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On some level, I have always been able to enjoy *Love Live!* as the crude otaku capitalistic black hole that it is. The franchise has never been one to have grand aspiring messages aside from what could be easily commodified in cute mannerisms, bubblegum song-and-dance routines, and wisped happy feelings that come from a “follow your dreams” narrative structure. No matter what my overall thoughts on the previous seasons were (and they vary widely), every installment at least had something within it that either attracted me in terms of its visuals, its music, its direction, its camaraderie, or whatever it could claim as unique and ... interesting, even if just at the conceptual level. The original *School Idol Project* was the point when the franchise had not quite yet determined what did or did not work, throwing its ideas at the wall to see what stuck and, ironically, giving it a freshness that got increasingly less as each new season took hold. *Sunshine!!* and *Nijigasaki,* being installments that I never really liked and each one subsequently feeling more calculated in its moe-dification, at least tried reframing either the franchise or the larger diegetic universe into something that could be molded into newer forms.

What this indicates is not only an acute awareness of what the franchise signifies, but also that any significant deviation from the established formula was not going to be welcomed. The modern anime industry is increasingly wary of riskier gambits that may not pay off, even for something as seemingly surefire as school idols. Particularly in the rising of other properties like *BanG Dream!* (just to list one example), *Love Live!’s* hold on its niche is far less stable than it was even four years ago. This matters because *Love Live! Superstar!!*, at least at first, seemed to stand poised to push the series in a direction it wouldn’t have thought of before. Rather than a band of nine or more girls in its ensemble, it had only five. It also eventually appeared to adopt something akin to a genuine antagonist character in Margarete, unlike previous rival groups such as A-RISE or Saint Snow, or individuals like Lanzhu, where everyone was still friendly with everyone. Particularly with teasing the idea that Kanon would not be present in Japan for the show’s unique third season opportunity, *Superstar!!* consistently stood at the threshold to do something so daring that, even if it failed, I could at least applaud the effort to do so.

And then, it never did.

The warning signs were early. From the second season onwards, the show seemed to play itself like the creative team (including longtime series writer Hanada Jukki and director of the original *School Idol Project* Kyougoku Takahiko as two examples) received a memo from Bushiroad’s executives that immediate “corrections” were needed. The cast was expanded from five to nine, hastily needing to ingratiate new commodifiable kohai to a pre-established group dynamic. Margarete, herself so antithetical to the idea of idols as understood within *Love Live!*, was perpetually kept in the rearview mirror until her entire existence hinged on Kanon’s future. The end of season two with the Vienna school opportunity suspended and Margarete moving to Yuigaoka slammed the door so tightly that, in a bizarre twist of fate, the franchise that so often sings about idols and dreams within those idol ideals was to be caught in a perpetual nightmare.

That nightmare comprises what might be charitably called the “Love Live! Civil War arc,” with Margarete trying to create a new idol group from within Yuigaoka to dethrone the champion Liella!. Any inherent intrigue within this premise is immediately torpedoed by Kanon’s idea to join Margerete’s group before the first episode is finished. Such an action isn’t just a paltry attempt to artificially create false conflict within the show. Part of the reason why Margerete’s defeat stung her so badly was that it was the FULL team of nine that stopped her. Kanon no longer being in Liella! means that the group that she’s actively trying to defeat is no longer as it once was, and while the rest of the group can say that they’ll keep trying hard without Kanon, it is Kanon who is the main embodiment of everything that Margerete wants to surpass. This is likewise why most of her dialogue in season two centers around Kanon as opposed to Liella! as a whole. If Kanon joins her, then what is Marguerete accomplishing by beating Liella! now? The reality is that she wouldn’t accomplish anything by doing so. To spare her that humiliating realization, the story chooses to have Margerete eventually be brought to the “good guys” with Kanon playing this absurd 4D chess.

That is not a spoiler – it is the truth that *Love Live!* always abides by. It therefore comes as no surprise that the newest character in the whole of the season, Natsumi’s sister Tomari, should likewise fall in line with inevitably realizing “happiness is found in Liella!” as truth. It’s destiny; her performance in episode two spares the narrative from having to demonstrate her capabilities (compare this to Keke in season one, who had barely any endurance to speak of), so she doesn’t need to “try” at all. Any barriers she has are purely ideological, and in her case, the extent is almost comical to which she seemed to hurt Natsumi for the purposes of “keeping her safe.” So, when her buckling against the torrent of happiness dawns, it’s both abrupt in how quickly it takes place and late, only after most of the other characters have had their previous plot threads picked up and doubled down upon. At eleven characters total by the time of season’s end, the notion that even more exploration for those we have already seen and which the narrative reconciled makes for a grand misuse of time. In moving through these motions, it is as though the show is trying to convince itself that this was the right path all along and silencing its own doubts through the characters feeling old doubts return. Maybe it should have listened.

*Love Live! Superstar!!* season three is essentially a declaration that *Love Live!* cannot actually have anything stand in the protagonist’s way except through the most abstract forces possible. In prior installments, it was the threat of school closure and trying to prove the brilliance of individual idols (by reducing them to caricatures of whatever realized self the show was claiming they were and failing to distinguish them from the group) by making their personal problems vanish under the veneer of “growth.” Here now, with a desperate need to validate the existence of new characters and re-validate the old ones, Liella’s! position as last year’s titular Love Live! winners trying to defend their title lacks any meat or meaningful substantiation. At its core is a center with no color. The music plays, but it means nothing.

Perhaps unintentionally, *Love Live! Superstar!!* is the most overtly clear that Bandai Namco / Sunrise and Bushiroad have been about the franchise up until this point. They are an ex that promises at each reconciliation that they can change and become better, but always ends up defaulting back to the same behaviors that you hoped to never see again. What dream is there to be had in being the same? I suppose that consistency is admirable in a sad, cynical, perverse kind of way. While it may proport to be about fun and happy times, the dismaying implication of *Love Live!* is that it champions conformity clothed within the pageantry of self-identity. The characters may have a quirk or singular “thing” that distinguishes them, but the assembly-line construction of the groups at each new iteration lacks the soulful parts that add to their adorable dances. It has reached the point where it no longer hides the illusion. *Love Live!* has never been about idols – moreso than many other properties that are of similar spirit, it has been about trying to capture vague feelings that are perfectly calculated to generate the impulse to consume. This is a franchise that, at this rate, will never grow and never change, no matter how many new school idol groups it forms.

This is effectively my graduation from *Love Live!* – whatever the franchise has coming next (because we know it’s coming), I’ll have already moved on.

