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Are we at Peak Anime? I think we must be at Peak Anime. There's certainly a glut of it - an inexhaustible supply of anime so cheaply-made that it seems not to matter that hardly anybody watches it. I'm the kind of person who looks at something nobody has watched and says to herself, "I should watch this." Not because I expect it to be good. As a learning experience. I think you can learn a lot about the world we live in by looking at its ephemera, at the products we take for granted.

Estab-Life was apparently created to ... promote a mobile game that never actually got released. It was made on the cheap, even by the standards of the notoriously parsimonious anime industry. The thing about the anime industry, though, is that... human beings are fundamentally creative. We all have stories we want to tell. We can be passionately devoted to telling those stories, any chance we get. Sometimes, the trade-off to getting paid peanuts is that you get to tell the stories you want to tell. Getting on TV? Getting a platform? One takes what one can get. Humans are willing to sacrifice a lot in pursuit of our dreams, in pursuit of a life where we can find meaning and fulfillment.

Which, it happens, is the basic theme of Estab-Life. This series tells stories of people who want to run away from their lives, even though the _title of every episode_ says that you _can't_ run away from whatever the episode's subject is trying to run away from. Schoolwork. Democracy. Destiny. Control. All of these things, the episode titles say, are things you can't run away from. And then the stories show people doing exactly that, with the help of the series' main cast, the Extractors. One by one the things you can't run away from are eliminated, until at the end there's only one thing left that the characters can't run away from: Themselves.

There's a great deal of subtlety in the show, in the way it portrays its characters, particularly the leads. The main lead, Equa, stands out because she _doesn't_ want to run away. She does what she does because she's genuinely happy with her work, because she's living her values to their fullest. She's forthright and clear that this is _why_ she helps people run away - because she wants other people to have the same opportunity she's had. I'm genuinely surprised at just how much I _liked_ Equa. This is a lady whose personality is that she's irrepressibly cheerful, upbeat, and compassionate. She's an amazing person, everybody loves her, and for most of the show she's functionally invincible because she has plot armor that's not _literal_, but is so blatant that calling it "metaphorical" seems like a stretch. Characters like this normally annoy me.

Here, though? First, while the story is one about human smugglers in a dystopia, for the most part it isn't _nearly_ as serious as that description implies. Their clients are a yakuza boss who wants to become a magical girl, penguins who want to escape the Stasi. Equa is loveable first, because she takes these characters completely seriously. She's utterly sincere about things that other people would raise a cocked eyebrow at. She's not kind because the plot demands it, she's kind because that's the fundamental basis of her character.

In fact, her kindness isn't seen as completely good. She's not always right. Most notably, she gets the rest of the team shot at a lot, which is pretty convenient given that the show is an action comedy and therefore a certain amount of action is called for. Everyone around her loves her, everyone around her works to protect her, because even _with_ the plot armor, she constantly puts other people before herself, she constantly puts herself in harm's way for others. The trick the show pulls, though, is it does the same thing Equa does - she's important, but she doesn't ever center herself. It focuses on the other characters, their personalities, their stories, and you learn about Equa by how she treats _other people_. She avoids talking about herself. She turns the focus back onto other people, and it works because that's the most important thing about her, not her history, not her backstory, but her deep, principled _compassion_.

That's all you need, really, for a great series, in my opinion. Compelling characters with strong, realistic motivations. Well, maybe I'd ask for a little more than that in a show this cheap-looking. The animation here isn't what I'd call garbage-tier, but it's largely not very visually impressive. It's not going to make a lot of sakuga rolls. In general the show tries to show, not tell, but with a budget this limited there's only so much you can show. Even though I grew up on "classic" Doctor Who, even though I can accept green bubblewrap as convincing body horror, I wouldn't be bothering to tell you about this show if it was simply a good story with strong characters.

No, what puts this show over the top is that this show is also _very queer_. The three main characters in this series are also a sapphic love triangle. How sapphic? You know Birdie Wing, the girls' golf anime from this season where one constantly has the sense watching it that the two leads are going to start making out at any second? This show is more sapphic than that. It also happens to feature some of the best trans representation I've seen in anime. Admittedly that's a pretty low bar, but the show _sails_ over it with ease simply by having the lead character state the obvious - that there's nothing wrong with a yakuza boss wanting to be a magical girl. It repeatedly features tropes that anime has done very, very badly in the past, and generally does them well. I wasn't happy about the implicit fat-shaming in one of the episodes, but that's about the worst objection I can make to anything in this show.

But WAIT, there's MORE. The show is clearly, obviously set in a dystopia that, uh, shares some distinct similarities with dystopian situations other people might be familiar with. Do I personally know what it's like to leave everything behind in search of a life where I can be happy with myself, with who I am? Absolutely, and I'm far from alone in this. The show starts out by centering the joy of being able to do that, of having someone who will give you an opportunity for that better life. The thing about this world, though, is that everything comes with a cost. Equa's blithe pursuit of her values eventually does get the Extractors into trouble. At some point in the series, she does something that seriously threatens the entire structure of the society she lives in, the society that turns a blind eye to the Extractors' criminal activities. She does this without a second though, because it's the Right Thing to Do. There are consequences to this.

So the show, having succeeded thoroughly at lighthearted episodic comedy, takes a sudden turn for the dramatic. It works. Not only does it work, this turn builds naturally and organically on the framework the show has already built. Not only was the Extractors' world always a dystopia, but the ridiculous, lighthearted things they did in the earlier episodes are shown to have real consequences. It does all this, and then, at the end, it sticks the landing. The last episode does have a big old exposition dump, but it also has the best action and design work of the show. That's still not a ton, but I certainly wasn't expecting to, at any point, find myself saying "Wow, that actually looks pretty cool" about anything in the show. More importantly, over the last few episodes of the show it absolutely reveals itself as a thoughtful and heartfelt meditation on not just life under dystopia, but the nature of dystopia itself, on what it means to truly escape from a tyranny of not just people, but of systems, systems designed with all the best intentions in the world. Not only do I think the ending doesn't cop out at all, I think it goes beyond even a lot of anime that I love. Estab-Life celebrates diversity, but at the same time does not shy away from acknowledging how difficult it is for people who don't have the same values or the same experiences to practice diversity as a central value, the way Equa does. It's enough, in this world, to point out the glaring and obvious problems we face, but Estab-Life served to reinforce my genuine hope and belief - belief that a better world is possible and that it is within our grasp, and that sometimes, the best way we can do that is by leaving behind the things that no longer serve us.

In the earlier episodes of the show, characters repeatedly question why the characters' clients would want to leave. Why would a powerful mafia boss want to run away? Why would a celebrated, elite troup of ballet performers want to run away? Why would a high priestess want to run away from a land where she's the voice of the local Goddess? Why would an otaku want to run away Akibahara? Maybe, the show suggests, the characters aren't running away, but walking away - walking away from the same land, a land Ursula K. Leguin called "Omelas".

Estab-Life is a genuinely great show. I'd give it a 9/10 if it'd had a budget of more than about 500 yen per episode. You should watch it.