Animation Revelation's Animation Blog

As an Asian-American, Orientalism has been a difficult topic to grapple with. Because the word has been used in many different ways in recent internet discourse, inadvertently resulting in vague explanations. Literature professor Edward Said originally popularized the term to mean representations of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures that presented them as “the other”, something to fetishize or view as more an exotic theme park than its own society. But that leads to the question as to what problems there are in Orientalism, as that definition can apply to works celebrating Asian cultures just as much as it can apply to works that demonize and stereotype them. Avatar the Last Airbender, a show praised for portraying fantasy cultures influenced by Eastern imagery, was written and directed by mostly non-Asian creators. Yet to refer to it as Orientalist seems unfair, as that lumps it in with the Fu Manchus and Charlie Chans of pop culture.

And it leads to an unfortunate dichotomy suggesting that any Western art that portrays Asians is racist no matter how positive or layered the depictions are, which I can’t possibly agree with. If anything, it divides cultures and builds fences over potential bonds if works like Isle of Dogs, Sita Sings the blues, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Samurai Jack are viewed as something to avoid instead of a potential path. Also, the debate is very different for Asians as opposed to Asian-Americans, where native Japanese mostly responded with apathy or nonchalance at hot button topics here like when Scarlett Johansson was cast as Motoko Kusanagi. Or China’s lack of interest in Crazy Rich Asians. Not to mention when the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was protested for allowing patrons to try on kimonos as a cultural exchange protest, even though the sponsors for the program were Japanese and questioned why they were criticized for attempting to share their own culture.

But there can still be a sense of discomfort when looking at some works that attempt to celebrate Asian culture, especially ones from years past. Like the Gargoyles episode “Bushido”. Set in the middle of the Avalon World Tour, Goliath and friends find themselves in Japan where they meet the local Japanese gargoyles, all wearing traditional robes and kimonos. While they’re all manipulated by a Japanese businessman who, poor at his own bushido studies, abandoned his traditions for greed. Most of these new characters are played by Asian voice actors. The setting is never played for laughs or looked down upon by the main cast. And the ultimate message is about how gargoyles shouldn’t have to compromise and lower themselves into amusement park subjects if they want to be accepted by humanity. All in all, something that should age well. Should.

Watching the episode, I felt some awkwardness seeing the typical Gargoyles plot of “Goliath and pals get manipulated by a master planner” but set in Japan, with even a Japanese Xanatos to remind you what show you were watching. A show that has been championed for intricate plotting now resigning into its own formula but set in different countries, like all those post sell by date Simpsons episodes where Homer goes to Brazil/Italy/Canada/Australia and gets into generic hi-jinks. “Bushido” is an episode that means well and has its heart in the right place, but still somehow comes off as dated even for its time. The Japan portrayed here comes off as the amusement park the show derides, with ninjas, pagodas, samurai, and villains who act and look like Yakuza. Anything PG-rated that the average person can come up with when they think of Japan is seen here. And it leads to a simple world within a simple episode, told in a padded-out arc that should have ended sooner than later.

Of course, that’s too little to view the episode as a flawed product, but there was an aftertaste in the episode’s message that felt troubling. Where right before Goliath and his friends leave to go to another location, the Japanese characters they’ve befriended vow to go back and embrace their bushido teachings if they want to avoid where the villain Taro stood. And while it’s a lesson about how it’s important to learn your history, this also sounds like a call for traditionalism and a rejection of potential new ideas. Because as corrupt as Taro was, the heroes never offered an alternate situation for Gargoyles and humans to integrate with each other. Instead, we’re told that the best solution is to use honor codes and morals developed by the samurai of old, a message that sounds more familiar from Japan’s ultranationalists than a Greg Weisman cartoon. It’s like an anime suggesting the best solution for British people isn’t to modernize or adapt but to adhere to the ideologies of Middle Age knights, hearing an American yearn for the old days of LBJ, or those who think the Spartans were the peak of humanity. The message carries an overly romanticized view of samurai that can’t understand why Japanese society has moved past them, and especially ignores how the history of samurai is one stained in blood. But maybe that connects to a common theme in Gargoyles: That new ideas are bad and old ways work best. Like how Demona can adapt to human society and learn modern-day science faster than our heroic Gargoyles can, or how the idea that Gargoyles who were crushed when turned to stone can be brought back to life through technology is never used beyond the Coldstone trio. Gargoyles is a forward-thinking show in many aspects, but when it trips, it trips hard. And while “Bushido” certainly isn’t racist or offensive beyond nitpicking, its intentions are undermined by a lack of flexibility.