There’s a moment early in *Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian* when the titular Alya / Alisa Mikhailovna Kujou takes off her wet sock, making Kuze Masachika uncomfortable. Noticing this, she devilishly chuckles to herself and uses Kuze’s own discomfort for her flirtatious amusement, asking him to fetch another sock and put it on her leg. But an ill-advised remark about Kuze’s supposed cowardice (lyingly translated from Russian by Alya, which Kuze is all too aware of) prompts Kuze to immediately turn the tables on her, and now Alya suddenly finds HERSELF in great discomfort as Kuze does what he was asked, accidentally grazing ... her nethers in the process. A quick kick in the face and hasty evacuation leaves them both in, arguably, a worse state than they had been in just a few moments ago. It’s an interaction that lasts for all of two minutes, yet says much about when the series shines at its best, and makes its subsequent detouring all the more disappointing.

*Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian* loves making its characters disoriented, such to the point that it wears it like a form of armor. Looking beyond the sock incident, there are other similar interactions among the show’s cast that, either directly or indirectly, make a point of knocking the characters off from any supposed positions of authority or superiority. The calm and cool Alya is thrown constantly into insecurity regarding her own feelings for Kuze, not helped in the slightest by her older sister Masha playfully teasing Alya for feelings that are brazenly obvious, dismissive as she might be. Yuki’s own sheltered and posh upbringing gives her smarts to slyly navigate her high school’s upper crust by disarming and endearing with charm, yet she can turn that off like a switch to indulge in her own uninhibited hijinks and jokes. And then there’s Kuze, dealing with a rambunctious sister, trying to disassociate himself from what he once knew, and reconciling Alya’s own truths—for you *Umineko* fans out there, “I’ll say it in Russian!”

Informing that lies the show’s central gimmick – Kuze is fully aware of what Alya is saying when she speaks Russian, in part because of his own impassioned study of Russian thanks to a girl he once knew and loved many years ago. When Alya thinks she’s being secretive, Kuze holds more cards than she realizes. Situations between Alya and Kuze allow the sense of hiding one’s true feelings to be subverted to move the story forward, an intriguing take on a tired old miscommunication convention. This therefore leaves both Alya and Kuze alike in a strange twilight zone of both understanding the other and, admittedly frustratingly, holding one another at an impasse – they’ll be able to grow closer both platonically and romantically by spending time with each other, but they’ll never cross that final confessional threshold until either Alya says her feelings in Japanese or Kuze admits that he knows everything that she’s been saying in Russian. Either way, someone will have to bear the brunt of the final embarrassment, and it’s difficult to not wonder why Kuze doesn’t just clear the air, even given his mental and emotional hangups.

But perhaps that’s fine. Alya’s rougher exterior isn’t consistently up and violently striking down Kuze at every perceived sleight or blunder. Kuze himself understands just how important Alya’s pursuits are in her academic life, and is more than willing to put any goofiness aside. *Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian* manages the magic act of having it both ways – comedically flirtatious and slapstick-like, and putting the jokes on hold to have a conversation that’s actually important. What blooms is a more amusing relationship, oscillating between moods, ideas, and episodes with a blush and a smile, ultimately reading as more sincere than it might have been otherwise if it had remained wholly committed to something more dynamically restrained. The final “endgame” might be put off until volume whatever-the-editor-demands, but to see Alya and Kuze play off one another is to constantly ask which one will come out the other side more disoriented than the other, and rarely in a way that feels unpleasant (with a couple of notable exceptions). Especially considering that Alya is playing with the deck stacked against her since Kuze knows everything that she’s saying when speaking Russian, seeing Kuze be thrown off-kilter in some fashion offers its own brand of pleasantly surprising satisfaction.

Though the serious discussions between Alya and Kuze “three-dimensionalize” their relationship, from where some of those discussions manifest undercuts the material’s own innate delight. Wrapped within the romance is the larger political current of their school, and the student council offers Alya the chance to establish a station for herself beyond just the treasurer. However grand the pursuit, *Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian* makes it clear that her own ability to navigate the school’s landscape is haphazard at best (not helped by the underlying “ethno”centrism of the student body being averse to outsiders) and dismally outclassed at worst. Against the larger figures within the sphere, Alya stands adrift. It reframes and disorients Alya as one of the central protagonists; the girl we’ve seen tickle and be tickled by Kuze fails to prove her own capability for independence, framing her as a woefully inept political figure who seemingly can do nothing without Kuze’s interference or long-term planning. Social ineptitude befits her characterization – nothing is inherently wrong with Alya failing at something, nor the implication that she will improve over time (as she begins to do). Yet, its scale as presented comes at the cost of her character position within the overall picture. Seeing Alya stumble so badly, even under the auspice of improving over time, comes across as unengrossing. It robs the zest that makes the two leads’ dynamic work well.

Though to say that the show has “two leads” is, itself, rather misleading. Both in Sunsunsun’s original story and Itou Riyota’s direction of the adaptation, the material with commendable insistence implants Yuki into the thick of both the romance and the political drama. Though I mentioned her slyness and propensity for explosiveness of comic sensibility, she stands in Alya’s way on all fronts, both as popular darling for student council presidency and for putting up barrier after barrier to Alya and Kuze’s potential happily-ever-after. Yuki, when viewed through Alya’s eyes, is the construction of everything that Alya aspires to be – popular and with Kuze. Though she stands at the meeting point of both the political and romantic plots, she is not an antagonist in the strictest sense of the word. That does not mean that it would not be open season on Alya and Kuze. Lord knows that Yuki gets her jollies out of a little trolling.

It therefore makes it unfortunate that her strongest impression is that of the meta-aware character, frequently breaking the fourth wall in spirit by offering a comedic reward for directly pointing out something about otaku media and culture that fans would inherently recognize. She’s the successor in a long line of characters doing this (recently brought back into larger consciousness with Cid Kagenou in *The Eminence in Shadow*) and it seems that it’s a trend that’s here to stay. It’s already long outlived its welcome, although its half-life can be prolonged—albeit temporarily—by the sheer weight of Yuki’s consuming on-screen presence. Though, each time a joke of this nature was made, it seemed to call more attention to the balancing act the show couldn’t quite manage.

All that transpires within *Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian*, in terms of the political matters, the Kuze and Yuki family dynamic, and whatever romantic fate awaits Alya and Kuze, hints at developments that see ultimate payoff down the line. Despite all that promise, as presented with this season, the series succeeds with more finesse and fluency in its more lighthearted romantic affairs rather than its indulgences in something beyond the sociopolitical scope of its romantic duo. When characters pondered about how to respond to whatever student council matter was on the table, images of clothes shopping, a school dance, and botched Russian pronunciation asserted themselves in memory.

One question does remain, however – will Alya ever get used to spicy food?

«может быть...»

It means “definitely.”

