in one of the earlier episodes, when the girls were training and first spending a night together outdoors, sleeping in a tent. As they laid back and tried to sleep, they kept each other awake with silly small-talk and dumb jokes, and this thread on /a/ had completely convinced themselves that the scene was attempting to directly mimic the scene from the Kyoto trip in K-On!, the scene after the pillow fight where Ritsu keeps trying to prod at Mio, scare her, and make Yui and Mugi laugh. If you read a text summary of both those scenes, they would seem to be fundamentally identical, but when you actually sit down and watch them, one feels ever so slightly fake (or perhaps “forced” is a better word), while the other feels deeply real. Bocchi the Rock! has cute character designs and good voice acting; it has a surprisingly consistent and well-balanced production considering the studio behind it; it has a clear sense of inspiration and emotion spearheaded by an up-and-coming director who clearly learned all the right lessons from mentors past; and it has dialogue, monologue, and audiovisual expression that will 100% make you feel at times emotional, be it for a second, a minute, or a while. It does not, however, have a scene of Tainaka Ritsu saying goofy shit to keep her best friends from falling asleep on their trip to Kyoto, because she loves them and doesn’t want the moment to end.

Of all the human, real-life person things I’ve been newly dabbling in lately, by far the most profound and telling has been my willingness and desire to take pictures. You see, I’ve never taken or had pictures. Pictures are friends, family, loved ones, memories. None of which I’ve ever had. But now that I think I’m starting to have them, I want to save these moments, these jokes, these things to think about later, to tell other friends about some other time, smiling, laughing, or simply reminiscing. The sense of belonging I feel when I see someone who missed out on something, turn my phone to face them, and see a smile on their face is one that I still haven’t comprehended enough to fully express the feeling of catharsis from which I receive. Memories I have of K-On! can stand emotionally on par with memories I now seem to be making at an increasingly rapid pace, whereas memories I have of this show and many others will likely not survive the alcohol, let alone the passing time. I would be very impressed with myself if I was still writing as SingleH this time next year, because I don’t see any of what I’m currently building crashing and burning anytime soon. I’ve fallen in love with these people, and I’ve grown addicted to the warmth they make me feel, even in this weather. It is fourteen fucking degrees fucking Fahrenheit in fucking Dallas right now, and as corny and stupid as it sounds, I’d say Bocchi the Rock! provided me with about as much warmth as this glass of Aberlour. I obviously first turned to my beloved rum to find some solace, but when it failed to do the trick and soothe my freezing body, I figured the time to stop being a dainty little bitch had finally come, and only the spice of whiskey could truly warm me up, but I appear to have underestimated the diversity of my options. The warmth of Bocchi the Rock! didn’t even need to be spicy either. It just needed to be warm. Like that hug from Ali.

Thinking back, I could hear her heartbeat. Hopefully she couldn’t hear mine…

Thank you for reading.

[Originally posted on September 28th, 2022.]

Shortly before it ended, I received a message from someone asking if I was going to review Ousama Ranking, and I responded, “Ousama Ranking is so good, explaining why almost feels patronizing.” And I think that was a really good way of putting it. I had only seen nine episodes at the time, so I was unaware of how the writing quality of that show would unfortunately soon decline, but later developments aside, the point I was making still stands. Some anime are just so outstandingly fantastic, it’s hard to justify reviewing them, because how blind does somebody seriously have ... to be to not appreciate the pure brilliance being presented before them? When I replied to that message, those nine episodes I had seen fell squarely into this trap. I was so in love with everything and so excited to talk about it, but I couldn’t really think of anything to write, because…I don’t know…just look at it. It’s radiant. I think I could teach someone addition, multiplication, or division, but don’t think I could teach someone how to count, you know what I mean? I am a dying, crumbling, decrepit motherfucker, do you understand? With my experience, I’ve developed a wide palette of many things, like food, for example. And one thing I love? I love sharp cheddar. I love some super fucking sharp cheese, so when I see sharp cheese, I just think, “That’s delicious. That’s obviously the best thing in the world. No doubt.” And this show is like a really sharp cheddar. I suppose there are people out there who don’t like sharp cheddar…for some reason…but if you do appreciate things that are good, then I guarantee you will love this show. I know, I’m coming across as fangirlish and sycophantic and dumb, but I’m being completely serious. I ask as well you please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying as, “Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid.” Because all I’m saying is that in my own personal experience, Made in Abyss is an exceptionally accurate filter. As far as I can tell, if you watched through the series and walked away impressed, you are passionate about the art form and find that anime is genuinely for you.

These days, when you read anyone, especially me, describe an anime as feeling “like a video game,” it is almost exclusively meant to come across as a damning and dismissive insult, because the video games being referenced aren’t exactly the most inspiring wells of human creativity under the sun. When I say something “feels like a video game,” I’m talking about Fate/Grand Order or Fate/Apocrypha feeling like free to play, mobile phone gatcha games. I’m talking about In Another World With My Smartphone feeling like a harem VN with your stock self-insert MC living out his stock MMO RPG-style isekai fantasy adventure. But when I say Made in Abyss feels like a video game, I mean loading up a fresh world of Minecraft at midnight, lights completely off, Sweden by C418 comes on, and I just sit back, nuzzle deep into my blankets, and walk in a straight line for hours, taking it all in. The endlessly fresh, randomly generated world being built beneath my feet, carrying my imagination as it goes. Wondering what could be over that hill or beyond that ocean, saving coordinates every time I’m inspired to build on these gorgeous, captivating landscapes. Whether it was my days procrastinating as a lonely highschooler, or my days only a few years back, a working adult shut in by the pandemic with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to love me. Was my instinct to find some new hobby, devote ever-more time toward anime, or maybe even say fuck it and go outside despite government warnings? No. My only desire on those aimless nights was to look back with longing, so I went to Amazon, bought a new Xbox, downloaded Minecraft, booted up a new world, and I knew I had made the correct decision. The lockdowns started in May, just in time for Sentai Filmworks to cancel the showings for Dawn of the Deep Soul which I had reserved seats for, and the night I was supposed to be delving deeper into the abyss, I was instead here at home, booting up that new world. I felt silly and childish, but the springtime showers began to fall outside my window, Mice On Venus began to play, and I was already lost.

When it comes to the anime medium’s ability to captivate what little wide-eyed spirit I have left, Made in Abyss stands as the undisputed crowning achievement. I made a point to mention the titles of certain songs in the Minecraft OST, because Minecraft, as well as many classic late-90s RPGs which share this same inherent and magnetic sense of exploration and wonder, are very much taken to the next level by their music, and to simply state Made in Abyss benefits similarly would be the understatement of the millennium. From the moment the black screen is lifted and you’re first graced with the visual splendor the series has to offer, Kevin Penkin is right there, weaving sound waves into brain waves and sucking you deep into Tsukushi’s world in a way I wouldn’t even imagine possible. Indeed, this industry is thoroughly blessed with musical talent for the ages, but Kevin Penkin’s music physically takes me places. It takes me somewhere where I feel I can actually have—without shame or reservation—an imagination, and have wonder, and have excitement. I often think of how pointless this all is. All this fucking autistic, meticulous effort and time—Oh! My GOODNESS! Don’t even get me started on the fucking TIME I put into this profile!—all the work I put in, and for what?! To express some opinion no one cares about, in a fashion so personal hardly anyone would even agree or feel the same?! Watching something like this makes me feel like it’s all worth it, because…gosh, what am I even supposed to do with myself after experiencing something this powerful and entrancing? I’m like some flavorless, open bottle of flat soda, but the spark and soul of Made in Abyss bottles me back up, shoots me full of carbonation, and shakes me up until I’m ready to explode! Should I just smile and keep my mouth shut like I always do? Not talk to anyone about it? Not share my BURSTING excitement and love for something THIS special?! Even I couldn’t manage that. So you may not listen—no one may read this—but I’ll be standing here anyway, proclaiming, screaming at the top of my lungs.

About a week ago as of time of writing, I broke my headphones. I have a few high-quality pairs, but the ones I typically had plugged into my laptop were these Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 32 Ohm which I’d had for about two years, and one night during my most recent alcoholic downward spiral, I guess drunk me just got careless and forgot to take them off before knowing the black out was about to hit. Sometimes my “morning mysteries,” as I like to call them, are quite amusing. Like, “wtf what was I thinking when I did that?” Or, “lol why did drunk me put that there?” But sometimes it’s not so amusing. Sometimes I wake up and have to slowly, clumsily, pathetically put my entire bedroom or office space back together from scratch, thinking where I went wrong and why I had to reach this point to have any fun anymore. Needless to say, the morning I’m referring to, finding my headphones strained and twisted around a table leg, was one such depressing and hopeless morning. I’m lucky to make a fine amount of money, and I’m extremely frugal (except with alcohol of course), so I have a lot in savings for someone my age and can easily buy a new pair, and when they came in the other day, it was late. I think it’s just because my zip code is last on the delivery schedules for most commercial postal services, but shit always gets to my house at like 5:45pm at the absolute earliest. Anyway, this time it was around 8:00pm when I heard the knock at the door, so I was only about an hour away from digging into whatever bottles of rum were on the menu that night, but I’d been drinking some cocktails I shook for myself that afternoon and was in the mood for music. Looking around at this life I want nothing more than to escape, the first piece of music I decided to play from my replacement headphones was Prayer and Immolation. A modern classic, an already-timeless masterpiece without question. Most anime tell less complete stories in their entire run than that song tells through its melody alone…but with my eyes closed, lost in the thrill of such powerful music, I forgot to stop iTunes from playing the next track…

What follows Prayer and Immolation, as I hope many of us know, is The Return of Made in Abyss, Kevin Penkin’s most obvious, most emotionally overwhelming love letter to this anime with which he’s rightfully earned such international fame and acclaim. The rousing emotions, the excitement, the wonder, the majesty, even the fear and anxiety—it’s all there, wrapped up in one powerful swell of musical genius, and I just lost it. It was like eating nothing and feeling utterly hopeless on the verge of tears all day long, and then, as comfort food, scarfing down a carton of Blue Bell ice cream while listening to Pure Pure Heart, inexplicably bawling my fucking eyes out. I was just crying and crying and crying, curling up into my keyboard like this pathetic little creature, and by the time it had passed, there were so many tears on my keyboard, that now, the backlight on my bottom arrow key is dead. The key still works when I press it, but it’s no longer illuminated…I guess it’s time for a new laptop now too, huh? Lately…well, for quite some time now actually, all I’ve wanted to do is get drunk and die. Watching Made in Abyss made me want to do considerably less of both. Which is pretty stupid, right? I don’t know. There are worse things to look forward to, aren’t there? There are worse reasons to think to yourself, “I have to keep going, because X, Y, and Z are just a few months away! If I can just suck it up for this long, then this will happen, or I’ll be able to do that, and it’ll all be worth it!” I’m sure many of you are hastily making your way to my comment section to tell me just how wrong I am and just how pathetic I must be to even suggest it’s even remotely okay to get up in the morning because I’m looking forward to a fucking Japanese cartoon I’m invested in, but…I don’t know. I just can’t regret loving this series, because as everyone enjoys reminding me, I hate anime, right? “SingleH, that sack of shit! That insufferable bitch with a low mean score who hates popular anime just for being popular!” Having at least one seasonal anime I’m head-over-heels for should be a welcome change of pace, no?

The most spoiler-free synopsis of Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun that I can possibly give you is that Riko, Reg, and Nanachi exit the elevator onto the Sixth, only to unexpectedly find a society already there waiting for them, and the arc is all about navigating this newfound society in order to gain knowledge and survive the layer. As it happens, Orth, the society on the surface in which Riko was raised, serves as a perfect parallel to Ilblu (which I’ve made the executive decision to reject the kanji pronunciation of and simply enunciate as “Ilublu”), the city on the Sixth. I’m thankful for this, because not only does it give me a chance to gush about the genius of previous installments in the series which I failed in the past to write for, but it also effectively gives me a chance to praise this season without being forced to spoil any specific details about it. After all, if you ask me, the only way to properly experience such a mystifying world is to go in blind and experience it yourself firsthand. So…Orth, in simple terms, was a gold-rush town. The Abyss existed, was discovered, and then a civilization naturally formed around it, because it’s just so fucking badass, and its sense of scale so awe-inspiring. The society that we’re shown to have evolved in Orth is something you intrinsically and immediately understand to be—fucked. Up. At first I thought, “Oh, great. Another—It’s cutesy, but oooo it’s also dark and violent! Are we Madoka★Magica yet? Did you buy the blu rays yet?—but it isn’t like that at all. It’s just foreboding. Like, I quickly began looking over my shoulder and realizing that something was deeply wrong, and it is so in such a way that Riko doesn’t recognize it at all. Given yours and my modern-day, civilized, rational value systems, there’s so many things that are just daily business in this place that scream out to be punished and remedied by human rights’ activists and Thomas Jefferson, but to Riko, everything is going according to nature, and it actually gets the viewer supporting Riko in her quest to do things that are inarguably self-detrimental and morally wrong.