(this article has spoilers)

When I found out Mari Okada was going to not only write a movie but direct it, despite having no prior experience animating, I was interested by that on novelty alone. The writer who has almost defined melodrama in this decade of anime sculpting a story from a whole other angle. Even if I’ve found little genuine enjoyment in most of her work, there’s still something worth taking notes on a writer whose developed an obvious style through all of her works. Compared to other writers whose signatures are so underdeveloped that even when they’re making shows without relying on source material there’s little identity to them, almost every Okada show has a moment you notice where even in the first episode they’re undeniably covered in her fingerprints. Like dysfunctional and often complicated relationships between a mother and her child, over the top childhood trauma, love triangles that explode in everyone’s faces, bizarrely singled-minded individuals whose actions and desires are completely alien to everyone else in the story, and crying. Lots of crying. Not since Jun Maeda has someone shaped the romance/drama genre in anime like she has.

And like Jun Maeda, Okada’s typical storytelling techniques can become hindrances as they repeat so much in her work that Maquia had little new to say. At first I thought the script was meant to be another one of her twelve episode animes but truncated into movie form, but looking at it closely, the primary story didn’t warrant a whole movie. First off, let’s stroll through another familiar Okada trope: The struggles of motherhood. Troubled relationships with mothers have been such a tried and tested Okada cliché that I wasn’t surprised when she revealed in her autobiography that she too had a rough time growing up with her mom. I guess what’s surprising in this film is that the mother is the main character this time. The character who starts off as a runt, comes of age and become a soldier, then grows old and dies? We look at his story through Maquia’s unaging eyes. From her perspective, years and decades become like seconds as her adoptive son grows old enough to be seen as her sibling, then ultimately so old that they look like granddaughter and grandfather. Reminds me a little of Yvaine’s situation in Neil Gaiman’s novel Stardust, except that book had more jokes.

Not to say this movie would have been better if it had more humor, but I found myself annoyed at how straightforward this film was. Because once you strip away the terminology like “Iorph” or “Renato”, the film does little with its fantasy setting. The Iorph are just elves. Blond-haired, meek humanoids who live for hundreds of years but hide in tiny villages while humans rule over most of the known world? They’re elves. Elves who weave for most of their lives, and without the pointy ears, but elves nonetheless. And the only difference between the Renato and regular dragons are that the former succumb to Mad Cow disease. You could say the fantasy elements are underdeveloped because they take a backseat to the humanity of the movie, but it doesn’t strike there. If I wanted a movie about the struggles of a young mother, I’d just watch Wolf Children. This film doesn’t know which side to lean into. But maybe it’s intentional. The movie’s themes prove to be a series of contrasts. By the end, the corrupt empire that slaughtered and kidnapped Iorph women loses its hold and gets attacked by other nations, while the Iorph village eventually recovered and it turns out the species isn’t on its last legs like the majority of the movie suggested. The supporting character Leilia struggles to at last meet her birth daughter to mirror Maquia’s combination of love and alienation towards her adoptive son, but then that subplot wavers off by the climax without any satisfying conclusion. And I guess that’s what Maquia was, a thousand punches but no finishing blow.

Another anime season, another light novel adaptation. Here’s to another smorgasbord season of crappy LN titles, now adapted for a visual format! We got your isekais, we got your imoutoshit, we got your fantasy harems, we got your crappy vanilla SAO in case you thought the alternative flavor was too tasty, but perhaps the one that has everyone talking is a fantasy anime based on a little novel called Goblin Slayer. Goblin Slayer, the latest “dark” fantasy light novel to get an anime follows the titular character on a quest to slay the green menace known as Goblins. A dude decked out in badass armor on a one-man war that kills his targets in increasingly violent and creative ways. Sounds like a fun, if juvenile, time right? Well, maybe a bit too juvenile. I’ve been cautiously optimistic for the anime almost all year, the metal-sounding title combined with the simple premise, badass looking protagonist, frequent comparisons to DOOM, and promise of a splatterfest of goblin gore got me somewhat interested when I saw it pop up on certain boards. Unfortunately one of the first things I heard about Goblin Slayer was the amount of rape and sexualized violence in the manga adaptation (almost all towards female characters, of course), so already my interest took a plummet, it wasn’t until I learned that most of those elements were only on-page in the manga that my interest slowly climbed back up, this combined with the staff later revealed for the anime, including writer Yosuke Kuroda, whom has worked on some of my favorite such as Gungrave, S-CRY-Ed, Jormungand, and this year’s Gun Gale Online, and had worked alongside co-writer Hideyuki Kurata on Drifters and Hellsing Ultimate. Director Takaharu Ozaki also made a name for himself with last year’s critically acclaimed Girls Last Tour, so with a solid staff combined with White Fox being in charge of animation my anticipation grew, albeit, rather cautiously. Unfortunately my caution was not unfounded.