From the first episode all the way up through *Ensemble Contest-hen*, Oumae Kumiko’s journey has been one through reconciling her own feelings and trying to become more self-actualized. It’s been a long road getting from there to here, complete with many frustrations, contradictions, confusions, angsts, and apprehensions both from herself and from others that she is privy to hearing about or experiencing. Back then, she was just a student, mending her old relationship with Kousaka Reina and learning to appreciate just how much her senpai Tanaka Asuka meant to her. Here now, at *Hibike! Euphonium* season three, she fully assumes the role of her predecessors ... as the president of that band, taking on a new level of responsibility to the group to propel them to winning the gold at Nationals, the prize that has consistently eluded them.

With a new year and new leadership however comes new rigor—Reina IS an executive now, after all—and with that also comes new urgencies. It’s not just about winning gold; as Kumiko is so reminded by both her family and her teachers (if not also the occasional conversation with classmates), she’s a senior now, waiting on the doorstep of whatever potential and likely-collegiate future might await her, and needing to decide about such things. But not all decisions need to be made straight away; besides, Reina’s dream of performing with Kumiko at Nationals is only getting closer and closer until, of all things, a euphonium sound coursing through the air catches Kumiko’s ear. It’s only a little later that we learn who made the sound: a new girl transferring to Kitauji High School, sporting a navy-blue uniform and a silver euphonium of her own, Kuroe Mayu. Change isn’t on the horizon – it’s right there, as plain as the reflection on Mayu’s euphonium and Kumiko being taken by the sound that comes from it.

If *Hibike! Euphonium* season three had anything that it could plant during the interim between *Chikai no Finale* and the first episode’s lead-up, it was that you could take certain things more or less as a given that they’d occur. The narrative has always followed Kumiko as the point of orientation (with the notable exception of Yamada Naoko’s masterful *Liz and the Bluebird*), and that much has not changed. But, with her now needing to assume greater responsibilities to the ensemble as a whole, it likewise necessitates a major shift in orienting the view of that ensemble. As a student, Kumiko was a participant in the exercises for marching and listening to Taki’s instructions on how to improve a practice’s performance. But in a position of authority, she must take a more centralized birds-eye view of the ensemble (and we, the audience, likewise follow suit), being the person that others would come to with problems and grievances and be expected to navigate through them.

That shifted perspective regarding the ensemble accompanies a shift in the music’s usage within the season. In-part because of the single cour’s truncation, there are not as many overt “performances” in the course of the thirteen episodes – there are decidedly fewer times that we see the band collectively working together either in practice or in actually performing before the listening audience, and likewise for the viewer. *Hibike! Euphonium* season three however understands that the performances themselves were never the actual attraction for the series. It’s not that they were outright unimportant or anything of the sort, but rather that they were not the point. The melodrama of the season serves as the ensemble’s true performance, allowing both discordant countermelodies and high emotion to come through as complements to the tone rather than the showboating they might have been otherwise. All of this is realized through its masterful visual-acoustic storytelling and episode directing from some of Kyoto Animation’s most important figures like Kitanohara Noriyuki, or newcomer to the directorial side Miyagi Ryou, who began their career on *Hibike! Euphonium* season one and now gets to take a driver’s seat role for its final act.

But Mayu is the final, and arguably most important, ingredient to this general reorientation. Her euphonium playing and coming from a previous school known for its prestigious music program brings its own problems into the fore. Mayu heralds that Kumiko’s place as the “one true eupho” is on far shakier ground than she might have anticipated. It’s not just because she’s good, but rather also due to Mayu’s general demeanor of friendliness and wanting to not rock the boat clashing with the inherent approach that Kumiko has in mind. The prior experiences with the trumpet solo audition from freshman year and Kanade from junior year were signs of needed changes. Those changes manifested in the form of Kumiko and Reina working to make Kitauji’s band a place where, regardless of one’s status as an upperclassman or underclassman, the best performances rein and have the privilege to perform at the competition. It’s a doctrine that reads as the ensemble’s credo, and one that Kumiko especially believes is best for everyone.

Mayu’s behavior thus makes for a rather ironic response to Kumiko’s own perception of Kitauji’s meritocracy. The entire notion of competing in Nationals means, in-part by virtue of how audition processes work and having only a finite number of players allowed, that not everyone can be satisfied or be having fun. Mayu’s reticence to replace anyone expressed early in the season serves as a challenge to that meritocracy ideology, questioning its legitimacy and whether everyone sincerely feels that way, and her continued insistence provides a point of consternation for Kumiko who just can’t realize how to respond to this peculiar obstinacy. It’s not that Mayu doesn’t want to win gold at Nationals, because she does – otherwise, she’d never have voted to do so. Yet, it’s a heightened form of Kumiko’s own desire to not have anyone drop out that she’s essentially confronting, a reflection of the passive version of herself from previous seasons that she thought she had moved beyond, but now has to confront from a new angle. Confronting Mayu’s insecurity means confronting Kumiko’s insecurity, creating one of the major thematic threads for the season.

Mayu and Kumiko’s perspectives are thus each chasing a metaphorical rainbow that run parallel; they may be headed in the same general direction, but they can’t cross. Because of this fundamental inability to see eye-to-eye, they cannot connect as easily. Mayu’s apprehension is just as despairingly resolute as Kumiko’s belief that what she herself believes in is the truth of how she honestly feels. Yet as each episode progresses and we see that perhaps Mayu’s apprehension seems all-the-more to be coming true, it gives dialogue and entire sequences a particular weightiness to each word and interaction. Emotions run higher and tensions run thicker not just because the stakes have increased for the main cast with increased auditions and graduation drawing nearer, but rather because the ensemble collectively is carrying this sort of held breath every time, with confidence wavering in confusion. I mentioned before that the melodrama within the band is the true performance of the season, and it subsequently manifests in inner-band friction both collectively and between individual members that is true *Hibike! Euphonium* spirit.

And that spirit of conflict always has its inverse; that of optimism and understanding. Between Kumiko’s presidency, Mayu’s apprehension, Reina’s perfectionism, the new freshmen, Tsukamoto providing insights of his own, Kanade’s own rounding out of her edges, and everything else, *Hibike! Euphonium* season three is juggling a lot of ideas within its thirteen episodes. It would be easy to assume that it would crumble under the weight of it all, yet like magic, it doesn’t. The endgame for the season is more or less a surefire conclusion, but the route it takes to get there walks the twilight between crushing and soaring. No matter how much it may pull out some brutal pathos punches or moments of sheer deflation, it never tries to leave its characters out in the cold forever; there will always be something to pull them back from the precipice.

That may just be its most optimistic message of all for its audience, and one that the series has been comfortingly saying since the very beginning with that flashback that started it all – there will be hardships and times when you have to come face-to-face with your own disappointment, inability, or uncertainty. Sometimes, it may seem cruelly unfair, or you may feel like you’ve taken two steps back for every one step forward. But underneath it all lies the tenderness of love and friendship, bonds worth holding onto no matter how late they may have been forged. If this is indeed likely to be the final installment of this franchise I imagine Kyoto Animation would want to move on to other properties to develop and see what lay within their imagination), then it could not have chosen a better way to finish. Its characters left Kitauji High School better than when they came in. They bettered themselves not just musically, but personally. That’s the true finale that the series had been building to since the beginning. All the desires to improve, all the tears, all the notes, all the drama, all the smiles, and all the goodbyes – season three is the culmination of everything *Hibike!* in the end.