And this zeitgeist is everywhere, too. There’s no one who’s doubting it, and we the viewer certainly aren’t meant to, because this isn’t some YA novel about fighting against the corruption of the system and returning the power to the people and whatever commie shit. Again, this society was conceived and willingly maintained as a wild west type of town. The people who came here did so because they were greedy opportunists or wide-eyed adventurers. They did not come here and build a well-structured society wherein social safety nets of sorts would exists and all of its people—any of its people, for that matter—would necessarily be taken care of. It’s this weird, creepy, quasi-propaganda-state which raises its young to think it is a good thing to die delving the Abyss in the pursuit of glory and achievement, which was probably my favorite element of the entire first season and the series as it has continued up till and including now. It’s not like there’s some greater good necessity to go delving down into the Abyss. Cave Raiders are not saving the world in any way shape or form. They’re just doing it because they’re inspired and want to, which is of course why Bondrewd is such a complex and inspiring character. Bondrewd, the challenger; the legend; the king; the undisputed champion; the triumphant man of science and progress; the wager and winner of wars. It’s also why Riko, the adorable one, is in my opinion one of the most underrated anime protagonists of all time. It’s so cool to me that Tsukushi spent all the time and effort conceptualizing and fully realizing this society, and then the story is in no way about the society. It’s just the backdrop for Riko’s adventure and the sort of “mental foundation” off of which she will presumably operate in reference to forever. Not just for right now, but presumably forever, we will be made to view Made in Abyss while standing in the bleachers, pom-poms in hand, wearing our sexy, hiked-up cheerleading uniforms, and shouting out our support for a leading character who actively makes moral decisions which we the audience find to be questionable, and I love that.

When I first heard in episode one, even, that the kids in the orphanage were only allowed on the First Layer, I was thinking like, “At least they take care of the kids to some bare minimum extent and aren’t completely exploitative on SOME level," but the first encounter we see with a monster is with the Crimson Splitjaw which shouldn’t even have been there. Riko and Nat are getting attacked by a monster from many layers down. This thing is from the Third, and much more dangerous, yet it’s up on the First for whatever reason. In my cynicism, my immediate thought was that this anomaly was going to be a bad omen, or some sort of harbinger to start the epic save-the-world adventure, but that isn’t the case at all. That kind of shit happening is just normal. It’s simply normal for a big powerful monster to find its way up accidentally, and that’s that—it’s just fucking dangerous. I loved so much, too, how when they explained it to Leader, like, “Hey, btw, we almost got fucking maimed and eaten by this giant thing.” Because his reaction was just to say, “Oh…well…be careful. Life sucks, I guess.” I mean, Riko’s bedroom is a repurposed fucking torture chamber…need I say more? Made in Abyss simply places its trust in the judgement of the viewer. It’s not justifying or glorifying anything. It’s merely presenting events and allowing you to think about them what you will, as Riko will almost always be thinking something very different for reasons you and I were simply not conditioned to understand. When Riko confronts Bondrewd in the laboratories under Idofront, even after Nanachi had exposed everything he was guilty of and explained in complete, horrid detail the true nature of the cartridges, she’s still like, “Hey, man. I can understand having ambition, but this is getting a little spicy.” Like, she seemed to me to be reacting as if what offended her about his conduct was specifically that he had manipulated and mislead the children, not necessarily that he was scoffing at the concept of human rights and committing unimaginable crimes against humanity in an effort to make scientific progress.

Even now, this pattern of judgement continues to persist. After a certain character recounts to Riko the history of Ilblu over the course of two truly grueling flashback episodes which literally made me feel the need to vomit, the man chiefly responsible for the sickening events described, upon realizing Riko was now aware of his crimes, sardonically jibes, “So, do you hate me now?” To which Riko very frankly replies, “I don’t really know you, but I do like this village.” In other words, “You may’ve forced upon innocents one of the most morally nauseating, existentially horrifying experiences ever depicted in TV anime, but the ends justify the means, am I right, boss?” She even proceeds to praise his adventurer’s spirit, labeling him as someone “who does everything he can.” Sound familiar? [insert the rumble of scientific triumph] Observations and commentary of this nature can—if you didn’t get the reference—also be said of the social systems Bondrewd fostered in Idofront, though obviously taken to a much more wildly brutal and unsympathetic degree. After all, even after all he had done, Prushka and especially Nanachi had admiration for what he was able to achieve. I’ve explained before how Bondrewd isn’t a tragic character, because tragedy at its core is showing a character with a flaw and how that flaw destroys them, but Bondrewd never received a significant comeuppance for his actions. What made his story powerful was that Bondrewd made the choice to sacrifice everything for progress, and he got his wish. The horror comes from the fact that Bondrewd isn't irrational, insane, or sociopathic. There's no way to write him off as a cheap, one-dimensional, simplistic, “monster” sort of villain. He is correct, even if you hate him for it, and the relationships he formed with his “children” were indeed eye-wateringly manipulative from our perspective, but they were completely consensual, two-sided, and—yes—even loving from theirs. The most powerful line in the film—“Papa’s pain.”—was a misunderstanding, a failure on the part of innocent little Prushka to realize Bondrewd’s success on HIS terms.

This jarring separation between the value systems of the characters and the value systems of the viewer is what makes the characters and stories within Made in Abyss so fascinating above all else, and it is this separation and examination of value systems that is the entire premise, plot, and climax of The Golden City of the Scorching Sun. It takes everything complex and worthwhile about the series and its established thematic patterns and deep-dives all the concepts it can, as deeply and characteristically disturbingly as it can as well. Speaking of being disturbing, there’s another dimension to this series that I find oh-so fascinating, and that is the gore porn aspect it has. Tsukushi, the gentleman, is a plain-and-simple pervert. He’s a man who enjoys, among I’m sure many, many, many other things, loli, shouta, urination, ryona, humiliation, asphyxiation…I mean, if I list off any more hentai tags, some of you motherfuckers will probably be able to successfully track down the h-manga I’m looking at literally right now. It’s a show that features a great many scenes that reveal this sort of fetish revolving around—I don’t know—like this idea that the human form is just straight-up gross. In the final episode of season one, for example, Riko is shown agonizing in pain, urinating and defecating all over herself as Nanachi undoes her stitches and removes the parasitic mushrooms growing off her arm. This is disgusting, but it’s also HYPER-realistic, because that’s what our bodies do when they’re overwhelmed with pain. But TV and film aren’t typically one to show any of these nasty bits, not necessarily in lacking of any particular know-how, expertise, or general competency, but simply because audiences don’t want to see it. Made in Abyss has now made it so, personally, I do want to see it. I love this constant reminder that human beings are just these water balloons full of gross and fragile shit that will pop open messily if pierced even slightly. It’s repulsive, yet oddly romantic to appreciate this and ground yourself in this idea of your own body being such an alien creature to even your own understanding.

Be it consciously or subconsciously, I think casual audiences can tell he’s presenting the world in this way deliberately, and that’s why they’re so creeped out by the undertones consistent throughout the series. I’ve had this problem dating back to my early years in college, where I have trouble allowing myself to, for lack of a better term, be consumed by emotions. Like, if I’m really sad for example and want to cry laying in bed, I’ll started crying, but then instantly get hit with this hyper-intense feeling of self-awareness, where—gosh, this is so hard to put into words—I just feel like someone is holding a mirror in my face, and it makes me feel intensely self-conscious even in the privacy of my own bed, and I just stop expressing any emotion whatsoever. Only when I’m completely and totally overwhelmed and bottled-up with directionless frustration and hopelessness can I truly let it all out without reservation. This issue, however, is also persistent in less extreme circumstances, like getting immersed in anime, for example. Whenever I find myself getting immersed and emotionally invested, that invisible hand will appear, shoving a mirror in my face and making me feel too self-aware to stay truly glued to the screen, but Made in Abyss overcame this completely. I haven’t properly watched anime in months, so it took a minute, but by the end of episode six till the end of the season, I was all in. Entire episodes spent holding my breath, gasping in shock, hand over my mouth, eyes wide…unreservedly spellbound. I just wanted to keep on gazing, even if it was a dream—that’s fine with me. And once again, here comes Kevin Penkin’s heavenly score, music every step of the way making me feel tension and emotion toward the screen I thought myself too cynical to feel any longer, making every scene its own special brand of utter perfection. This season I will begrudgingly admit isn’t actually completely perfect—because it ends. Otherwise, though? It’s in the dictionary. The verisimilitude; the building of such a breathing world around this glorious pit. A true phenomenon, with me, totally speechless.

I’m the type who really cares and puts a lot of effort into clothes, publicly, but the jacket and pajamas I’m currently wearing I’ve owned since I was like sixteen, because I haven’t grown—in any department—since. Throughout the course of these past few downward-spiraling months, I’ve consistently used my daily hangovers as an excuse to not write, though while slowly but surely churning through this Made in Abyss review over the course of days and even weeks now, I’m slowly but terribly surely coming to appreciate the fraudulence of such an excuse. I am, after all, hungover right now, and I was hungover when I wrote other bits of other paragraphs too. Just sitting on my couch in the front room listening to Aria Math, thinking back—which, by the way, Aria Math, is the official soundtrack to this review, that and Flood II by Boris. This season was just so spectacular. Like, one aspect of this series which I personally tend to often overlook is the action, but the action this season was even more consistent than the action in Dawn of the Deep Soul, and that shit was a fucking movie! All the moments of Riko using her whistle with Reg as her relic were so sharp and intense, like, they just had such a classic anime hype aura to them that was just so—Ugh! Just SO perfect. And listening to you-know-who screeching as Reg whips her around??? That was SUCH a piercing voice performance, and I mean that in the best, most complementary way possible. And, again, the brutality is so violent and terrifying. I love how Maa is introduced stepping on this fucking gerbil accidentally, and even though it was fixed instantly, he still violated the village’s NAP, and so all his worldly possessions were stripped away before his teary eyes, he had every fiber of his existence torn apart to gory shreds, and he was formed into a currency that was then used for a loli to shit in a toilet after it had been ritualistically tossed into the throngs of drooling spectators gleefully gathered around to watch their fellow citizen endure this magnificent horror…for a loli to shit in a toilet. Content like this can be found nowhere but here.

This review has turned out to be even more emotional and creative than I already anticipated it being, and I hope I can in some serendipitous form or fashion tie that in to my experience sitting down and riding this roller coaster of a season. It’s not that Made in Abyss isn’t well known to me and those who love it similarly as an emotional or creative work; it’s simply that I personally failed to anticipate just how intensely I would find myself gripped by it this time around. Having been so utterly hooked and addicted to the series when season one first aired, I quickly found its conclusion left me feeling empty and desperate for more. Impatient, I went and read the manga to see what happened next, and this mistake made it so Dawn of the Deep Soul was comprised of a story arc I had already experienced in manga form. This in no way ruined for me the quality of the movie, but it made it so I couldn’t have that same awestricken look on my face as I did in 2017, first witnessing the magnificence of this world and all these ideas. I stopped reading the manga after the Idofront Arc, though, and being able to first experience the Ilblu Arc as an anime brought back the same feelings of magic and horror which season one so completely spellbound me with all those years ago. When Vueko wakes up and Wazukyan reveals what he had done, I was just so deeply wrenched. Seeing those past events throughout the course of the flashback felt like studying the colonization of South America or something. Someone actually joked about that on /a/ however many years ago, and the more I thought about it, the more I suspected it might on some level be genuinely true. Just thinking about the course of events, like how this unspeakably horrendous human tragedy that reverberated throughout these peoples lives and shaped the society they left behind for future generations to come, and for all future historians to observe, was just the result of ignorant explorers drinking some bad water. I know I only just a second ago spoke on the series’ brilliant brutality, but moments like that just hit you like a bullet train to the face.