By the time you read this, you should already be well aware that the Goblin Slayer anime kept in the infamous rape scene from the manga. Somewhat censored, but still enough was shown to make it obvious as to what was happening. As expected, the outrage was insane. Dozens upon dozens of articles twitter threads, youtube videos, and forum posts were made detailing how Goblin Slayer is a terrible anime and you should be ashamed for liking it. While not all criticism was valid (the ones saying its fascist are particularly eye-rolling) but a lot of them made valid points, especially regarding its depiction of rape. Likewise, the pushback against this was also something to behold. Fans, both of the source material and newcomers alike where telling these people that they were overreacting, that this isn’t the only anime to have rape, that manga/manga like Berserk and hundreds of others have had rape depicted in the past, that the rape in those shows were worse than the rape in Goblin Slayer, that the rape was there to show that the Goblins were “really bad guys”, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

To which I have to say to the defense force: “so what”? So what if other anime have shown this in the past? Just because some show had rape in the past, usually more graphic or extreme, does not excuse tasteless depiction in the present, especially when it ends handling the topic even worse than its predecessors did. I myself am a fan of such works like Berserk or most of Yoshiaki Kawajiri or Hideyuki Kikuchi’s early input, and they’re easily my least favorite things about those works, but I can look past them as a relic of their era and the fact that they’re ultimately better written and more engaging works in spite of those elements, not because of them. The “it’s to show how bad the goblins are!” argument is also laughable due to how overused variations of that argument are to justify why rape needs to happen in a given work. If a writer is good enough, they wouldn’t need to shove rape in the first chapter of their work to “show how evil and irredeemable” the villains are, as there are millions of other ways to prove someone’s villainy than to rape a character that will soon be discarded. Just look at DC’s Identity Crisis from last decade; do you really think people took Dr. Light seriously as a villain again after he raped Sue Dibny? No, he just became the butt of even more jokes in the fandom and future writers had no idea what to do with such a character with that on his rap sheet, they very well couldn’t have him in lighthearted stories again, yet they couldn’t successfully write him as a competent villain again without having to address such a heavy issue or ignoring it entirely, and given a choice to write a rapist, or a similarly evil character that doesn’t have such baggage attached to him yet still allowing for more flexible stories like the Joker, it’s easy to see why Dr. Light remains forgotten to this day.

That’s how I feel about the goblins in Goblin Slayer, too vile and despicable to be in lighthearted stories, yet too one dimensionally evil to be part of a nuanced narrative, and if the story just treats them as a typical dangerous threat from now on, then what was the point of them being rapists in the first place? You can spout in-universe justifications as much as you want, but before the rape scene happened the anime honestly did a really good job building them up as a credible threat, it was a staple of a good horror scene; lots of tense build up coupled with false reassurance that things will go well, then the rug is pulled when they show up on screen, the poor cgi actually adding to their unsettling, erratic nature, which only becomes more effective when they start slaughtering the characters we’ve been following up ‘til now…and then the monk’s clothes get ripped off and it all turns into a really bad, low-budget hentai, and the anime loses me. I wasn’t terrified, disgusted sure, in the same way you’d be disgusted if your neighbor went on the street, de-pantsed themselves, and defecated in public. It was like if in the new Halloween movie, they successfully did everything to make Michael scary again with master directing work…but then suddenly he stops and rapes his victim for no real reason. It just comes off as trying too hard and ends up clashing with the tone as a result. And that’s the problem with rape scenes, not just in Goblin Slayer, but with “dark” fiction in general. Too often they resort to on-screen sexual violence (almost exclusively against women) as a means for bad writers to show how “realistic” or “mature” they are without actually saying anything meaningful about the issue, often ignoring the actual repercussions inherent in the act.