Let YOUR next piece begin.

Director Mizushima Tsutomu isn’t concerned with making the next “hit” – if anything, he’s concerned with making the next “concoction.” A look at his filmography will show that he has directed several projects which involve the heavy collision of various ideas that, on paper, seem like they should get along like cats and dogs. How, for instance, is the idea of cute girls doing cute things in a tank battle setting supposed to work? Why would anybody expect a lowbrow teenage sex comedy that also functions as a prison escape flick to mesh together, and somehow have that work? Crazy, right? But crazy is the ... point, as lo and behold, *Girls und Panzer* exists, as does *Prison School*.

And those are just two examples! Mizushima’s understanding and approach to genre is to take what it is about each that people enjoy, and bend or twist them into new, almost-unrecognizable forms. Mizushima doesn’t care about having something to “prove” as it were, mostly because he gets his jollies out of being weird rather than being artful in the way that other directors are. And in an anime landscape where fresh ideas seemingly are in shorter supply, it’s at the very least worth considering just what he’s cooking up at any given moment.

It therefore makes perfect sense why *Shuumatsu Train Doko e Iku? / Where Does the Doomsday Train Go? / Train at the End of the World* functions as it does in its weirdness. It is quintessential Mizushima, in that it feels like a sensible next step in his handling of preposterous entertainment ideas. Our foursome of heroines all embark on a post-catastrophe science-fiction screwball road comedy journey through a topsy-turvy funhouse world of strange landscapes, bizarre people, and way too many bitter lemons to eat. Each stop along the path to Ikebukuro comes complete with its own warped or finagled place, where the people there are just as mystifying. One stop has a serious shroom problem (to put it one way), while another location has a miniaturized military. But where could the adorable Yoka be, the person who accidentally got this whole 7G Network mess started when she pressed the button and screwed everything up? Can the world return to normal?

From the first minute, *Shuumatsu Train* doesn’t pretend to be concerned with giving fully fleshed-out character biographies to Shizuru, Nadeshiko, Reimi, and Akira and assumes you’ve seen enough cute girls doing cute things anime to know this rigamarole already with who is who. The immediate need-to-know particulars of who they actually are comes through in the quick conversations and colliding personalities about incidentals and the grand design, and expects you to “get it” already so it can “get on” with the real point – the journey. Any development or more-dynamic character building will come not from the native environment that they know, but instead by venturing into the yonder.

And if cute girls doing cute things has often been the gravity surrounding fixations on hobbies / “the main thing” that could be considered either abnormally obsessive or unusual (we all can list at least one show in which the cast revolves around a niche activity that more or less defines them), then *Shuumatsu Train* takes that gravity and maximalizes it to the universe itself. Each location does indeed have its own central “thing” that distinguishes it from every other stop, almost like the different levels of a video game in which each location has its own puzzle to crack before opening the door. It provides a sheer unpredictability to each setting even when the outcome inevitably ends with the train pulling out of the station and moving on. Sometimes, they’re simply passing through and commenting on how weird something is because…well, sometimes something is just weird and there’s not much more to say. Other times, the ridiculous level of micro and macro analysis needed to get through is itself like an overstuffed shogi board ready to collapse under the weight of its excess pieces.

Yet, miraculously, it never falls apart because it never stops being fun. The inherent appeal of the screwball road comedy is in the varying locations and peoples, and how the characters are forced to interact with both in order to make heads or tails of what’s happening. Using post-catastrophe science-fiction as the backdrop allows any crazy idea to be applied without needing to spend all this time and energy explaining why something is the way that it is. Any such explanation can be chalked up to “LOL 7G” (its activation in the first episode makes a further lack of explanation all the more acceptable) and instead put resources into making each stop more tangibly present. Beyond the “trait” that each place possesses, each also presents obstacles that are distinct enough to require different solutions rather than a single tried-and-true method. As such, the variety in the settings complements the variety in the situations.

But that maximalization I spoke of does not occur often with the heavier drama, though drama is certainly present. Tone-wise, the show rarely makes actually sincere attempts to divert away from the comic because the attempts that appear on the surface to do so are, in and of themselves, far too deliberately silly or tongue-in-cheek to take too seriously. Yokote Michiko’s series composition lets you know who is doing what and how they are functioning within the show’s overall universe either as a force for, against, or within the main foursome, but never to the point where it forgets or misplaces its popcorn origins. This is only broken with Yoka and Shizuru, the ones who got the metaphorical train running in the first place. As a result, the show’s inner structure is quite bare-minimum, but the color explodes every time, coming with some genuinely-impressive layouts and animation displays that go far harder than a show like this would reasonably be expected to have.

Coupled with the understanding that Mizushima’s Twitter account over the past several weeks has been talking about train stuff from facts to fascinations, including other incidental things about the production or locations used for making it, he clearly got bitten by some kind of bug and decided to just run full-tilt with it. He’s created something with the full awareness of what it is and avoids the pitfalls of derailment, even if it couldn’t escape production problems with its final episode. The whole is an unusually free-spirited anime, chugging along its merry way and always prepared with a fun little something to whet the appetite.

There is no room for normal on this route; *Shuumatsu Train* takes delight in its oddness, and that’s the way it should be.

I’ve long abandoned the idea that every anime needs to aspire to artistic greatness. To think that they should is to be so consistently setting an impossible bar and inevitably getting disenfranchised, as well as to ignore that sometimes media can, in fact, purely exist for the sake of entertaining or distracting its audience for a brief time. There’s nothing wrong with that – media carries innumerable uses. Although, it does unfortunately mean that the phrase “turn your brain off” has become accepted as a default soundbite to undermine critique of a show that’s simply trying to entertain and, to the person in question, failing ... to even succeed at that level. Media does not need to “make a point” or “be about something” in order to function or even be considered good, but media also does not get a magical get-out-of-jail-free card simply because its aspirations are “lower.” Aiming low is, after all, still aiming and carries the risk of missing.

I bring this up because *Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included* is a show that dispels any notion of deep storytelling within its first minutes to let its audience know what they’re in for, and still manages to wilt like flowers in a basement with its bar being set so low. With its emphasis on the cute titular angel, the sugar-coated sweetie named Towa comes to Earth in order gain more firsthand knowledge about humanity. But thank goodness that she just so happens to land on the apartment veranda of Tokumitsu Shintarou, who is such a gosh-darned nice guy that he lets her live with him. And while she’s at it, why doesn’t she spruce up his place and cook him his meals? And why stop at just one supernatural creature coming into Tokumitsu’s midst when the show can throw at least another three on top of that as well?