Someone recently left a comment on my page saying, “I have a feeling your reviews aren't really reviews but just very very aggressive venting.” And they appear to be literally correct. As episode nine came to a unrelentingly gorgeous conclusion, fading out with Penkin’s music instead of the Myth & Roid ED, I realized that in being brought to genuine tears not by the content of the episode, but rather by the sheer majesty of the music, I was being a total fucking hypocrite. You see, being a hateful sack of subhuman trash, I personally find great enjoyment in laughing to myself internally at other people, and one group of people I feel particularly superior over and who I find it completely impossible to not find funny are the people who clap after a movie’s credits roll in theaters. If you clap after a play, well then great. The performers are right there on stage, and they appreciate your lovely display of respect and enjoyment. But if you clap after the next Disney product is shat out before you on its scheduled interval, then you’re just lauding a digital screen while Kathleen Kennedy makes her way to the bank, rapes pigs, melts babies, and does whatever these people do for leisure. After episode nine, with tears in my eyes, I rose, and luckily stopped myself from completing my standing ovation, but I was on the way there, like a hypocrite. I was just rewatching Sicario (2015), and the combination of Villeneuve’s direction with Deakins’ cinematography was downright fucking deadly, because literally EVERY shot is perfect, and appreciating the Made-in-Abyss-like perfection of that film again made me want to create something myself in turn. So here I thusly am, writing, doing my one thing. And…is it not terribly ironic? A fictional world’s inspiration making me want to reengage and reintegrate into the real, not the wired? I mean, I can practically feel the judgement and the gazes, of those in my old class. I am not me; I am Lain; I am the “peeping tom.” I—not others, but ME—I am looking in. And, though I do appreciate the presentness of the day and time, I’m afraid I don’t seem to understand.

The trio is separated for much of this arc, and their worries regarding the whereabouts of one another somehow struck a chord with me. You see, I’ve never really been able to empathize with that sort of thing, because I am a true loner. No friends and bullied by everyone in elementary, middle, and high school; no platonic friends or *serious* relationships in college; no platonic friends or *serious* relationships now in the professional world; no nothing. I’ve pretty much always been alone, at least emotionally. I’m sitting in my papasan chair in a room with black-out curtains, with the lights off, and with the door closed. I’m going to have to comb through this writing later today to weed out all the typos hungover me failed to catch. I am completely alone. So whenever anime—or any fiction really—comes to the point of friendship or romance or connection, I don’t at all check out or anything, but I certainly feel myself more at a distance than I might’ve had the emotional focus been on something more general, because I’ve never really had anyone TO miss. However, recently, I found a friend…I think? I’m laughing at myself for speaking in such naive-sounding, childish terms, but I think it’s true. A few months ago, I hit the message cap on MAL, which—yes—for some reason fucking exists. If you have any more than a thousands messages in your inbox or your sent messages tab, then MAL will stop you from sending any more, and you’ll have to delete logged messages or replies in order to send more. This is outrageously fucking obnoxious to deal with, so I finally, after all these years, decided to say fuck it and download Discord. I only use it to talk to people I speak with regularly—or at least people I had been speaking with regularly via PMs, and, though this has been brewing since before then, I think therein I’ve found a friend. These past two weeks I’ve had Discord closed so I could focus on writing, but drunk me regularly opens Discord to quietly check to see if he’s sent anything, because…well, I don’t really know. All I know is I’m wearing an absolutely toasty sweater right now. I sure do love Autumn.

Sometimes I wish I could just go back in time and change things. It's pretty rare to see such an absorbing anime, let alone a genuine fantasy whose fantastical atmosphere hits the spot this perfectly. As I was first witnessing the majestic gorgeousness that was the end of episode nine/beginning of episode ten, I just sat back, stunned. Like, what the fuck even was that? I can’t even put that into words. That felt like—I don't even know—but it didn't feel like it was from this decade of anime. That felt like something you unearth two or three years after having started watching anime seriously. I honestly just have no idea what’s wrong with me. The alcohol, no matter how self-destructively excessive, has provided such a perfect escape from reality. This endless cycle of getting insanely drunk at night, spending all morning mindlessly hungover, and then committing all afternoon—from like noon till ten—to being a sucked-in workaholic, it’s just allowed me to escape completely, and I honestly find comfort in it now. I want to get out of it; consciously, I do. But I don’t know if I’m able. And don’t get me wrong. I know these are all fluffy, sappy words, and I’m all too aware of the possibility—indeed, the probability—that after I get through what reviews I can this season, I simply sink back into the bottle for another two and a half months and then be forced to make a similar, forced last-minute recovery to write for Fall anime, but I nevertheless have hope I can stay above water this time around, by necessity, if not by choice. When I allow my head to fall back and my eyes to stare up into the darkness, toward the ceiling, the only light in the room, my computer screen, is in a position such that the illumination is essentially directed toward my chin. The result is that the light passes right in front of my face when my head is leant back. I obviously can’t see how much of my face is hit by the light, but my eyelashes, sticking outward, are caught by it completely, and the first-person sight of my glowing eyelashes looking up into the darkness reminded me of my experience watching episode one of this season. Like I said, it’s been months since I watched anime properly, and an issue I had first loading up the season was my eyelashes. My eyelashes at the top of my vision were distracting. It’s like they were there to serve as an anchor, as a reminder as to where I was, and who I was, at a time when I obviously wanted to forget all that shit and become immersed in this other world, and…well, I don’t really know where I was going with that…it was just annoying.

I don’t know why I keep doing this, let alone why I continuously insist on publicly mentioning it, but for whatever reason I caught myself thinking about Eromanga Sensei again the other day, specifically the scene where Muramasa is explaining to Masamune why she’s so taken with him and his writing. She describes feeling unworthy of the praise her fans lavish her with. In particular, one piece of fan mail which said they would rate her work “one million out of a hundred.” She had always done her best to write what she felt was 100/100, but to know that her fans could get even more out of her work than even she could consciously imbue it with humbled her. She proceeds to explain that this is why she’s so in love with Masamune and his writing, because to her, only his work has ever given her that 1,000,000/100 reaction. When she’s talking about how she can’t find other work to give her that same feeling, I really resonated with that, because as someone who’s consumed way too much anime, I do feel that as my standards go up, it gets harder and harder to have that 1,000,000/100 reaction. Like, what will ever give me that when I’ve already seen so much? I just don’t get that “ah ha” moment of getting blown the fuck away very often anymore. But I do still get it from Made in Abyss. That’s why I’ve tried my best to keep this review as emotional and “unanalytical” as possible, because this review simply IS biased. Trying to appear as if I’m still approaching this series with a discerning eye would be a completely dishonest suggestion. I mean, yes, of course, if the script suddenly went to shit and the production suddenly nosedived, then obviously I wouldn’t sit here and hide from reality, pretending my precious Made in Abyss was still a good show, but that decline was obviously never going to happen—and didn’t happen. I knew it would deliver and I would love it, and it delivered and I loved it. By appealing to me so intensely, Made in Abyss as an institution has permanently and in a way I cannot reverse shaped the way I judge art, and it’s apparently gotten to the point now where I can’t even imagine what my current conception of anime evaluation would look like without Made in Abyss in mind as a benchmark. Anime without Made in Abyss now would be simply unthinkable. It would be like sunrise without sunset. Like Oreos without milk. Like apple without peanut butter. Like charcuterie without chocolate. You’ll have to forgive me for indulging myself here, but it would be like Coke without rum. Like Fresca without vodka. Like Sprite without gin. Like a classic Sidecar without a sugared rim. Like a vanilla icecream milkshake without RumChata. Like a hangover without tears. Like sobriety without sadness. Like an afternoon without loneliness. Like a hospital bed without pancreatitis. Like bell peppers and beef without any beef. Like, one might even be tempted to say, chicken. Without tea.

It’s been a long time,
things haven’t been easy,
and this fleeting respite surely won’t last,
but SingleH is, at least for the moment, brief and desperate as it may be, in a really good mood.

Thank you so much for reading. <3

If what you’re used to is reading the writing of SingleH drowning in the poison of liquor or stumbling through the daze of the following hangovers, then I’m afraid what you’re going to now have to get used to is the writing of SingleH desperately clawing through partially self-induced insomnia and, relevantly, unprecedented exhaustion and overwork. Back during the Fall 2022 season of anime (before my not-at-all self-induced Winter 2023 vacation), I was writing a lot of sappy, optimistic shit. I was writing a lot of ooey-gooey, Disney Princess shit about how happy I was and in what a loving social circle I had finally ... found myself. There was this line in my Bocchi The Rock! review that went something like, “I don’t see any of what I’m currently building crashing and burning anytime soon.” Which should be an infamous line now…because, surprise surprise, it all crashed and fucking burned. Having lost my job, been robbed of my friends, and now being seemingly set in a routine of working two comparatively demoralizing jobs, seven days a week, every single week, I’ve been left with even less time to delve into anime than the ditzy retard of six, seven, eight months ago who so naively thought the happy times—having finally decided to start for the first time in over two miserable decades of life—would somehow never end. It therefore only had time to occur to me just yesterday that Demon Slayer is no longer “the new” popular anime. I had become so used to talking about it as the sort of “new hotness,” that when I remembered season one had aired four whole years ago AFTER I began watching this season and been reminded of this particular cookie cutter’s shape, it finally dawned on me that to most of currently engaged seasonal anime viewers, Demon Slayer is a well-established, tried-and-true juggernaut. And it feels like it. It feels exactly like the rerun of itself which it has utterly devolved into.

The Swordsmith Village Arc feels almost indistinguishable from The Red Light District Arc insofar as being just another shounen battle manga arc that isn’t the beginning of the story, but also isn’t the climax of the story, and which perpetually exists in this sort of template format where buddies, mentors, and monster-of-the-week villains stand out to you as being almost entirely interchangeable. The series can’t really introduce you to anything since it isn’t beginning, and it can’t really take you anywhere meaningful or exciting since it isn’t ending. It’s just meandering through this phase of the “overarching narrative” which every popular shounen series eventually finds itself in, where the author and the publisher have both been made aware of the titles’ success and have thus stumbled upon their respective reasons to keep it going with new, sometimes seemingly (arguably) random story arcs, but where the former is made to confront the biggest inherent weakness of shounen narratives: the fact they are only ever designed to begin and end. Shounen concepts are created, packaged, and sold in chapter one, and they always have been. I spoke about this in my previous Demon Slayer review where I dismissed the “Demon Slayer is only popular due to its dazzling animation” argument people love using when they attempt to shit on this series, so please just let me remind you of what you already know. Finding One Piece and becoming Pirate King, becoming the Fifth Hokage, obtaining all seven Dragon Balls, turning Nezuko back into a human, etc. These were the examples I used to explain the classic shounen structure of [initial setup] + [far-away goal] = [you can literally publish a manga like this for decades by thinly veiling filler arcs as real arcs], and Demon Slayer is no stranger to using this formula. Entirely forgettable mid-sections such as The Swordsmith Village demonstrate this painfully.

Let me ask, what happens when you take Tanjiro our protagonist, a few demon slayers along with a Hashira or two, Upper Moon Demons who you wouldn’t consider “main villains” in the grand scheme of things, and a location that could for all intense and purposes have been conveniently and relatively effortlessly fished out of the author’s ass? The answer, if I may, seems to be yet another season of Demon Slayer which can most easily be remembered as “another season that made the series as long as it ended up being by filling air time between the beginning and end.” Nothing feels terribly consequential, and any new characters involved just feel like “the new characters” who “just happen to be involved.” At least in The Red Light District Arc, there was some sort of a rhyme or reason for Daki and Gyuutarou to physically be located within the red light district itself, because in The Swordsmith Village Arc, the villains obtain information off screen to get themselves on location, and then they just appear suddenly as if to meet a quota. Our previous Hashira, Uzui, was no masterfully deep character or anything, but he and his wives had some charm, and stylistically they looked and felt like they belonged in that environment. Hashiras Tokito and Kanroji, on the other hand, really just come across as “the Hashiras who this arc is going to feature mainly because they’re the most easily marketable Hashiras which the author has yet to assign generic and deeply uninspiring backstories to…oh, and also they use swords I guess (like all other members of the Demon Slayer Corps).” I can’t honestly remember if this arc’s Upper Moons, Gyokko and Hantengu, were previously teased in previous installments of Demon Slayer, but I’m going to be generous and assume they were so I can immediately turn around and say that if they weren’t, this arc would remind me most of an anime-only, made-for-TV Fairy Tail filler arc.