People like to argue that everyone acts like rape is a bigger deal than violence in regards to fiction, but in many ways that’s true. There’s a stark difference between seeing a guy brutally slaughter a horde of nameless minions and seeing a character get raped on-screen. The former is usually impersonal, a cathartic spectacle used to excite and entertain a usually fantastic scenario, while the latter is always incredibly personal and all too real as there are victims of the crime that are traumatized by the experience to this day. Such an argument is also disingenuous as it ignores the controversy over fictionalized violence that still happens today, with one of the most recent examples being the backlash against the Death Wish remake earlier this year.

I’ve also noticed that many people that defend Goblin Slayer’s rape scenes also criticize SAO or Akame ga Kill for their use of rape and other edgy elements despite Goblin Slayer not being any better in its use of it. To say that this reeks of hypocrisy would be an understatement. Goblin Slayer is just as guilty of using rape as a shorthand for making its antagonists irredeemable and killing off characters violently for shock value as SAO and AgK are, yet somehow this is the one that has people leap to its defense and praise it as a genuinely good story while other shows remain the butt of jokes on the internet? If anything Goblin Slayer handles its edgy elements worse than its contemporaries as it horribly clashes with what is inherently a silly, fun premise. People like to compare this to Berserk, but for all its faults Berserk has a consistent tone to it, and its unsavory elements, while not expertly handled still have actual repercussions for both the characters and the world, even in the early volumes it was apparent that it was more than just a manga about a lone badass fighting demons and would become more of character drama with the stakes of an epic fantasy novel, whereas Goblin Slayer, by the authors own admission, is a low level fantasy adventure more focused on a specific niche than anything really deep or heavy. Maybe I’ll change my mind if the monk fighter comes back and turns her traumatic experience in the goblin cave into a drive to prevent other women from suffering what she suffered and becomes a fellow goblin hunter, but that sounds a bit too smart for a show such as this.

I know by now that fans are more than sick of hearing everyone talk about the rape in Goblin Slayer, but if you are tired of hearing this discussion over and over, then the blame lies in the series itself for including it in the first place. When you introduce heavy subjects in your work, then be prepared for your portrayal of said subjects to be discussed and your work to be judged according to how you handle those subjects, especially when handled poorly and brought to a new, more visible medium. And really, the fact that so many people are still discussing the subject matter two weeks later is an indicator that there’s unfortunately not much else to Goblin Slayer for the uninitiated.

Now, I’m not saying anything like Goblin Slayer shouldn’t exist or nobody can put rape and other controversial subject matter in their work, or other such nonsense. Every work has the right to exist, everyone has the right to create, and creators have the right to put whatever concept or subject matter they so desire in their work. However, with that also comes the right for that creator, work, and use of that subject matter to be criticized whether they like it or not. Keep in mind that I have no ill will towards the author of the original Light Novel himself; Kumo Kagyu. The guy just wanted to make a cool, dark fantasy book inspired by fantasy books and anime he consumed while growing up, and I can respect and relate to that. It’s clear that his depiction of goblins as evil, depraved rapists was more of a desire to emulate other dark fiction but doing it poorly in typical amateur writer fashion and ignorance, rather than any deep-seated malice, and while he is to blame for including and (presumably) approving it in the first place, the addition of graphic rape in most of Goblin Slayer’s adaptation also lies in the hands of the ones in charge of said adaptations. Ultimately, Goblin Slayer won’t be a commentary and critique on rape culture, and the society lets those evils slip away because that’s not the story Kagyu had in mind nor is it his vision, but just yet another misstep of a young writer not understanding the topics his own work perpetuates. Unfortunately, the vision Kagyu does have leaves a lot to be desired, as Goblin Slayer is still plagued with a ton of issues that hinder its enjoyment and verisimilitude.

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To be continued.

La Bizzare Aventura di GioGio Cinco Parte: Vento Aureo

Its the Giorno show! Hoooray! The bastard son of Dio Brando/Jonathan Joestar is alive and well and driving cabs in Naples. But most importantly… he tastes like A LIAR! Of course when you’re being tongued by by a man in white Gucci pretty much anything tastes like a liar. In other news, Koichi is back!…because Josuke was obviously too busy beating up delinquents who disssed his haircut, and Yukako still wants his precious fluids. Also Jotaro shows up for 3 minutes before hopping on a plane to pay Jolyne’s child support. Oh those wacky Joestars! HAHAHAHAHA…nothing happened in this episode.