The show’s presumption is that the inclusion of fantastical characters from varying myth or folklore is enough to carry interest. Let’s put aside any of the details concerning the differences between angels, yuki-onna, or any of the other myth creatures that find their way into the series since those are such a given. *Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included* has its distinctions between characters feel less like distinctions and more akin to reaching into the metaphorical hat and pulling out a character trait to assign them. It’s most evident in the material’s treatment of Towa; her inherent nature as an angel is less of a presence than one would expect, as it only ever manifests in rare moments of attempted comedy or for what is supposed to be tantamount to a big reveal. Instead, Towa’s nauseating adorableness is often trumped by her naivety of the eye-rollingly absurd variety (how else would you explain nearly getting lured by a suspicious man in her first day on Earth to a love hotel despite having studied some Earth behaviors). The other characters do not fair much better in this respect. Any references to their mythological origins are treated as window dressing rather than something that could provide more off-the-beaten-path variety to the show’s cheap vanilla taste. A blizzard being conjured or other such things make for trifles.

Tokumitsu isn’t treated much better either because he is not a person. Not really, anyway. There is virtually nothing about Tokumitsu that would instill any sense of confidence in his ability to provide anything of note within the material. He exists almost exclusively as a blank slate, lacking any singular “thing” aside from his niceness that makes the group of oddball women flock to him like flies to honey. That niceness he has might be a relief in the sense that he’s not acting like a prick and still manages to get a bunch of women to hang around him, but it does not go a long way in making him appear like anything other than an author insert (even though the mangaka Matoba is actually female). The overarching sense that colors Tokumitsu, the other characters, and the scenario as a whole is just that of no effort, pallid personalities that do little more than take up space on the screen.

And that’s the show’s tragedy – there is no effort anywhere to be gleaned here. Whether within the writing itself, the character designs, or the overall aesthetic of the show, *Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included* does not succeed because it does not try. When it’s not using a phenomenally bland color palette or bare-bones storyboarding, it is constantly recycling or reusing settings and backdrops that have been seen countless times with no attempt to appear different, at least to any degree that anything matters. It does not go ham with its own mythological riches beyond the shallowest ways because it clings to its own moe so tightly. It thus comes to the detriment of essentially everything because everything else HAS to adhere to that cuteness overload. The unintended consequence is, ironically, the absence of anything warm. It all instead has the illusion of warmth, feeling so cold in its seemingly unapologetic and zombie-esque clichés.

I do not blame director Oonishi Kenta or main series writer Yasukawa Shougo for what transpired here – with how equally-unimpressive the original manga is, I doubt that anyone could have taken Matoba’s concept and done anything meaningfully with it. Between this material and *Beelzebub-jou no Okinimesu mama,* it seems that Matoba has a fascination with tinkering with notions of mythological characters or creatures to reimagine them as cuteness incarnate. That’s not a concept without merit – in an entertainment age so suffused or overstuffed with irony and attempts at being meta or “meta,” something good is perhaps buried here.

But here’s the thing – good media, regardless of whether it’s trying to entertain or say something profound, does not make itself. Putting a bunch of characters in a room and having them occasionally do a thing or realize something is not, in and of itself, the same as creating intrigue or fun. *Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included* seems to operate under the assumption that its characters simply existing and moving through pre-programmed motions of iyashikei / romantic comedy slice-of-life and the occasional moment of “development” is somehow enough effort to justify its creation and existence. Any such motions are too hollow to matter here. This show is an automaton – soulless and godless no matter how many angels you throw in.

To put it another way, it sucks.

There is a distinct difference between something working out in theory versus it working out in practice. If you were to visually lay out or list everything within *Metallic Rouge* in terms of its characters, places, and concepts, you’d be able to have a pretty firm grasp on what’s going on. In part because it is deliberately drawing such heavy influence from other cyberpunk or science-fiction media before it (with Ridley Scott’s *Blade Runner* being the most overt), the pieces to put everything together are indeed there, even if you don’t happen to know of its inspirations. However, the anime’s sense of revealing this information ... is to have revelations or twists come in rapid succession, proposing a whole slew of questions for each one it answers, and bloviating the world to be so all-encompassing that one could be easily forgiven for getting confused or lost in the wash. It is true that it is the viewer’s responsibility to be able to grasp what a piece of media is doing and try to meet it halfway, but that doesn’t mean *Metallic Rouge* is freed from the fault of its haphazard storytelling. With so much “stuff” that is explained and only thirteen episodes to get it all done, the parsed-out result is not a project that is poorly conceived, but one that struggles as a realized product to find its stable grounding.

And there is plenty to work with, too. As an oppressed synthetic population within the world, Neans are essentially shackled to the Asimov Code—itself named after science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who coined “the three laws of robotics” in the 1940s—which means they cannot harm humans both directly or by inaction or indecision. Coupled with their dependence on a substance called Nectar, Neans are robbed of any real sense of self-signification, clearly positioning them as a population both within society and metaphysically to be pitied by the audience. Within the Neans is the so-called “Immortal Nine,” proto-Neans that can exercise free will beyond the Asimov Code and take matters into their own hands, violently if needs be. Enlisted to stop them are Rouge Redstar, a Nean who isn’t particularly bright but can punch really hard, and Naomi Orthmann, the brains and tech-wizard who seems more relaxed.

For all the players involved, *Metallic Rouge* poorly orients how they all factor into the grand scheme (or, to use a framing device that the anime loves to employ with Puppetmaster, roles to play). If the series opted to have the two main characters as the main force walking through the narrative, it doesn’t succeed at this. A pair of characters embodying a tried-and-true “buddy cop-esque” dynamic is not poor by itself, though in terms of what makes Rouge and Naomi tick, there’s surprisingly little that feels distinct. The early interactions are occasionally tinged with remarks that border on yuri-adjacent signifiers, or turns of phrase that are meant to be endearing, particularly from Naomi. Yet, it assumes that tiny touches like these are substitutes for actual meat, rather than the potato chips or chocolate that our heroines like to indulge in. Given especially how much of the show Naomi and Rouge hardly see eye to eye, if not just being uncommunicative, dishonest, or not even within the same proximity of each other, it’s hard to care about them as a binding tether within *Metallic Rouge’s* story.