I picture whoever it was in the studio, whichever individual cinematographer can actually, singularly be credited as responsible for coming up with the idea to smother everything with digital effects in the now-trademarked ufotable style as if they were Ragyou Kiryuuin, some diabolical villain cackling maniacally as they sew our brains together with this spectacularly spectacular, vapid display. We’ve now—I hope you don’t mind—reached the part of every Demon Slayer review which inevitably feels like an exercise in treading water, because whether you’re the one writing or the one reading, it’s the section where we get to have the same argument with ourselves over the caliber and importance of the production quality which, depending on who you ask, either by itself cements the series as a timeless masterpiece destined to go down in every hall of fame constructed and to be remarked about in every history book written throughout the remaining history of mankind, or which stands as little more than an excuse the series uses to pretend it’s worth any more than a tirelessly polished piece of literal shit. I still just don’t understand how the discourse surrounding this series got so deeply seated in arguments, positive or negative, regarding the overall quality of Demon Slayer which BOTH feel the need to operate off the admission or the insistence that “the animation is great, but X, Y, and Z make the show terrible” or “the animation is great, and A, B, C just make the show that much better.” I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but just as you will, no doubt, occasionally find yourself uniquely impressed with certain showcases of animation, you will also occasionally find yourself taken aback by some goofy-looking CG fish monsters, because Demon Slayer is not and has never been immune to the peaks and valleys of general TV anime production. It just happens to be flashy more often than not, simple as that.

Thank you for reading.

Like many, I was impressed with the debut of Studio Bind and their highly-anticipated, highly-praised, highly-controversial anime adaptation for Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, and like so many more, I was already getting excited for its second season as soon as its first came to a close. However, also like many, I proceeded to be half-disappointed, half-confused when I saw the announcement for Oniichan wa Oshimai! with the name of Studio Bind—the studio which I thought was created for the sole purpose of adapting Mushoku Tensei—so proudly attached. A veteran animator like Shingo Fuji making a directorial debut at a studio I can actually trust to ... produce something competent is always something to be excited about in my book, but would some goofy gender-bender manga adaptation really be worth pushing back Mushoku Tensei season two??? Call me the Grinch—no fun allowed—but could something like this really feel like time well-spent for such a capable studio and talented staff? Because after watching it, all I can really say as to the answer to that question is “hopefully yes.”

“Hopefully,” as in, “I hope this series ends up feeling worth MY time and effort to review,” since nothing else airing this season apparently is. I guess I could review season sixty of My Hero Academia or season forty of Bungou Stray Dogs, something like that, piss a bunch of people off, etc. But what’s the point? Where’s the fun? What can be said about the endless deluge of shounen baby formula, highschool romcoms, and isekai/grossly-isekai-adjacent fantasy adventures which populate the apparent entirety of this winter season that hasn’t already been said about prior, similar, questionably distinguishable contemporary anime to complete exhaustion? I’m going to try to refrain from ragging on the actual quality of the anime produced this season from a technical perspective, even though I most certainly could (and don’t be sure that I won’t), and I’m instead going to ask that we all take a moment to appreciate the eye-watering banality of it all from a creative perspective. Even everything popular, seemingly, is a next season of a show I already reviewed and can’t bare the thought of writing about again.

Then there’s Oniichan wa Oshimai!, the unequivocal best anime I’ve ever been this fundamentally disappointed by. It’s a show about your typical NEET otaku protagonist getting dragged out of their room and slowly but surely rehabilitated and reacquainted with normal, social, everyday life through the power of friendship, family, whatever. The element of the story which gives the series its excuse to call itself different and stand out from the crowd is that the inciting incident which first begins to push our hero, Mahiro, away from the NEET lifestyle is that his magical(?), genius(?), scientist(?) younger sister administers him an undefined mystery drug that turns him into a girl. Wacky, right? Don’t see many gender-bender anime around these parts, now do we? But if you look past the quirky gimmick, the oh-so outrageous loli fanservice, and the consistently mind-bogglingly fantastic animation, I’m afraid you’ll be left starring in the face of, essentially, an anime you’ve already seen. I’m not saying the series is generic, because, indeed, it’s a tad fucking weird. What I’m saying is that I wanted more Space Race type shit. Ya know?

If we’re gonna sip our cognac and be high-class, gentlemanly and ladylike, intellectual critics about this, then I think it’s worth taking a full-stride step back and making the general commentary that this was an enjoyable series. It has that nice cushiony fuzz to it where I could just sit and un-impatiently watch the damn thing. All an anime really needs to succeed when it comes to borderline slapstick comedy, at least in my book, is competent voice acting, which this anime has; creative direction and good timing, which this anime has; lots of movement and visual energy, which this anime has; and good character designs matched with memorable, funny, broadly entertaining facial expressions, which this anime has in fucking spades. So often did they go for the most obvious joke and still make me laugh anyway. It’s just the most technically well-executed version of the simple thing it is, and the simple thing it is is silly. And that’s fine…and I expected that…I just wanted more Space Race shit. I wanted it to have something that would fucking reach out and slap me in the face if I tried lumping it in with “the other basic moe shows currently airing” other than “lol he got turned into a girl.”

If you were to scroll through the seemingly endless waterfall of seasonal anime which aired this season, intentionally paying each promotional image nothing but a mere glance, combining every entry which your brain subconsciously finds difficult to visually distinguish into one anime, you would end up with I’d wager something like five or six. There simply isn’t enough pizzazz popping out, nothing to get your neurons firing in different enough directions. My eyes simply could not in rapid succession pass by the MAL entries for, for example, “The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist in Another World” and “The Iceblade Sorcerer Shall Rule the World” without my mind fumbling incredulously at the alleged uniqueness of the two properties. When a friend of mine first learned I was considering writing for this series, he said, “Ain’t no way you’re hoping on this crazy train.” To which I frankly replied, “When does the crazy kick in?” Oniichan wa Oshimai! has a memorable premise, I’ll give it that, and I’d consider the cast of characters particularly quirky to watch, but the wholesome NEET recovery routine has been done so often now as to, well, be a routine at this point. Like, if this wasn’t such a heartfelt, technically impressive animation passion project, what would it be the sum of its actual parts?

To play Devil’s Advocate, it’s worth pointing out that the first half of Hikari no Ou came out this season, so…that was probably interesting and worthwhile…presumably? Buddy Daddies, as well, looks fun, decent, cute enough…DOESN’T IT??!?!?!!????? Clearly I’m just being an asshole about the whole seasonal anime thing, right? I mean, what? An anime becomes worthless and derivative as soon as the arc of its story begins resembling an established genre of past works? Is that the argument I’ve been making? Because that’s a fucking stupid argument. If my whole thesis statement is Oniichan wa Oshimai! is somehow not worth watching because it is to whatever degree “formulaic” underneath the visual gloss, then this is a bad review. I just don’t have the fucking time anymore, okay? I’m like a normal fucking person now with a life, under pressure. If I’m gonna soak back into this, I wanna be pulled in hard. I wanna suffocate in the quicksand that got me this deep in the first place. I wanna be wooed, wowed, kapowed—swept up, up, up, and away, or plunged into the abyss. I don’t just want to watch something good; I want to watch something special; I want to watch some new and exciting, boundary-pushing, Space Race shit. Evidently, I want to watch something that didn’t air in the apocalyptically unimpressive season of Winter 2023.

But hey? This is all sounding more and more like a me problem.

Thank you for reading.

Disclaimer: An entire bottle of Mount Gay Black Barrel, an undisclosed amount of Appleton 21, and multiple cans of Bacardi Rum Punch (to use as chasers) were consulted in the creation of this review. Plus however much Barrell Armida is in this rocks glass. This entire show and this entire review itself were both additionally and respectively viewed and created over the course of about nineteen hours. Alcohol and its affects were therefore heavily involved in all relevant processes. Hopefully you enjoy…

Being a drunk corpse, I figured a much more pertinent use of my time than watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners—as much fun as that show was—would ... be to take a leap back in time to once again reacquaint myself with the 4.5 Tatami Ideologue, and I must say, it was more than happily worth my time. Maybe I would’ve felt differently about the series if I had watched it first at the appropriate age, but personally, The Tatami Galaxy had always been one of those anime whose reputation seemed completely incongruous with my own experience. It was always spoken of as being this “pretentious,” “elitist,” “pseudo-intellectual” anime, and I could never understand why. I obviously understand that in the context of their common usage, these phrases are buzzwords that mean nothing and whose actual definitions are completely unknown and misunderstood to those using them, but still, these buzzwords have always been used to describe artsy, confusing, abstruse anime which the casual viewer would consider annoyingly if not purposefully difficult to parse. Anything written by Chiaki Konaka; anything directed by Mamoru Oshii; anything touched with a ten-foot pole by Kunihiko Ikuhara; even shit like Evangelion. These to me are anime which most of these people would call “pretentious,” “elitist,” whatever. But even if I find things like this to be relatively easy to understand, I at least understand why others wouldn’t. Lots of weird symbolism, unstated themes, non-linear storytelling, etc. But The Tatami Galaxy doesn’t really have any of that. It’s just a show about a college kid losing his mind in his dorm room, because he doesn’t know how to grapple with his newfound freedom to choose his own path and frankly thinks he REALLY should’ve gotten laid by now…which is a station in life pretty much anyone over the age of twenty can empathize with…right?

Unless everyone on the internet whose ever used those buzzwords to describe The Tatami Galaxy was fucking fourteen (which I highly doubt), then the idea that such an anime would be lumped in with the taste of someone who’d be super into Serial Experiments Lain for example seemed completely ridiculous to me. What could possibly be less “pretentious” than a story such as this, let alone one presented with this much emotional honestly and this many details which reveal it all to come from a place of the author’s intensely personal experience? At the end, seeing the main character being the one to tease Ozu in the hospital bed is among the most cathartic character arcs I’ve ever seen executed on screen, and the idea anyone could see something this sappy and adorable and think “elitist” is downright alien to me. And Masaaki Yuasa had at that point had already established himself as a master of this specific craft. Mind Game, Kemonozume, Kaiba—they all vary in subject matter, in theme, and—let’s be honest—in overall quality, but they all share this emotional openness that characterizes a great deal of his catalog, and The Tatami Galaxy was far from being an exception. Even characters who you weren’t strictly supposed to relate to, I found to be open books. Far more than the main character and his isolated arrogance, I personally found Akashi to be a much more empathetic presence, because depending on how you look at it, she is failing to reach out and “grasp the opportunity” just as egregiously as he is. Even in the early episodes, it’s completely obvious that she’s trying to get this guy’s attention, and yet she stops short of making any moves on him despite the fact he’s clearly fucking oblivious. And that’s fine—The Tatami Galaxy is very much a male show, meant to teach a lesson to a male audience. But the fact it can nevertheless have so many angles to appreciate it from speaks volumes.

If there was one human being on Earth who I would think to be a good-enough Yuasa replacement to take the reins of Yojouhan Time Machine Blues, Shingo Natsume would most probably be the one. Not only did he work as an episode director on the original show, and not only is he a genius director on his own rights, but his style simply fits this project perfectly. And this project was, if it needed to be stated, an exercise in pure nostalgia. Never have I felt more warm in my heart and at home in my soul than I did as soon as that Asian Kung-Fu Generation OP kicked on. I don’t know what exactly it is about the music they’ve done for this series, but it fits so wonderfully. Seeing all these faces I’ve known for over a decade now felt like…well, it felt like seeing faces I’ve known for over a decade now. I didn’t even have to look at the screen in that opening scene. I was on the other side of the room, pouring this glass, but hearing Jougasaki, Hanuki, Higuchi, Ozu, and Akashi speak—I didn’t need to see the screen to know the expressions on their faces. I was actually just talking to my hairdresser about this earlier today, because, not to brag or anything, but next week I’m getting transferred and promoted. And the people I’m going to be presiding over now are angels send down from Heaven to save me from the fiery depths of hell. I was talking to her about how it’s been so long since I’ve been able to spend time around people who actually LIKE me. People who actually know something about me, and who I know something about, who ACTUALLY like me. We like being around each other, and it’s cute. This department in particular has, more than any other department I interact in the vicinity of, a distinct “work culture,” for lack of a better term. And it’s because they like and know each other. They spend time together. This series has absolutely succeeding in capturing that aura of…I don’t know…that aura of people.