Yeah Golden Wind’s first episode is probably the weakest we’ve had since Dio The Invader way back in Season 1. The problem being that it simply introduces a bunch of characters we don’t really like out of the gate with some less interesting returning ones to give/receive infodumps about why Araki STILL has a hard on for Dio. It’ll get better, I know that. This isn’t the second most popular JoJo arc in Japan for nothing. But for a first episode, I was somewhat underwhelmed. So how many months before King Crimson/Epitaph/whatever shows up again? – Lord Dalek

Boarding School Juliet

Oh boy howdy, just what we needed! Yet another Romeo and Juliet thing, and one set in a fancy high school too so you can squint and pretend Ouran or Utena are back on TV again! Look at all these wacky high schoolers fighting each other without any adult supervision! Oh look! It’s blacks versus whites, and by that I mean the colors of their uniforms! Look at this rich high school student act wacky! Isn’t that wacky?! But wait, the main characters are called Romio and Juliet! Why is Romeo’s name spelled like that?! I don’t know! See, Juliet’s the leader of her team of whites! But get this, it’s shocking because she’s… a woman?! Oh no, a woman leading a high school dorm?! Silly Japanese animes! Wondering if this will have anything to do with Shakespeare?! Gosh! Isn’t that a mystery?! Mercutio? More like Mercuckio!

But the biggest surprise of all is that… Juliet almost gets gang-raped by a bunch of blacks! Guys in black school uniforms, I mean! Tee-hee-hee! But in the nick of time, Romio saves her vagina from getting filled with gooey vanilla extract! And instead of thanking him, she’s pissed! She thinks getting saved from rape is just as bad as getting raped… because she explains it would hurt her reputation if people found out she needed to get saved… and I’d like to reiterate the alternative to getting saved would have been getting gang-raped harder than a girl from Goblin Slayer! And the fight goes on and the fights goes on and the fight g—wait, did Romeo, I mean, Romio say he loved Juliet!? Color my shock! So after more arguing, Romio and Juliet becomes boyfriend and girlfriend! But only in public because of Juliet’s reputation! It’s funny because she’s a fucking tsundere! Man! I loved this anime! It was so fucking gnarly! Almost as gnarly as fucking my girlfriend while hooking Capri Sun right into my veins! – !!!!!!!!!!!!

Conception

You know…when I was looking over this season’s Anichart, one show in particular stood out amongst the rest of the pack. One show dared to go above and beyond the call of duty to provide a concept that spelled exactly what it meant on the box. And it lived up exactly to my expectations. That show was Conception, and it is… by far… the worst show of the season.

So what’s the deal here? Well its another isekai!…strike one…its based off a game by Spike Chunsoft!…strike two…and its made by Gonz—YOU’RE OUT! Oh all right what else could possibly be wrong with this? Oh just the plot. Two high schoolers find themselves warped into a fantasy land when our lead normal guy’s girlfriend suddenly admits she’s pregnant…despite being a virgin. Well actually she’s not, its all part of a dastardly plan to save the universe by having normal dude impregnate several other fantasy world girls to defeat the impurities or something. Because apparently he can’t do it alone but the product of his hot member can. Also because this was based off a game by the Danganronpa guys, Monokuma is in this except he’s now an annoying perverted tanooki instead of an annoying perverted Panda. Terrific!

…no its not terrific, its disgusting. I feel morally appauled by the display here. This show is nothing but disgusting trash. Let us never speak of it again. – Lord Dalek

Second Opinion Once Removed

They’re not just boyfriend and girlfriend, Dalek. They’re cousins. They’re cousins, and they had sex in the first episode. – BloodyMarquis

Third Verse Same As The First

Oh dear god you’re right. See this is what happens when my mind is still boggled over that one cat girl and her ridiculous spinal column doing a squat thrust. I mean really…

How the fuck is this supposed to work Marquis? You’re supposed to be the genius. I just work here! — Lord Dalek

DOUBLE DECKER! DOUG & KIRILL

Well here it is… Tiger & Bunny 2! …sorta. For many, Double Decker! was a complete surprise when it was originally revealed and a complete disappointment to T&B’s army of fujoshi, who demanded more Kotetsu and Barnaby and instead got Not-Kotetsu and Not-Barnaby, when it was finally announced. I honestly didn’t care. While I enjoyed the first half of Tiger & Bunny, the second was a complete buzzkill of increasingly uninteresting plotlines that I still can’t be bothered to actually finish. Yeah. Its been 6 years and I don’t care anymore. However this is a brand new show! Surely they couldn’t possibly make the same mistakes again!