The Immortal Nine, despite being for the notion of Nean freedom and actualization, take actions that are bizarrely counterintuitive to their goals. Part of the reason for this is the wide disparity between its members; some of the Immortal Nine are docile and just want to live peacefully. Others are quick to violence, even if it means that some of their own fellow regular Neans—the group that they are ostensibly trying to help—die because of their actions. In making the Immortal Nine ununified and having both extremes as operating ideologies within them, *Metallic Rouge* unintentionally undercuts the very issue of Nean independence that it is proposing via the Immortal Nine’s stance. It is difficult to care about an oppressed class when the group most representative of them has characters killing “for fun” or murdering their own kin. This is not a case of “a few bad apples spoiling the barrel,” as the old saying goes since there’s only nine of them. When half your apples are spoiled, it’s a sign that you’re a poor farmer.

Because Rouge and Naomi as the protagonists cannot be positioned as antithetical to Nean freedom (because that would presume the series is advocating slavery is a better option, which…uhh…), the narrative thus puts them at odds not with Nean freedom, but rather against the Immortal Nine. And since the Immortal Nine possess personalities or cause actions so cartoonishly outlandish or evil to give the “good guys” and the audience a force to understand but not sympathize with, *Metallic Rouge* cannot elicit any meaningful introspection. The complexity of the Nean Freedom issue is relegated to battles with easily identifiable antagonists, defeated / killed in tokusatsu fashion in favor of gradual integration of Nean rights into human civilization to prevent “chaos.” The result is a civil war narrative in which even if both sides are simultaneously right (the investigator Ash even says this outright just in case you missed it), the actual sense of exhilaration to see the conflict play through to the end just isn’t there because there is not a good enough reason to care. This, of course, does not discount the idea of the Asimov Code still restricting their options for self-defense or self-preservation at human hands.

Part of what magnifies this uncaring is the mis-prioritization of what transpires within these thirteen episodes. The Neans themselves as a larger collective seem strangely out to dry. While there is a visit to a Nean settlement for a short while, and the first episode involves watching a Nean suffer Nectar withdrawal and die as a result when no one offers to help (itself a good moment of worldbuilding), most of the interactions within the story don’t involve the Neans themselves as communicating bodies. The latter half of the show has so few Neans featured within it that further opportunities to see their interactions within the world are rather nonexistent. The Immortal Nine, in essence, speak on behalf of virtually all the Neans, and given their own wildly contrasting personalities, it’s a shame that they are the primary representation this population has within *Metallic Rouge.* For non-proto-Neans, Noid is the only one who has any kind of longstanding presence within the show, and that’s mostly as Ash’s subordinate.

The show instead more heavily focuses on the interpersonal—and familial—drama and having so many revelations or actions come one after another for the sake of shock or worldbuilding / expositing. It makes the mistake of thinking that the intrigue of Rouge’s contemplations, the Immortal Nine’s ideology, Naomi’s quips, etc. can map onto or substitute itself for the Neans. For supposedly being about creating revolution, the people who would most benefit from it are barely anywhere to be found. It is perhaps the irony of ironies that the oppressed Nean class within *Metallic Rouge* is so underrepresented in their own longing for freedom, shoved to the side for those proto-Neans and other humans that are not slaves to the Asimov Code that imprisons everyone else. For all the things within the anime, it feels so hollow in the end.

I do not doubt that Bones wanted *Metallic Rouge* to be their next big showstopper and a massive celebration for their 25th anniversary of bringing joy in anime to millions. Part four of the 25th anniversary documentary on Crunchyroll is essentially a giant ad for it. But perhaps in their efforts to make it the “most thing” that it could become, they didn’t realize until it was too late that it had become so large that there was no way that it could be as fully developed or realized as it could have been. In what should have been their crowning hour, it turns out that the emperor had no clothes.

That is, in essence, *Metallic Rouge’s* great failure – in trying to “cram in everything,” it doesn’t ultimately amount to anything. Its characters are caught within a moral conundrum that leaves no particularly delicious food for thought or thrills, residing in washed-out ideological shadows. It assumes that twists (out of left-field or otherwise) or other “big moments” are enough to cover when the inner cohesion is lacking. The result is a cyberpunk anime that has no real life within itself, fueled with doses of its own Nectar and burning through its supply so quickly. Much like that Nean in episode one who was pleading for Nectar in his final moments, the anime was desperately searching for something to grasp onto.

Anime could always do with some more originals IPs, but an original IP does not make a good show by default. Most regrettably, *Metallic Rouge* demonstrates this to be the case.

Perhaps it was just a case of finding the initial humor and characterization of *The Dangers in My Heart’s* first season unamusing that made it not land for me. As much as I was telling myself that Ichikawa Kyoutarou’s mannerisms were just a case of teenage indulgence in the macabre and not really indicative of some kind of seedier way of being, the dynamic between him and Yamada Anna was just not resonating with the intended affect that I knew the material was going for. That being said, I could tell that there was something within this material that was worth clinging to, and despite ... my own misgivings at the start, I wanted to give the second season a try since I wanted to see what it could do once it moved beyond itself.

Now at the end of season two, I was happy to see that not only had the material moved beyond the awkwardness that defined it at the start, but rather that it had taken the time to cultivate something surprisingly sincere and funny, or if not exactly funny, at the very least amusing. This is not a romcom that remains stuck in the ever-so-perpetual “will they won’t they” or “school year purgatory” as evidenced by both the physical and emotional transformations the characters at the center experience for themselves. Yamada and Ichikawa move into the latter phases of middle school adolescence, and as Ichikawa grows taller and has his voice drop, Yamada herself begins to learn how to navigate Ichikawa’s own social mannerisms.

They still at times contrast like cats and dogs in terms of personality (goodness knows that Ichikawa will never become the same type of expressive extrovert that Yamada is), but the time they’ve spent together builds the silent forms of communication that make their dynamic more earnest and heartfelt. Each learns to become more receptive to the other in ways that they themselves perhaps did not expect, which makes their growing together a constant flurry of discovery and, most significantly, SELF-discovery. This is not a story of the characters “needing” the other one, but rather the act of becoming their best selves through the natural course of falling in love with each other. The personalities are not rewritten; they are enhanced and molded into more multifaceted shapes and contours. It is the trait that defines the better romances and romantic comedies.

And since the material has moved past the initial fascination phase in the other person and into the more elaborate feelings of young romance, the apprehensions that Ichikawa feels, and Yamada herself needs to reconcile, take on a new and rather exciting life of their own. The library is largely left behind as *The Dangers in My Heart* allows itself to venture into the kinds of paralyzing unknowns that two people attracted to one another will **have** to venture into. Spending time at Yamada’s apartment almost feels like treading sacred ground (and Heaven help you if you are caught by the Father), and a trip out on the town feels like an exercise in trying to manage one’s nerves and hoping that you don’t say or do the wrong thing. Even though not every situation the characters find themselves in leads to the most emotionally-cathartic or hilarious result that either the animation or the writing is intending to provide, it rarely ever feels out-of-place or “wrong.”