It was so funny. The morning I posted my most recent project, I was so happy, so excited, so optimistic for the future, and within hours it was humiliatingly raped and destroyed, and I sunk deep, deep, deep back into the bottle, to a depth and darkness which I still have yet to escape. Night is Short, Walk on Girl, another companion piece to The Tatami Galaxy, is a movie which I’ve slowly over the years come to appreciate as a film which can only be properly enjoyed while intoxicated, and I say this seriously with a straight face. All her talk of cocktails, and how she wishes the Pacific Ocean was made of rum is, yes, #SoRelatable, but it is also in all seriousness a legitimate guide to enjoying the film. The serendipitous, jovial nonsense; the attitude of gleeful abandon; the endless shifting from one adventure to the next, all while keeping the overall emotional arc in mind. The way the film flows is very much reminiscent of an actual night on the town, and I don’t think I ever truly experienced that film until I did so drunk. And I did this; I’m typing this sentence separately, but I did this, and it was life-altering. This is ironic not simply for obvious reasons, but also because becoming a proper alcoholic has utterly decimated my short-term memory. I can’t really remember anything anymore. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. なし. I can’t remember anything, but I do remember this series. And what does that say? Well, first of all, it’s actually good, but moreover, it’s memorable and worthwhile enough to warrant not only enjoyment, but a rewatch of the entire series. Typically, I write to slow, lyric-less music. Anything else I think would be too distracting, and so I write to the tune of shit you could fall asleep to—shit I actively do fall asleep to on occasion. But this time, sippin’ whiskey, of course, I felt it would be an utter sacrilege to type to the tune of anything other than the titular blues.

Now if only I had a time machine to go with…

Thank you for reading.

*out-of-context spoilers for Classroom of the Elite (major spoilers for Durarara!!, and x2)*

I’d become a fairly well-oiled machine when it came to writing seasonal reviews and keeping up with everything airing in any given season, but thanks to this unhinged alcoholic downward spiral I’ve been on these past few months, you’re going to be seeing relatively few SingleH reviews for this Summer, 2022. I know—good news for many MAL users, but I was almost able to make a comeback for an unlikely reason, and that is I got sick. Rather, I am currently sick as of time of writing. Upon first realizing this, I was ... so deeply relieved, thinking what fantastic timing this was. I mean, now I’d have a legitimate excuse to take time off work and make up for all the time I’d wasted drinking hundreds of dollars worth of liquor per week. Unfortunately for me, though, I’m not just “sick enough to get a work note for a few days” sick, I’m “I’m fucking bedridden with the flu” sick. Not only am I debilitated conventionally, but I’m also now on medication to recover that requires me to, as many sadly do, not consume any alcohol, not only for the days on which I take said medication, but also up to five whole days afterward. Typing this from bed; wrapped in gross, sweaty, fever-dream blankets; surrounded by nothing but a thermometer and my final, empty bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade to keep me company, I truly didn’t think my life could presently get any more physically or mentally distressing than this…then I realized it was time to watch season two of Classroom of the Elite. This series, at least to me, is the perfect embodiment of the, “Ah, I see you’ve laid out in a very detailed fashion a long list of well-argued criticism against the anime I enjoy, but I’m going to take it upon myself to not seriously address any of it and instead simply jeer at you, ‘If you don’t like it, don’t watch it lmao!’” Because I’ve seriously been dreading this for quite some while.

If I was committed to covering seasonal anime like I am now at the time season one of this series ended, then I definitely would’ve written a review for it, because Classroom of the Elite is surprisingly a lot more interesting than it looks, at least in certain ways. Actually, that isn’t true at all, but it still very much succeeded at presenting itself as if it would successfully evolve into a very specific type of show with a very specific type of gimmick that I am personally a huge sucker for. I haven’t really come up with a name for this yet, but the type of show which is told seemingly from the prospective of the protagonist to a point, which later reveals the protagonist was hiding something not only from the other characters, but from even you, the audience, and said reveal then changes the way you think about the protagonist, the antagonist(s), and the story in some profoundly different way than you had before you truly understood who the protagonist was. The classic, most perfect example I can think of is from Durarara!! Learning Mikado was in control of the Dollars from the start massively recontextualizes everything he’d said and done up until the point you learned this about him, and the series continuously does this to reframe how you would personally evaluate this character who you thought you knew well. Learning that Aoba had infiltrated the Dollars with the former Blue Squares, seeing how Mikado embraced this and used them to covertly police the gang. All these slow but firm steps forward into a deeper, darker version of himself built such a compelling character, because, despite spending most of our time with him—him still being the “main character”—he made decisions that surprised us not quite enough to think of him as being out-of-character, but more than enough for us to think he had more depth in store which we simply had to anticipate.

I suppose far less deep and interesting, yet obviously much more famous and easily referenced examples of this phenomenon could include Light Yagami, Lelouch vi Britannia, and all their like to a certain degree, but I think I’ve painted my picture quite clearly, and, no matter how cheaply it did so, season one of Classroom of the Elite concluded by making Ayanokouji out to be one such “enigma protagonist” (which is the name for this trope I think I’m going to stick with). In this show, it’s probably the only memorable scene in the entire first season, as well as its seemingly climactic finale, so I’m sure no summary need be in order. It wasn’t as dramatic as Mikado turning out to have been the boss in charge of the Dollars, but suggesting that Ayanokouji had this weird, deeper angle to his personality other than simply being deadpan harem MC No.2576773 was honestly a rather enticing prospect. We’d seen glimpses of his life as a guinea pig in some laboratory setting in episodes six, ten, and eleven, but at no point was it made clear that his time there effected his personality, let alone his worldview—goodness gracious, imagine a character in a show like this actually having an interesting worldview—so having him give this monologue about how all humans are tools and he doesn’t care about anyone whatsoever was pretty neat. I mean, the dialogue was the sort of edgy one-liners you’d expect from a fucking light novel, but it was still SOMETHING. Something, anything at all to make even a second of this shit worth it. I was probably only seduced by it because, again, I’m a real sucker for these kinds of reveals, but for it to actually be worth anything, season two had to do two things. 1) It had to capitalize on the reveal and make Ayanokouji an interesting character, and 2) it had to not be complete dog shit. Unfortunately, it utterly failed to do both.

If I hadn’t learned about this “twist ending” from reading through spoiler-ridden threads on /a/, I never would’ve picked this show back up after dropping it two minutes in. That whole opening scene on the bus was excruciating from start to finish. Every millisecond like nails on a fucking chalkboard, with every hallmark of every bad modern anime I’d ever seen, the likes of which I cast aside without hesitation after barely being able to stomach a few meager minutes. Opens with a pretentious Nietzsche quote which has nothing to do with anything, in German, of course, mein liebe freund; generic, lifeless, washed-out, effortless, devoid of anything resembling artistic heart or soul in its direction, animation, color design, background art, character design, settings, or music; brain-numbingly uninteresting protagonist; over-the-top side characters with wildly unrealistic and exaggerated personalities rambling about nothing, all indicative of the writing sensibilities of a middle schooler, or worse, Tow Ubukata. It was all there, and watching it even at a full 2x speed was unbearable. The episode, and the entire show afterward, proceeded to be little other than character introductions for uninteresting looking pieces of sometimes-animated cardboard, rule sets for obnoxiously convoluted games or structures which exist solely to engage those who think engaging with such makes them any more intelligent, and personal confrontations that only really spark due to a character seeing one thing one way and feeling the need to impose the way they feel about said thing upon others…in other words, pompousness and immaturity. And if that wasn’t the single most unsexy portrait of any anime you’ve ever heard, I warn you now that season two is even more visually atrocious than season one…somehow. With last season’s compositing, I really don’t know how they made this look even worse.

Season two has officially dropped any pretense of looking like an intelligent series to any passersby, as it has undergone the rather undignified, hasty transition into a full-blown harem. In season one, there were some minor hints that Kushida was starting to develop feelings for Ayanokouji, but her character is so fucking all over the place that you can’t really expect her to stick to anything emotional. It was therefore understood, at least by me, that this would be a series about whatever light novel nonsense it was going to be about, and any romantic sub-plots would be reserved exclusively for the inch-by-inch progress Ayanokouji would presumably make with Horikita over time, but season two quickly brings the teen romance shit straight to the forefront, no matter how jarring the clash is with the pre-established conflicts I thought we were going to be focusing on. The result, naturally, is completely farcical. By the end of the season, he has Horikita, who I suppose makes sense considering how all she really needed was someone emotionless enough to stomach her arrogance; he has maybe Kushida, but her character is so confusing and absurd that one episode she’s hugging him from behind and another she’s trying to ruin his life and get him expelled; he has Sakura, who likes him because he doesn’t “have scary eyes” (look at her lecherously), because if there’s one thing I know about teenage girls, it’s their universal attraction to guys who look at them like asexual robots; he has Karuizawa, who warmed up to him after he contently filmed her getting assaulted and coerced her into collaborating with him after debasing her to the point of tears; and then he has Sato, who I honestly don’t even fucking understand. She just saw him do the Devilman: Crybaby meme run during the relay race and suddenly thought, “Oh my God, I’m so wet! Please fuck me! Harder! Harder, Ayanokouji-sama!”

Needless to say at this point, season two lives up to the first in every way, and I obviously mean this to be a scathing insult. The problem with Classroom of the Elite in simple terms is that it’s terminally fucking boring and completely fails in all its attempts to endear, invest, or engage you with or towards any of its principle characters as a consequence of them being exclusively presented as one-dimensional tropes (Horikita, etc.), over-the-top cartoon characters (Kushida, etc.), in-context memes not to be taken seriously (Kouenji, etc.), or narrative cannon fodder who will never at any point or in any convincing fashion have any gravity to their presence or be of importance to any long-term conflict in the series (Hirata, etc.), however long it chooses to fucking last. Fourteen volumes, isn’t it? The novel? I shudder at the thought of how many seasons of TV anime that translates to… Anyway, it’s just more of the same. More rules, more exposition, more internally conflicting feelings of and between unreasonable teenagers, so on and so forth. I cannot reach far enough back in my own memory, unreliable as that now admittedly is, to a point in my life where I could give half a shit about the halfhearted drama and embarrassingly predictable gambits such a pseudo-intellectual series has to offer. Since the “big reveal” at the end of the last season, Ayanokouji’s presentation has changed in, as far as I can tell, exactly zero ways. We get some slightly more revealing and honest inner monologuing, but that’s about it. The entire suggestion that his personality would gain a new dimension was nothing but hollow hope, assuming said hope wasn’t entirely fabricated from within my own oddly inflated expectations, wherever in the fuck those would’ve come from. Actually, come to think of it, where in this damned to hell piece of shit series WOULD I gain any positive expectations?

Ugh—they had such a good thing with episode twelve too, and yet they still completely failed, not only to make the slog up until that point worth a damn, but to even make it feel ultimately satisfying by the end. Yes, the episode was the only one to have some decently animated sequences, but having him just waltz in, confront everything, and massacre everyone was such a simplistically bold writing choice that was genuinely satisfying to watch. But what’s the end result? The end result is the exact same monologue from the end of season one. Yes, it was much better written; yes, it was much better produced and executed; yes, it was a genuinely cool scene that actually kinda made you scared of Ayanokouji yourself. But what is he saying? Again, “All humans are nothing but tools. I have no emotions. Blah, blah.” In other words, albeit more brutal, the same shit from the end of season one. I thank the fight for being completely fucking epic and absurd, because it genuinely felt like getting wasted and watching UFC with my cousin and her friends, but does it contribute to the substance of the episode—or of the SHOW, for that matter??? No. It really doesn’t. And so I’m sadly forced to repeat my not-so rhetorical question from the end of the previous paragraph: “come to think of it, where in this damned to hell piece of shit series WOULD I gain any positive expectations?” From its cardboard characters? From its comical ridiculousness which betrays any intention of self-seriousness it could possibly hope for? From its embarrassingly uneven production quality? Please don’t tell me I’m supposed to get them from its fucking dumb, uninteresting, forced-harem waifus. And for GOD’S SAKE—PLEASE—don’t tell me I’m supposed to get them from the teenage-IQ, pretentious quotes which pop up at the start of every episode.