Well good news! They haven’t! …they’ve made it so that I don’t give a fuck about anything!

Yeah this show is about emotionally fullfilling as that cheap ham sandwich I had for lunch the other day. Apparently the team at Sunrise decided that the most important feature of Tiger & Bunny was the visual look and have gone all in on it. So now we have more rediculous architecture, weird cars, and bad haircuts. And what did they lose in return? Oh…just likable characters…a plot that makes sense…something that isn’t immediately annoying. Remember how you were really into Kotetsu and Barnaby’s early squabblings? How it made you emotionally invested in the Jake Martinez fight (whichthesecondhalfjustspatonitfuckTiger&BunnyThanksForRemindingMe)? Well that’s gone now. Doug is your typical (ie: BORING) cool professional detective of few words and Kirill is just a plain annoying version of Riggs from Lethal Weapon. And the plot, what little there is, is just The Wire…but camp. There is no real development here. The show is too infatuated with its lore and fictional universe to care. And if the show doesn’t care than neither do I.

But there is one thing that makes me laugh…if this makes it onto Toonami in three weeks (the dub is already out) then the salt of the bros who were begging for Tiger & Bunny 6 years ago will be even greater and more delicious than anything those fujoshi could dish out. And this is clearly all I have to live for now. Salt. – Lord Dalek

The Girl in Twilight

Seriously? This season couldn’t go one day without another Isekai show? Wait…scratch that, couldn’t go one day without TWO isekai shows??? I thought we were supposed to be finally getting rid of this crappy genre when Kadokawa banned ’em from their submission contests. And then I realize that that Slime show is actually from a LN from several years ago and the one with the Aikatsu rejects and their silly radio is an original pile o’ poo. This is where we are now people. Japan’s major publishing houses may be giving isekai the boot but animu will always be eternally pandering.

Whelp… guess I can’t put this off for much longer. Settle it with a coin flip. Heads its Sparkle Vampire Precure, tails its off-brand moe dragon quest.

*flip*

The choice is made.

So in this show a bunch of girls who all look kinda dead inside use a cheap offbrand walkman to cross over into an alternate world that can’t tell if its Clannad’s Illusionary World or the Drifting Classroom. However they get more than they bargained for when the magical girl doppleganger of the series’ lead protagonist hitches a ride back to our world for no apparent reason because she owns a REAL Walkman. And then…she leaves!…’k

So what was the point of Girl in Twilight? Lord if I know. There’s no setup, no payoff, and no return value. It does have yellow snow and rabbit snake monsters though. Yay? – Lord Dalek

Irozuku: The World in Colors

Why is every PA Works anime about some wistful young adult girl trying to find her role in life as she moves to a new land? I don’t get this formula they keep holding on to. Sometimes it can work wonders like in Shirobako, but that’s the rare time it actually works instead of producing yet another dull anime. You think anybody still gives a shit about Red Data Girl? Show after show of coming of age tales produced by a text generator powered with Mari Okada’s blood. Sure, PA Works shows are shiny, and have pretty backgrounds. But KyoAni’s also shiny with pretty backgrounds, and they don’t get a pass for producing bad shows either. And while KyoAni moved on and started producing different kinds of schlock, PA Works has still been producing works that appeal to people who still think Your Name is the deepest anime ever. Or if you read that chapter of Elfen Lied where it turned out that one girl wore diapers, and you were emotionally moved by that instead of laughing. Because if that appeals to you, Iroduku will be your favorite anime this season.