Which I suppose makes it a shame that, despite all the vast improvements materially between season one and two, the aesthetic is the one thing that never manages to quite dial itself back. The series is a bright one, and I mean that in the literal sense – the presence of light seems to bask in everything too aggressively, and while it could be said that the characters are themselves starting to see the brighter possibilities that the world of love could provide for them, it does not make for the best parallel in terms of actually physically sitting down and watching it unfold. Minegishi Kentarou and Yanagisawa Kumiko certainly tried to create a sense of visual tone, though it does unfortunately lead to mixed results.

But perhaps in its own funny and perverse way, that makes for the perfect metaphor. *The Dangers in My Heart* season two proved that beyond the initial “look,” it could breathe life into its ambiance and strike the poses that it needed to. I recoiled at first, not finding its initial draw to be for me. But as the story began to work and move its characters along the path carefully, I found that repelling to be changing into something wonderful in its own way. As Yamada posed for a photo and Ichikawa looked on and thinks to himself, I couldn’t help but smile at the crystallization of their feelings.

I’m happy that I gave it the benefit of the doubt.

*Spirit of Wonder,* even when making reference to scientific principles, is a collection that makes no pretense about being scientifically accurate. If anything, it banks on using its ridiculous jargon and long-winded explanations as part of the larger theme of exploring and daring to dream or experience fanciful, almost-impossible things. So when a group aspires to use a blimp to get to Mars, you put the rational part of your brain away and just let the group have their adventure and cheer them on. After all, going to Mars is cool, right? And hasn't every scientist or mathematician at some point had to ask, "But ... what if we COULD do this," and then tried to do precisely that which they envisioned?

I obviously cannot speak for everyone, but it seems like we tend to forget about the sense of wonderment that we have in youth, where everything seems like a new adventure and you feel compelled to follow that trail to the end, regardless of whether it succeeds or not. I imagine that's part of the reason why so many of the main players in *Spirit of Wonder* are young people, either fashioning their own way through emotion or being told by crazed old scientists to partake in an experiment with wondered eyes. Within Tsuruta Kenji's painstaking attention to paneling, character and face models, and spatial depth, he puts forth the request to experience *Spirit of Wonder* through equally-wondered eyes, watching the characters interact with the world. Rooms are messy, buildings are beautiful, and outer space is a twinkling blackness. The people become curious, they try, and occasionally, they fail. Such is the way things work. But failure is not the same as being sad, and Tsuruta makes this clear. Even in one of the manga's more dour endings, the kernels of hope always remain behind.

This is ultimately why, no matter how many flights of science-fiction fancy the material goes on, the underlying heart of the manga is always on its characters. In each of the anthology's chapters and the larger three-part Miss China story, everyone answers the call to whatever awaits them. Daughters, lovers, and dreamers all venture into the ephemeral world of wonder, and though the time there might be fleeting, the impact lasts forever when they come out the other side--sometimes literally. The journey is scientific in origin, but the hypotheses' and experiments' findings are always human. It is not grand in any moral message, but it is sincere for its couple of dozen pages at a time. Perhaps that is why I find myself wanting to self-insert into this manga, a sentiment that I almost never feel. I want to be one of *Spirit of Wonder's* characters, not quite in the sense of being scientifically-minded or someone who doesn't pay their rent (maybe I'll get there, who knows?), but because with the way Tsuruta crafts his worlds, I want to experience and learn about what he creates. Much like with his art in *Memories of Emanon* basking in his best work feels like staying in that ephemeral place of wonderment for just a fraction of a second longer.

It's worth clinging to, I think.

*Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead* is a series that, at least in the beginning, seemed to have its finger on a bizarre pulse that had laid dormant for some time. Romping through its *Splatoon!*-colored zombie-fied “end of the world” setting, it decided that character depth and important intrigue would be abandoned in favor of giving its setting the excuse to go full-fledged indulgent into the stupid. Why concern yourself with hunkering down and fighting blood, sweat, and tears to survive when you could be more concerned about getting beer at the konbini instead, despite the clear and present danger? Why take the time ... to probe the deepest depths of human emotion when you can deliberately be silly instead?

There was something refreshing about that. After all, we had already experienced the glut of zombie fiction in the late 2000s and early 2010’s from things like *The Walking Dead*, and recently saw *The Last of Us* assert itself as well. Given how stories sometimes try to justify its characters “having a deep purpose” for everything or insisting at some “deeper meaning” thematically within the material, *Zom 100* seemed to be a reminder that there is indeed a place for the wild and belligerent (if not also pig-headed) in entertainment. The show’s start seemed to celebrate the kind of B-grade joy that only this brand of slop (I use that term affectionately) could provide – lean into the joy of what you are, celebrate your liberation from important expectation, and go ham. Don’t concern yourself with having a point or a central argument to tie it all together. Embrace chaos and run with it!

And for Tendou Akira, he seemed to get that memo immediately. Having been nearly choked to death by his job and his boss, wrung dry from every ounce of life fluid within him, Akira nearly became another type of zombie himself. However, upon waking up and realizing that the world has changed with zombies running rampant both in the streets and his own apartment, he could not be happier! With his job at ~~OLM~~ his company effectively over, he sets out to do the things that he wants to do with the newfound sense of freedom. What other way could you celebrate than running like a madman, laughing at the change of fortune?

But naturally, it’s a zombie-infected country, so danger is just around the corner. Akira’s carefree and can-do attitude might be his MO, but it doesn’t quite translate to the most intuitive survival skills. It’s only after an encounter with Mikazuki Shizuka that involves just barely avoiding a rather painful greeting with a zombie-driven truck that he realizes that if he’s going to make the most of the time that he has left, he’ll need a list of things that he wants to do, even if it ends with his eventual infection. In the midst of this new understanding, he has a path ahead – and it involves more fun and crazy times.

This oscillation between the inherent over-the-top nature of the setting or situations and the tiny doses of cold reality gives *Zom 100* its life. The result is a strange kind of literally and metaphorically colorful funkiness to the whole, leaving the question behind of what type of preposterous happening will occur next. Akira is kept sober enough to realize that sometimes you cannot just go do whatever the heck you want, but not so sober that he doesn’t get preoccupied with his own vain desires and wants. Contrasted with Shizuka’s pragmatism, their dynamic (punctuated by Ryuuzaki Kenichirou and Beatrix Amerhausen) offers a steady string of collisions to roll the eyes and provide a chuckle. *Zom 100* doesn’t always manage to strike the balance perfectly, but it happens well enough to give the push the material needs to get on its merry way.

However, as the world expands beyond Akira’s gaze and intersects with the others around him, the material at times decides that pleasantries and laughter must be put on ice in exchange for rumination about life. In a manner that feels wholly antithetical to how it conducted itself at first, we take the time to get to know, or be reintroduced, to brief characters that are likewise trying to live their own lives in the midst of the zombie world. Yet, each of these encounters MUST tie into the historical past or the past / present anxieties of a main character like Akira or Shizuka, which screech the established tone to a halt. The sense of B-grade fun and kinetic energy that comes with the knowing wink that you should “just go with it” is thus replaced with something meant to be taken more seriously.