Honestly, how the fuck am I eight paragraphs deep into this review? Season one was horrendous, and whether it had a promising cliffhanger or not, am I really so dull these days to expect a show that had been total shit for twelve complete episodes to suddenly turn a new leaf in a new season? What the hell is wrong with me?! By season two, the art direction is physically nauseating and character models change scene by scene; this is the kind of bottom of the barrel dogshit trash I’d happily, confidently give a 2/10 after inspecting for thirty to forty seconds max. I don’t understand how I watched twelve episodes of ceaseless misery FIVE YEARS AGO, see about half a minute of promise at the very end, and at no point before building future expectations did I ever stop and think, “Hold on. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Those past twelve episodes of ceaseless misery shouldn’t really inspire confidence in the future, should they?” I then proceeded to waste more of my time watching through a second season, writing a review for it—thereby wasting your time now too—only to reach the inevitable conclusion that of-fucking-course none of this was going to pay off. I hope I never have a deep enough understanding of human psychology to fully process why I chased such pointless shadows cast by such an empty husk of an anime. I mean, I wouldn’t exactly describe this as being one of my more “passionate” or “inspired” reviews in the grand scheme of things, but I drink myself to death for nearly three months, come down to the final few weeks of the season with barely enough to time to watch, let alone WRITE for any of the anime I want to write for, and THIS is what I choose to spend my precious time on?! I’m sick for fuck’s sake! This is ridiculous. Completely unacceptable. I just took my temperature again to piss myself off, and it’s 101.2°F.

I should download Uber Eats or DoorDash or something. I am not going out to get more Gatorade and Maruchan like this…

Thank you for reading.

Kanokari really pissed people off when it first came out, but given my exhaustion with oversensitive outrage culture, I completely failed to take the outcry seriously. I only watched season one after it ended, and only then did I realize how badly I missed out. With that said, though, I’m also kinda glad I missed out, because writing for season two means I no longer have to waste time introducing the story and characters, since the audience is already familiar with the premise. And gosh…what a premise… Kanokari, morally, is utterly repugnant, and while that fact really upset me when I first started watching it, ... I later came to unironically enjoy it, not merely as a guilty pleasure to mock myself for enjoying, but as an actual anime. Given the amount of debauchery real people engage in, at times and in some countries, shamelessly in broad fucking daylight, I personally think there isn’t that much comparatively wrong with being a prostitute or engaging in prostitution if that’s what the pair in question seriously wants to do. What I do find something wrong with is attempting to derive, or presenting it to others as if they should attempt to derive, a positive, stable, forward-looking relationship from the position of a prostitute/client relationship. I mean, I’m not sure I particularly care for the idea of prostitution either way, but what I specifically don’t care for regarding this show is the implication that everything going on is totally innocuous, no one is going to be seriously damaged, and there are no long-term negative consequences. Frankly, girls, you should just do it. Open an OnlyFans today, or better yet, become a professional camwhore on Twitch. There really are no drawbacks. Just ask the women who’ve been stalked across international borders, or the men who’ve sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into parasocial non-relationships. The understanding of these emotionally complex, postmodern social devices is just far too simplistic in the mind of this author, and the manner in which he depicts them I would argue is actively misleading and bad for modern youth. It’s encouraging, or at least tacitly endorsing bad behavior in a way that it doesn’t really need to, and while, luckily, it does suggest via Chizuru that no one really could, should, or would operate like this for long in a perfect world, and those involved should always be trying to decouple and break away (literally the plot of the show), it isn’t direct enough with its messaging, and it excuses itself far too often.

Throughout season one, I was holding myself back from moving to Tokyo, calling the police, and getting this fucking guy arrested. I was admittedly drinking a little bit, but I still don’t think an anime has had me cursing and seething this much since I had to sit through however many episodes of fucking Rottenmeier in Alps no Shoujo Heidi, because—I’m sorry—this is pure fucking DEGENERATE shit. This is encouraging young men to pay for prostitutes with Daddy’s money and catch feelings. This is advice that, if heeded, WILL hurt real, vulnerable, naive people in the real world, and it WILL jeopardize their relationships and careers, both academic and professional. It remains true that the show itself recognizes this is no foundation for a healthy relationship whatsoever, but the messaging still is never direct enough nor does it ever stop excusing its bad actors. Ruka makes public spectacle of drama, cries like a petulant little brat, commits blackmail, and gets exactly what she wants; Kazuya and Chizuru use lies to manipulate the emotions of their elderly and/or dying grandmothers, and that works out swimmingly; Kazuya is caught stalking the woman he (allegedly) loves, and she rewards him with a Christmas present; Kazuya gets a part-time job to pay for prostitutes because his parents’ allowance money wasn’t enough to sustain his spending, and this newfound time commitment doesn’t seem to endanger his education at all; I could go on. I went to great lengths in my failed Mushoku Tensei review to explain how “some fiction are about morals, they’re about learning a lesson and watching role model characters, and others are not. [Mushoku Tensei] is very much in the later category…” Kanokari, however, is very much in the former category. It’s about watching a confused, indecisive young man to whom the target audience can heavily relate learn to (very fucking) slowly but (I assume) surely learn to grow a spine and commit to a relationship with the one he loves. Therefore, since it’s untimely trying to demonstrate self-betterment, the themes and suggestions it presents to its audience should be appropriate and virtuous enough to be presented in front of—and effectively taught to—its impressionable target audience. But this is not at all the case. Indeed, as described, it is very much the opposite. It tacitly endorses all the bad behavior listed above and more, and going beyond even that, what it chooses to actively and openly endorse is sometimes absolutely fucking wild.

I had always imagined that the big turning point in Kanokari’s torturously stagnant, snail-paced narrative would be the inevitable moment when the author finally found the courage to have Kazuya see Chizuru on a date with another man. I envisioned him losing his composure, grabbing her by the arms, and telling her, “I want you to myself. I love you. Quit this prostitution shit and stay with me.” I know—as if a fucking anime protagonist would ever say something that manly—but I wasn’t simply wrong. What happened was the EXACT opposite, because he felt NOTHING. Zero. He’s just like, “Ooo, no! We gotta get out of here before my friends see and my giant fucking pathological spider web of lies finally comes constricting down on my fucking throat, strangling me to death in my own sin and degeneracy! lol Whoopsie daisy!” I seriously don’t want young people to consume this and think human beings work this way, because it’s going to give them bad ideas about society. Kazuya’s reaction to seeing Chizuru with Umi on Christmas was so fucking warped, because he seemed to be suggesting that if it was a “rental date” then everything would be fine and dandy, but if this romantic Christmas rendezvous was Chizuru’s “real boyfriend” then, ooooh no, that would be devastating. BUT THERE’S NO TANGIBLE FUCKING DIFFERENCE! Sure, incels, she might fuck her boyfriend, whereas her clients aren’t allowed to touch her without *at least in theory* getting themselves in trouble with the law, but that doesn’t change the fact this line of work fucks with the psychology of everyone involved. The peak example of this comes when this fucking guy literally PIMPS OUT his girlfriend! Pimping HAPPENED in this anime, and they did it TO SOLVE A PROBLEM! “Sumi is shy and can’t talk to people. That sucks. Oh, wait! I know! We could teach her how to be an outgoing rental girlfriend! Hey, Kazuya, (guy I like) how about you go cuck me and spend the day with this softy, huh? Warm her up to the touch of a man, will ya?” Hard cut to the next episode, and they’ve started normalizing cuckoldry! But hey?! What’s the problem? I know throughout all of human history people weren’t exactly thrilled about people fucking their significant other, but we’re past that. It’s 2022. It’s time to let other bitches fuck YOUR man. So stop being a fucking bigot and embrace the times. Thus, Chizuru, being the progressive woman that she is, sends Kazuya off to Sumi and opens her legs—I mean opens her heart to Kuribayashi.

The ultimate cherry on top, the final chef’s kiss to complete all this contemptible debauchery was at the end of the OP, because we get through our delightful ninety seconds of all these romantic situations, and then the camera just pans down to a fucking check. A fucking BILL for like hundreds of dollars worth in yen, and it just left me stunned, because…what on Earth is happening here?! The commodification of love?! Does human interaction mean NOTHING to these people?! Does it all just boil down to dollars and cents?! Seeing that made me angry, but even more than that, it made me worried, because the viewers watching this need to be pulled aside and told, “This isn’t good. This is bad. Please don’t operate your lives like this.” I’m sorry, but it doesn’t hurt to stress this somewhat excessively. PLEASE, because the target audience here should not be led astray like this. They need to be protected from these suggestions, because they….well, you know…they’re just not that…well…nevermind. I don’t want this review getting deleted. Anyway, by the time I got to season two and had come around to appreciating the little bits of heart and soul the series had to offer, I was much less outraged by the immortality of it all. I mean, that still didn’t necessarily eliminate my reaction to any of it, but it was less shocking. Throughout the second season, I was still continuously compelled to verbally lament, “This is a man who cheats on women.” He’ll be doing something that in any other context would seem utterly sleazy and manipulative, but which is now attempting to be written off as acceptable because of this whole rental girlfriend scheme…which is itself completely unacceptable when they’re involving this much obvious emotion and boundary-pushing, not to mention more deeply intertwining people like Sumi who is far too pure and innocent to safety and healthily work as a prostitute. I’ll just be watchin’ a scene, sippin’ blackberry moonshine like a fucking Greek philosopher, and have to pause the episode, recoil in disgust, and mutter under my breath, “Ugh, what a fuckin’ scum motherfucker…” Ruka is over here like, “Don’t you feel bad asking me to let you cheat?” And he’s like, “It’s not cheating, though!” Implying rental date =/= “real” date, and I’m just bottling up screams, BECAUSE IT DOES! You’re leading this chick on while lusting after some other woman! You are a scumbag who thinks with his dick and has no appreciation for the emotions of the women in his life!

The best scene to discuss as a segue into season two is also the scene which first started winning me over, the scene which first suggested the show had at least some modicum of intelligence about itself, and the scene which, I think many would agree, simply contained the best writing of the entire first season. This of course is the scene in episode twelve where Mami, having finally figured out about this whole rental girlfriend scheme, takes Chizuru on a date, and the way this was presented, to me at least, felt like real, convincing, not-the-kind-of-thing-you-typically-see-in-highschool-anime drama. When I finally stop talking about themes and emotions and actually at some point begin discussing the plot, I’ll be sure to spend time talking about the comedically ridiculous, parody-level coincidences and contrivances that happen constantly throughout the series, and this was the first scene to truly break that mold, because this is the kind of shit a vindictive ex-girlfriend would actually do. She would stalk Twitter feeds and shit, get in on the gossip, spot certain people spending time together at certain social destinations, put two and two together, and take it upon herself to utterly humiliate the current girlfriend as much as she possibly could for no one’s satisfaction but her own. The scene also works thematically, because, dear reader, if being a rental girlfriend is just a job and nothing to feel funny about, then why does Chizuru feel so claustrophobic in the karaoke parlor with Mami, and why does she feel so grossed out by the things Mami is asking her to do? She’s just singing karaoke, right? Wrong, she’s selling her dignity to someone who’s forcing her to do things she doesn’t want to do and presenting herself as if she’s not feeling the emotions that she’s actually feeling—AND THAT’S NOT NORMAL. The scene perfectly exposed the corrupt and dangerous nature of the rental girlfriend profession to perhaps its greatest advocate in the series while simultaneously forcing me to appreciate that for all its ridiculousness and all its shortcomings, this series had at least one solid cast member. Mami, simply put, is an extremely relatable and believable character. I had noticed this long before that scene, but certain things she would do had always struck me as strikingly well-characterized. I’ve cited this example time and time again, but watching her was like watching Light Yagami twirl his pen around his thumb while contemplating deeper thoughts during class.

Obviously, twirling your pen around your thumb is a sort of habitual nervous tick which many people have developed; it’s not like I thought up until that point that I was the only human being on planet Earth who ever twirled their pen around their thumb in school. But when I first watched Death Note, I was a teenager with a superiority complex just as Light was, and seeing him do that while I was in the process of doing it myself, neglecting the homework on my desk, twirling my pen around as I seriously entertained his utopian ideals in my head…I can’t even describe how surreal of a feeling that was, and seeing some of the things Mami did throughout season one of Kanokari came close to giving me similar feelings. All the moments of Yuuki Aoi sounding completely emotionless and dead inside, all the shots of Mami peeling off away from the friend group to go stand in a corner somewhere and anonymously type angry shit online. She just had so many real-feeling moments of, “Oh, I have done exactly that at some point in my life.” Mami just stood out to me as this socially unhinged BPD psycho bitch that I could really see myself in, and while other characters are certainly less inspiring and much more anime-like—*cough* Sumi—Kanokari still does a better than average job at presenting bits of characterization most other anime of its type simply would not. I mean, even the mere admission that a girl could or would put on a romantic act to earn money from lonely virgins is itself fairly daring when you think about how committed most romcom are to the pure, 100% escapist school of anime writing. While aforementioned characters who stand out as particularly unrealistic definitely fuck with this balance a little bit—*cough* Sumi—it still does a lot for my immersion and my willingness to invest in the main cast when there is a clear and distinct difference between Chizuru as a rental girlfriend and Chizuru as her genuine self, both in animation and in her voice actress’s performance. The character who simultaneously makes and breaks the show is of course everyone’s favorite clinical retard, Kazuya, because as soon as season two kicks off, we’re made to appreciate what I assume is going to be the status quo forevermore: the more honest he and Chizuru are with themselves about the fact that they like each other, the less honest they are with one another, and therefore the more weird fucking shit they do to divert from a direct confession.