*Zom 100* is a series that, in one episode, will have the characters trying to stop a gigantic zombie shark from eating everyone, and then one episode later involves a dive into a character's darker psychological trauma and torments. It will ask you to buckle your seatbelt when Akira runs like a crazy person out of his apartment exalted at the new reality before him, then try to endear a one-off flight attendant character to "convey a message" to make you stop and appreciate the melancholy of it all. It handles lunacy far better than drama. *Zom 100* essentially employs whiplash as a deliberate storytelling tool between its episodes, but does not wield it effectively enough since it cannot fully commit to either tone it’s aiming for, leaving the material in an odd in-between suspension about what it really wants to do.

This in-betweenness also makes its way into the colorful aesthetic that was a central attraction before. It’s become well-known that the series, like several others released this year, fell victim to production delays due to either overambitiousness or an inability to get everything finished properly, if not occasionally both. Just a few days after episode one aired, Sakugablog already published an article expressing ambivalence about the production and whether it could even survive the seemingly-impossible standard that had already been set. The manifestation of such problems was already coming before the delay inevitably hit – the show’s visual identity was phased out in exchange for something markedly more run-of-the-mill, as though the shift to “more mature” storytelling accompanied the resulting change. It was not a wholesale replacement, but compared to what came before, it felt less like the absurd romp it once was.

The delays however are only the touch of bold print. Regardless of whether the delay happened or not, at the end of it all, *Zom 100* couldn’t uphold its own sense of hammy freneticism and wackiness because that somehow wasn’t enough for it materially. It slammed on the gas pedal with reckless abandon, then eased up while deciding to admire the scenery, and then thought to stop and take the time to dramatically ask what it all means for a character traumatized by their past. It didn’t need to be something that has a meaning; it just needed to be. But by trying to find meaning and pathos, it got greedy and textually collapsed in the process.

I miss the zombie shark.

*×××HOLiC* seems to defy any real sense of simplistic genre classification, and that’s a good thing. Given the sheer breadth of its surreal dives into the darkly fantastical, the comic, and the serious, it seems to have all its conventional genre labels connected to one another in inseparable ways. It makes its home in a strange twilight zone. But no matter what particular style or tone it is going for at any given moment, it always seems to move in sneakily smooth motions of change rather than being plopped down from out of nowhere. It sows seeds early that germinate into their fuller blooming later, ... and at the center of its blooming lies a certain shop that grants any wish. For Kimihiro Watanuki, plagued by spirits that he cannot seem to get rid of, he comes across the shop’s proprietress, the sake-loving, coy, and outright mysterious Yuuko.

To see the world through Yuuko’s eyes is to be made keenly aware of, to put it in rather odd words, “the relationship between everything and everything.” Every step, blink, word, and thought has a resonance and a meaning, a cause and effect that vibrates and changes the surrounding universe. Whether that meaning is immediately known to us or if it causes consequences that we ourselves are not aware of varies depending on the circumstance. *×××HOLiC* makes its narrative out of this idea, and it proves delightfully malleable regardless of your own personal history. After all, there is no one, singular real-world ideology that monopolizes these thoughts. Many of the world’s religions, psychoanalytical theories, and philosophies imply—if not outright state in their texts—an inherent connection between the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, how the weight of one’s actions and thoughts dictates life’s destiny, or whether there are no coincidences and that everything is inevitable or predetermined (the question of personal agency).

One could easily map Jung’s synchronicity idea, Sartre’s “man is condemned to be free” and “living authentically” analysis from *Being and Nothingness,* Buddhism, Christianity, or any other construct upon it as our guiding light. When thought about in this way, it clarifies what makes Yuuko a mystifying presence both within the narrative proper and as a reader experiencing the story. *×××HOLiC* personifies these numerous, real-world metaphysical beliefs by using Yuuko as the cipher, a characterized embodiment of the thing that we wrestle with and engage in, something that we take comfort in, get frustrated by, but also provides wisdom when needed with a gentle push.

*×××HOLiC* does involve pushing, sometimes with characters kicking and screaming. Whether it be Watanuki grimacing at needing to bring Yuuko’s fourth sake bottle of the day or someone coming to Yuuko’s shop in need of a wish granted, they are at times pushed into situations beyond(?) their control. In a philosophy where seemingly everything is inevitable, this could prove either fatalistic or nihilistic depending on your perspective. But focusing on a “what’s the point” angle means not focusing on the “what do I do about this” matter, and it’s that distinction that makes the manga’s material work. Even in the supposed closed-circuit nature of its themes and presentation, choices are always present. Watanuki's nature defaults to unfailingly be of help, even to the detriment of his own body or happiness. Choosing one possibility out of the many that exist, fueled by the past choices you’ve made and the state of your own mind, means rejecting all the other choices before you. To *×××HOLiC*, this fact carries with it all the weight of a world-interacting power. Of course, using that power carries consequences of their own, especially if one claims they’ll pay any price in reckless desperation. With the supernatural and natural world held side-by-side in the manga, one can only imagine the payments and compensations that could form...

But regardless of one’s motive for making their wishes, everyone as a result is changed in some way, shape, or form, sometimes coming complete with the recurring imagery of butterflies. The core relationship of the series is the prime example. From their earliest interactions, Watanuki and Yuuko sometimes have a relationship akin to a cat being dropped into water – annoyance to the point of sheer frustration (take a wild guess who the cat is). But such a dynamic is to be expected; for the purposes of this story, if Watanuki is to experience the universe through Yuuko’s eyes, it **must** (not “**should**”) involve pushback and gradual realization. No worthwhile transformation happens overnight, and nothing worth experiencing doesn’t come without effort.

As *×××HOLiC* cautiously warns though, to become aware of something means that you cannot necessarily go back to the way you were before; time, and experience, always push you forward. The series does not say outright that this change is good or bad, but understatedly claims that change is the quintessential—or to use Yuuko’s favorite term, inevitable—aspect of existence, and one that we all must reconcile in our own way. We reconcile it with our own choices at each new turn. When enemies become friends or you make a baseball bat and computer get intimately acquainted with one another, that may or may not be the part of some grand design by God, gods, or someone else. But no matter what design or not-design was in place to make it all happen, choosing or not choosing, along with the changes that come as a result, must occur. There is no pointlessness in *×××HOLiC’s* inevitability philosophy; instead, it encourages the possibilities that inevitability brings.

So, if you find yourself needing a wish granted, look, feel, and choose carefully. Then change, look ahead, and regret nothing. The trust you place in your decisions can make wishes and dreams become reality. As Yuuko would say, it’s no coincidence – it’s inevitable.