The problem with Kazuya is I suppose quite typical, it’s just the excruciating pacing and mind-numbingly stupid contrivances which have become the infamous hallmarks of Kanokari simply make his issues out to be more frustrating than they might be under other, similar circumstances. Kazuya is your average, inexperienced, weak young man; he is a boy with no spine whatsoever who consistently allows both his male and female peers to walk all over him; and, crucially, he is true to form in that if you provide him with even the slightest hint of pussy, then he is on that shit like a fucking police dog. This is all, of course, very much to his own disservice, because any time he stands up for himself or appears even somewhat decisive for even a second, all the women are like, “Wha-woah! D-do I actually like this guy???” I like this approach, because not only does it serve as a lovely lesson to teach its target audience how to act desirably around the opposite sex, but it successfully depicts to the audience why Kazuya’s wavering levels of decisiveness are frustrating to us AND the characters in the story, thereby lending itself some right to call itself self-aware. You see, this guy would do all the things he does and make all the concessions me makes for ANY girl, but no girl wants a guy who would put himself out for ANY girl. They want a guy who would put themselves out for just them—who’s gonna stand up for you, not that other bitch. If you go watch full-on harem anime, the main guy is always presented as being platonically nice to every girl so he doesn’t come across as some weird man-whore, but he’s still nevertheless presented as being able to get all the girls to love him merely by showing these acts of kindness alone—which is fucking stupid, escapist, porno bullshit for reasons we just discussed. Real girls want real attention, not simply platitudinous Mr. Nice Guy shit, so applying this harem logic to a romcom which is trying to take itself somewhat seriously, with female love interests which are for the most part—*coughs* Sumi—characterized believably, is what I would say primarily makes viewers of Kanokari understandably want to tear their fucking eyes out. Seeing Kazuya say or do anything decisive or committed in any form or fashion is such a breath of fresh air, but then it’s choked out of your lungs when the author decides, actually, maybe a hundred, maybe even two hundred, maybe even three hundred more chapters of torture are in order, so buckle up.

Kanokari is a perfect example of a series which is absolutely fine at being exactly what it’s trying to be, it’s just that what it’s trying to be is a mega generic romcom based on a long-running, cash cow manga…which is honestly, above everything else, my biggest single complaint with the series as a whole. It’s yet another anime that feels like it’s based on a manga that was very intentionally designed to last forever. I said this back when I first watched season one two years ago, and I’ll say it again now: there was never any hope that this season was going to reach any kind of satisfying resolution. I don’t know if its popularity will be sustained for future seasons; I won’t read the manga; the final episode does not leave you with any ultimate catharsis whatsoever; and while there might be slight progress and trivial drama which we can discuss endlessly, nothing here is gonna leave any particular impression. At the end of season one, Kazuya does the, “I love you!…………(credits roll and you think real progress was finally made)…………(after credits scene starts)…………uuuuuuuhhh but just as a rental lmao!” And you’re like, “Oh, okay. I don’t know why I’m surprised by that one. I’m gonna go drink bleach, hang myself, and slit my wrists all at the same time. Thanks, anime.” But in episode two of season two, he tells her straight up, “The real you is my ideal woman.” Period. No notes. He just says it outright, and here we fucking are ten episodes later and the misunderstandings are still running strong. Like, the amount of willful ignorance or sheer, diagnosable mental retardation these insufferable children must be afflicted by at this point is through the fucking moon. If you do as I did and simply invest in the characters no matter what fuckshit the story throws their way—or directly your way for that matter—then most of the contrivance nonsense is all stuff that, if you turn your brain off, very easily becomes ignorable white noise that quickly fades into the background. However, no matter the expertise with which I was able to incrementally sip my moonshine to keep a consistent buzz, there was some moments throughout both seasons that were simply too much, and I could feel the alcoholic implosion of my brain significantly accelerated by sheer anime absurdity. I feel now is a good time to warn you that not only did I watch this series consistently buzzed, but also at a leisurely 1.6x speed, so if you watch with neither, then your milage may vary drastically.

My first complete and total breaking point was back in episode six of season one when Ruka firsts shows up, because she arrives on the scene with nerdy, bucktooth, glasses boy and is obviously WAY out of his league. She then accuses Chizuru of being a rental girlfriend, makes herself wildly suspicious by even knowing about rental girlfriends in the first place, AND brings this accusation up to people who are themselves engaging in the practice, and yet they somehow fail to IMMEDIATELY realize she, too, was a rental girlfriend, and that shit blew my fucking mind. That was so beyond outrageously retarded that I was at that moment convinced this was all on purpose. Again, the show is absolutely littered with little plot holes and coincidences that break it from the ground up—things as basic as Chizuru’s double lifestyle not having been found out by every single fucking person in Tokyo, a point which is, in the case of her Ichinose persona, literally backed up by Superman “just Clark Kent with glasses lol who could that possibly be” Logic—but rarely does it hit you with impossible-to-ignore absurdities such as that. It’s riddled with little things, like, “Oh, they just happened to show up there at that time? What a coincidence!” Or, “Oh, they just happened to run into them a this spot? What a coincidence!” Or, “Oh, this person just happened to be right there in earshot or line of sight to them doing this thing that concerns the former in this way and now drama this drama that? W-w-what a coincidence!” All the excuses given by the show to handwave particular contrivances are fucking laughable and don’t make any sense, so if you’re the type of person who can’t really get into, “Okay, this show is pretty trashy. I’m just gonna turn my brain off and get out of it what I know I personally can get out of it.” Then I’d recommend saving your sanity and watching another, much smarter anime. And, now that we’re fast approaching the final paragraph of this monstrosity of a review, I’m slowly realizing the position I’ve put myself in—that of somewhat standing in defense of an anime which every thinking individual seems to rightly despise for many good reasons, all of which I’ve acknowledged and even criticized myself, but none of which I’ve even attempted to outright justify at all—and I’m struggling to find the answer to the question, “How and why did I enjoy watching this show again?” Because, I’m gonna be honest here, the answer isn’t coming to me easily.

This is as good of an adaptation of whatever its adapting as it probably could be, and I don’t think I need to read the manga to say that. There isn’t a whole lot of animation, but the gorgeous character designs and stylish costume designs lend themselves perfectly to the series’ stellar artwork. The author clearly wants you to think these girls are worth money—which, hey, I guess many of them literally are—and he was successful. The colors and backgrounds are solid, and the music is great, especially those in-character insert songs the voice actresses sang for. And if the obvious outpouring of effort wasn’t enough to convince you this production had some soul, I now take this time to direct you to the fucking *zawa zawa* Kaiji reference in season two. Like, wtf?! What teenager watching this trash is going to understand or even catch that??? It’s just one of those baseline inclusions that makes you say, “Well, okay, at least the people making this clearly cared.” But this is all fluff, really, because what truly got me to sink my teeth into this was all that juicy, bloody, red meat shit. That feeling when you see another woman’s purse in your ex-boyfriend’s apartment; that feeling when you imagine your ex-girlfriend hooking up with some bigger, hotter, manlier guy; that feeling when you have to talk to the guy you like the morning after you heard another girl at his place; the feeling of your girlfriend, who you’re not that serious about, having a family who truly trusts you to look after their daughter, or granddaughter in this case. The evolution we see from last season, where Chizuru kicked Kazuya off of her in the hospital bed with that big, over-the-top anime reaction, to this season, where he falls on top of her in an equally retarded fan-service set-up, yet, this time, she instead looks to him vulnerably and tells him to get off in a demure, understated voice, letting him make the choice himself. Realizing Ruka bought condoms, or seeing her force herself on Kazuya because she knows she’s losing the emotional race. Getting wrapped up in the late-night Gossip Girl shit, the drama, investing in the competition, being fucking disgusted with Kazuya; it’s all part of the process. I love allowing myself to get invested in trash like this just so it can frustrate me and force my cold, dead, icy heart to feel literally anything other than passivity and dejection, which I guess answers the question posited at the end of the previous paragraph. I wanted to rewatch and seriously engage with it, so I could sift though all this nonsense and see how much of it was dumb smut, and how much of it actually had a little amateur bit to say about relationships and love. I just made sure to leave myself an out to excuse all my actions as being self-aware, since I never hesitated even for a second to point and laugh…even though I still consciously allowed myself to invest in something undeniably low-brow, because fuck you. I’m lonely and felt like it.

Thank you for reading.

First of all, just to operate with full disclosure here, I’d like to address the fact that, at this point, my brain is just complete mush. I’m at the point now where I can physically feel how much more difficult it’s become, in merely the last five or six weeks, for my fingers to functionally type out my thoughts, jumbled as they already are. I’m not even sure I’m intellectually capable of critically analyzing an anime such as this anymore. I mean—fuck me backwards—some would say I was never intellectually capable of critically analyzing anything. “Thank god you quit reviewing, your reviews were borderline headache ... inducing and a blight on any anime review section. You act like this is a full time job and it's sad, go outside. It's okay you can maybe review the sky or the grass instead of anime :)” So now? All bets are fucking off. Even reading through my own past reviews is difficult, with me subtly slurring my words and tripping over my tongue. I’m literally, not-a-joke fucking dying. This isn’t even mentioning how my short term memory nowadays is completely zero. I still remember my life, and I remember who I am, and why I am who I am. I remember things and the world. But as far as events that happened recently, or what I said recently, or anything recently? That is all fucking dead, zero, nothing. Tiny little minutes will pass where, blink, I’ll just forget everything and all thoughts will have permanently evacuated my fucking skull. Randomly, in the middle of the day. Most of my reviews are drafted, written, and edited weeks—even months in advance, but I watched all twenty four episodes of SAC_2045 in the last two days and wrote this review in the exact same time frame…hopefully, at least, it isn’t as bad as I think it is. I suppose you, my sweetheart reader, will be the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner on this trail. [laughs nervously] Please just try to be lenient. I’m SO sad and lonely. Hug me, please; don’t hate me. Squeeze hard. I’m small and thin and fragile, but I promise you won’t break me. So squeeze, like you mean it. I’m ready.

So…the sequel no one wanted to the series no one asked for. What an enviable position to be in? I’m speaking as if there are separate seasons of this and not just one, twenty-four episode show that Netflix cut in half and budgeted separately, but whatever. Point is, we’re back, and the curtains have closed properly. At the end of the day, I would say SAC_2045 was essentially consistent. In my review for season one, I think I remembered ending with the CG talk, but, this time, I think I’m going to start with it. Most people seem to be approaching it from the perspective of, “Oh, wtf lol. This is shit. These faggots are incompetent.” But they unfortunately aren’t. They’re some of the best in the industry. This look? This was intentional. It may not look good to you (or fucking me), but THIS is what they were aiming for. So please realize that. This wasn’t a technical failure. It was an audience failure. They didn’t fail to animate what they set out to animate; rather, they failed to look at their audience and agree on what the end goal and end product should’ve been. Berserk 2016 was a failure; Ex-Arm was a failure; Hand Shakers was a failure; all the other CG trainwrecks you’re thinking of were failures. This was not a failure; this was a miscalculation. I mean, if we’re at the point now where Scott Matthew is coming back and participating in Ghost in the Shell productions, who are we to continue crying that this project was an unnecessary bastardization of anything? This is all original creative staff, with the original cast, and everyone’s original spark. The balance is just slightly trifled with by the sometimes excessive Shinji Aramaki visual action. So, Max, you’re right. Atsuko Tanaka’s performance as the Major really was commanding enough to overcome Ilya Kuvshinov’s sex doll female character designs. It’s not that our cyberbrains are infected with the nostalgia virus. It’s that we’re simply watching a well-written, well-acted show, and no amount of “muh CG” is going to change that, especially when the CG’s shortcomings are exclusively stylistic.

The visual post-processing in the second half is much more shiny and the definition on the models is much more, for lack of a better term, “bright” and defined, and the colors are infinitely superior, but the actual animation techniques and the energy which results on screen is identical to the first. Whether you like the designs they use or not, Sola Digital Arts has perfected their mocap animation style. Every step of every character looks technically flawless. The mocap approach to animation results in natural, weighty, anatomical movement, and after taking into account whatever engine they use to render the shadow placements and whatever program they use to apply so much body definition, you’re left with the perfect CG anime, assuming we’re still talking exclusively about anime that we want to “look like anime” (think GANTZ:O). Again, I don’t think I’ll ever truly welcome the change entirely, especially in the first half which wasn’t nearly as polished as the second [insert Ilya Kuvshinov’s self-insert backflipping naked up the stairs], but I suppose I’m just trying to be as objective as possible here. There’s this one retrohead who writes pretty good reviews about retrohead anime, but he tried writing one for Hathaway’s Flash, and it just came across as completely out of touch. According to MAL guidelines, you cannot comment on other people’s reviews, so I can’t tell you the user’s name or link the review itself without putting this review in jeopardy, but his argument was essentially, “As we all know, old thing good, new thing bad. And this new thing doesn’t resemble old thing enough, so it’s bad.” The only tangible complaint in the whole review was the movie looked too modern, as if that wasn’t only a bad thing according to his personal opinion. I think I’m just scared of coming across like that, especially when it was far from SAC_2045’s CG which turned me off to its visual presentation. I mean, “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” doesn’t exactly jump to mind when I see a wacky waifu with pink hair exclaiming, “EEEEEHHHHHHHH?!!?!?!”

However, speaking of the nostalgia virus and what I personally see as being tonally appropriate to include within a season of Stand Alone Complex, I must say that when I see a Tachikoma laying in pieces on the ground, expressing its excitement to finally see Togusa again, with Sakiko Tamagawa’s ever-adorable voice, and I feel something, is that all nostalgia, or is it that these are still engaging and endearing characters? Does it matter? I, personally, am increasingly doubtful it does, because these twenty four episodes—comparisons to anything aside for a moment—are really fucking well written. When I’m watching an episode about Japanese pensioners robbing a bank, because they don’t understand anything about how the financial system has evolved and how it’s not terribly possible to really even quote-unquote “rob” a so-called “bank” anymore, and they’re doing so because 1) two of them had their retirement funds lost to a global banking default that they don’t understand 2) because one of them was an employee at said bank who was trying to get revenge against his much younger manager, who manipulated him into putting up his pension as seed money for crypto investments, only for it to all be lost to the markets, and 3) because one of them came to the bank to withdraw all her savings, fly to a country like Switzerland where euthanasia is legal, and literally pay to die, only to learn that all her savings were in an outdated currency which, when converted to current yen-dollar bills, wasn’t enough to enact her plans, I don’t sit back and think, “This episode is nothing but an imitation of my precious Koukaku Kidoutai! Look at that CG! Fucking GAY LMAO!” I think, “Wow, Kenji Kamiyama has done it again.” His ability to get so technical yet keep it so grounded is astonishing. That, combined with Shotaro Suga’s character writing and Masayuki Yoshihara’s visual direction, is what made Stand Alone Complex the masterpiece it was. However, as I described at great length in my review for part one, SAC_2045 is sorely missing two of those three factors.

Half the episodes in each season of Stand Alone Complex were “complex,” which is to say, they were connected to the main overarching narrative, and the rest were “standalone,” yet at no point was the series repetitive or dry of ideas. It was always fresh, innovative, and thought-provoking. It was also never dry of imagination or emotion. It was always surprising, dazzling, and emotive. This entire twenty-four episode series, however, has I think two truly stand alone episodes to flesh-out the updated world, and, while those two were admittedly fantastic, the fact remains that much of the runtime is devoted to action scenes and prolonging physical conflicts without actually using any of this time to deepen the ideas, merely to have fun realizing the visual action potential they’ve made for themselves. This is fine, I suppose. I mean, it isn’t like it’s plagued with particularly poor execution, especially throughout the second half, but this was never the original appeal of Stand Alone Complex. Stand Alone Complex had action, and those action set pieces remain fucking brilliantly stunning to this day, but there were never long stretches of episodes which were JUST action scenes. SAC_2045, on the other hand, can sometimes be JUST an action scene, followed by someone explaining something with enigmatic technobabble, then another cliffhanger action scene leading into the following episode, which then begins with the previous cliffhanger and subsequent continuation of the very same action scene you just saw. I hate contributing to the “muh Netflix” shit-flinging which we love so much around here, but I must also admit that the Netflix model really didn’t help out here, because Netflix autoskipping the ED and not giving you that breathing room between episode breaks really highlighted how the series was just going from meaningless cliffhanger to meaningless cliffhanger when it was focusing more on action, less on…well, what all this was actually supposed to be about. Luckily these fucking roaches didn’t autoskip the OP, or I’d be pissed.

Wait…hold on. That was supposed to be the positive paragraph. How’d I fuck that up so much? Okay, so I was talking about how this show feels like OG SAC in how smartly written it is, and then I got sidetracked with bitching about how the emotional genius of Shotaro Suga and the directorial genius of Masayuki Yoshihara on the original “Kamiyama Team” was replaced by Shinji Arakami’s CG action overload, and how that ultimately ruined SAC_2045…which it did. Wait…okay, I guess we’re not going to have a positive paragraph then, because yes. That’s the problem. Kamiyama’s ideas are never constrained or balanced by his old coworkers who kept his genius creativity in check, and this is made worse by Aramaki exacerbating his love for physical, technical concepts expanding outward into these super-cyber-techno-whatever action spectacles. The old Stand Alone Complex always had, one might say, a point. It was always grounded within the boundaries of the technology, without ever diving into anything like spirituality. The Oshii films did, but that’s because their overall message and themes were profound enough to warrant such moments, and their particular directorial atmosphere was so compelling and different than the technical and “simply realistic” presentation of Stand Alone Complex. In SAC_2045 (and fucking Ubukata’s Arise series, now that I think about it), the technology is no longer the limit. Indeed, someone much funnier than I may refer to it as the “limit break.” I’m just bitching about the ending everyone’s already bitched about at this point, so, before this gets away from me, let me assure you, all SAC_2045 really has to dissuade heavy praise is CG, excessive action, and an ending that made episodes one through twenty-two feel like The Matrix (1999), episode twenty-three feel like The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and episode twenty-four feel like The Matrix Revolutions (2003). The rest is a technically and narratively ambitious comeback by the original creator himself, who made I think the best thing he still could’ve.

The metaphors simply got out of hand. References are one thing, but when I’m at the point where the show I’m watching is so obsessed with codifying all its concepts so strictly in line with George Orwell’s 1984 that I have to pause the episode, stand up, walk into the other room, get 1984 off the shelf, and start flipping through it again, then I think the writer has bitten off a little more than they could chew. In Innocence, for example, characters practically spoke to each other in quotes. Batou has two conversations, one with Togusa and one with Chief Aramaki, where literally the entire back and forth is conducted via quotes. But these quotes were not simply references to larger works which the film required you to intimately comprehend. Rather, they were quotes that were themselves self-contained parables, or allegories, or whatever. They could say it, and you, a thinking adult, could say, “Okay, well, the source escapes me on that one, but I still get the point he made, because I’m literate and can understand words.” I wrote MULTIPLE papers on Orwell’s work in college, and I’ve read 1984 specifically at least five times, yet even I have to sit here and think, “Wait…how is the Miniluv (Ministry of Love) giving you the Room 101 (phycological torture chamber for political dissidents) going to further your goals, when you yourselves use the Thinkpol (Thought Police) to enact justice already and start Sustainable Wars? Sustainable Wars are just societies where the ruling class has allowed for inequality to grow to the point of social collapse, so they can profit off the ensuing riots and violence fueled by weapons they manufacture. Is this sort of chaos not the exact opposite of the regimented Stalinist nightmare depicted in 1984? Is this partisan split within society not the exact thing Big Brother and the Thought Police would want to suppress? Where radicals run around with AK-47s, screaming about who’s N and N-Po, and railing against the one percent???” We’re so many allegories deep by the end of the series, I honestly forgot the original point being made, if there ever was one.

At some point during the first few episodes of the show, we get this exchange between Chief Aramaki and this American official who he knows to try and use her as a connection to get some leverage on the mission Section 9 had gotten itself wrapped up in, and at the end of the exchange she looks at him longingly and says, “I envy this woman you need so badly.” I was just like, “I’m sorry, WHAT?! Who was that?! What’s their history together?!??! Give me that sweet, juicy gossip!!!” But, looking back, that’s how Stand Alone Complex always was. Stand Alone Complex, Guardian of the Sacred Spirit, Eden of the East, etc. They featured humans, more than they did characters. SAC_2045 proceeded after that exchange to shower me with blissful character moments and dialogues which perfectly recaptured the chemistry of Section 9 as it always had been. Meanwhile, all these plot-relevant ideas for the main narrative build and hint in the background, and as the characters became interested and invested, so did you, because that’s what good stories do to you, and this continued until the final few episodes revealed them all to have been one giant nothing burger that was a complete waste of the minds and technical talent which brought it to screen. It’s not that it’s bad or particularly nonsensical. It’s just unsatisfying and, emotionally, predictable. Max, I see what you mean when you call it a “character assassination,” but the final episode’s script was so fucking bewildering that I can't really examine Motoko's decisions as if I was actually watching the well-established character, "Motoko Kusanagi." It’s not that she’s okay with the entire world living in a simulation, because they aren’t. When you typed, “Doublethink, N, and Shimamura’s grand plan are utterly lost on me. (On second thought, they're all just synonymous with each other, aren't they?)” I just giggled, said, “yes, they are,” and swiftly continued reading. There was no pot of gold you failed to appreciate at the end of this rainbow. It was just, “Oh, ghost hack. That didn’t really happen. Understandable, have a great day.”

Thank you for reading.

Anime openings truly are magical, aren’t they? The excite us, inspire us, and stay in our memories for years. Just this season, the OP for SPY×FAMILY, where it begins looking like a hyper-stylized spy thriller, but then quickly devolves into children’s artwork perfectly encapsulated the charm of the series; the OP for Summertime Render was so slick and atmospheric; and Paripi Koumei’s OP was a brilliant modern classic for obvious reasons, but the two runner-ups have to be Shikimori-san and Love After World Domination. They were both absolutely stellar, and Shikimori’s was so delightful, it almost successfully gaslighted me into thinking I was actually watching ... a good anime.

They say 70-93% of human communication is non-verbal, and I stand by these findings completely. This show has one of those OPs where, whether the show delivers on its promise or not, it at least suggests a level of personality and energy which I personally find so endearing and infectious. Like, even if the show has no personality (which, spoiler, it doesn’t), then the expressiveness and artfulness displayed throughout the OP can successfully brainwash me into thinking it does. It feels like a mixture of the Engaged to the Unidentified OP and the After the Rain OP, and no matter how shitty of a day I was having, no matter how fucking miserable I felt, it always made me smile.

The problem with all of this, of course, is that after the OP ends, the show starts, and it’s not great. The OP would make me think, “Oh, gosh! These two are so CUTE! Everyone looks so happy and expressive, the animation is astoundingly beautiful, and the artistry the director used to illustrate the trials and tribulations and the clumsy, invigorating course of their budding love is all just so invigorating! I just can’t wait to see this show with these characters and this artwork and this direction and—oh the show is boring as fuck………okay…great.” Generic, bland, banal, whatever word you wanna use, anything works. It’s just a boilerplate teen romcom with gimmicks that get old instantly.

There are definitely some things to like about this show. It’s a Doga Kobo project, so no matter how bland the art direction and character designs are, and no matter the fact this is clearly one of their lower effort productions, nothing ever looks unacceptably bad. The main couple are in a relationship at the start of the show, so you don’t have to deal with the usual melodrama involved with getting together, which itself is assuming you’re lucky enough to be watching one of the very few anime where the two main love interests actually at some point do fucking get to together. However, other than those few concessions, the entire show has very little in the way of redeeming qualities.

The gimmick is that Shikimori isn’t just a cutie. She’s also the female equivalent to the domineering ikemen in shoujo manga, and she endearingly protects her effeminate twink boyfriend, Izumi, all the same. I found it cute enough for a while, but my breaking point was already reached by episode five. Each stock friend character is just standing around doing their ONE thing, saying their ONE line in their ONE tone. Contrary to the bustling, energetic opening, the show itself has lifelessness leaking out of every orifice, including its fucking voice actors. As far as other, more recent waifu-bait shows go, Shikimori is comparable in quality to My Dress-Up Darling, an anime which I gave a 4/10.

…clearly should’ve put some more thought into that one.

Thank you for reading.