Here, we have a girl in the year 2078 who’s sad because she’s colorblind. In sixty years of future technology, they somehow lost the ability to make glasses for the colorblind. So instead of trying to help her, her grandma sends her back to 2018 without her consent, any guides, or any money. And we’re treated to this utterly heartbreaking story where a teenage girl has no idea how windows or band-aids work. Instead of asking questions to these past people or getting angry at her grandmother for doing this, she just walks around confused like every other wistful girl in PA Works shows. And instead of playing this for comedy, we’re supposed to think this is sad. This kind of shit could make people feel like middle-aged dads concerned of their out of touch with their teenage daughters, when they themselves are actually daughterless teenagers. Maybe if you’re the kind of person who thinks watching a teenage girl spin in a circle with her arms in the air while people are watching is heartwarming instead of silly, you can get something out of this. – BloodyMarquis

My Sister, My Writer

Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja nai is a real gemstone among this sea of anime. While i am a huge fan of goblin slayer (do not judge me) i cannot help but feel my true emotions may be swayed by this underrated darling. The socalled critics might say this show is bad because they think incest is bad, but that is a fallacy. Those people are SJW shills paid by crunchyroll and i do not accept false agendas. i think incest as fiction is perfect as an escapist fantasy for masculine men such as myself (do not judge me). Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja nai is about the darling Suzuka Nagami, a beauty with wonderful lavender hair who does everything for her brother Yu. She is the best person Yu could have and in a twist she writes a light novel all about how she wants to do sexy things with him but denies she wants to do sexy things with him so she keeps everything under wraps as her brother meets up with light novel editors with big boobs. i really liked the scene where the editor makes Yu grab her boob because i thought that was funny and a little bit hot (please do not judge me). Twenty years ago in middle school my chinese classmate Sofia Vu said i touched her cunt in a bad place and my teacher Mrs. Lincolnshire said i would go to detention. Well jokes on you two fat roasties because i am still here. i hope you in particular Mrs. Lincolnshire have alzheimer right now and i hope Sofia does not know i look at her twitter every day and tweet gore pictures and rape threats to her on burner accounts.

Yu reminds me very much of myself when i was his age. i was taunted by the small boobed girls too and i want to pay them back. i read books too just like Yu like the books of jordan peterson. It is a shame that there was not a scene where Yu was attacked by several black men (like jason dahmer I SWEAR to god jason dahmer I will doxx you and tell you that you are a BAD person one day) because that would have made my life quite similar to Yu. If i had a sister i would be very nice to her i would tell her her hair is nice and that she has nice boobs. If she wanted me to pet her cunt i would. i know that petting your sisters cunt is a no-no but i do not care (DO NOT JUDGE ME YOU FUCKS!!!). If gay men and gay women can be allowed to exist why not incest? i think wanting to pet your sisters cunt fur is normal and anybody who says it is not normal is a bad person. i am not the degenerate. You are. i am not a rapist. i am not a stalker. i am a healthy young man who just wants a girl to play with. Please go on my tinder profile (ID withheld for this guy’s personal safety. – Foggle) and let me know if you want to play with me. i am very nice and do not hurt women unlike black people like jason dahmer. (I WILL STARE AT YOUR TWITTER EVERY DAY AND MAKE YOU KNOW YOU ARE WATCHED JASON DAHMER I WILL MAKE YOU KNOW YOU ARE A BAD PERSON) – SwampRationalist222

Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai

You know that “spot the main character in a crowd” meme, where the poster shows pictures of various anime where almost everybody in the shot has brown/black hair and regular clothes while the main character has weird colored hair and clothes out of a fashion catalog or Final Fantasy game? The show could use that, because the main character disappears into the crowd several times through this episode. He makes no impression as a person for the entire first half, visually or emotionally. He even blurs into the crowd, as everybody in this show has brown/gray/black hair with drab clothing on. And one could say that’s the point when the main girl shows up in a bunny girl costume to contrast with the rest of the background. As the plot unfolds, her goal is revealed: She used to be famous, but after her fame waned, she became invisible and unseen by anyone except the main character. Maybe that’s the point. About how fame is fleeting, yet it’s the only thing that can allow us to become more than just background extras.

Except the cast are boring. Aside from the main girl dressing up in a bunny girl costume at a library, none of the characters deliver a striking first impression at all. And even after the costume, she doesn’t have much to say about herself as a person. Just that she used to be a celebrity and now she’s no longer acknowledged due to the magic in this show’s universe. Yeah, the series could be making a point over how celebrities and idols become something akin to ghosts after they make so much as a single decision, but this message would have worked more if the show’s world and people were more interesting. For now, I feel like I’m watching no-name characters scared of becoming no-names. If anything, it was like watching Monogatari without all of Shinbo’s stylistic choices. The girl even acted like Senjougahara while having a similar plight as her and Hachikuji. And while the Monogatari series became tiring, at least the direction kept my eyes focused. With that all gone in Bunny Girl Senpai, all you have is a snore. – BloodyMarquis

Release The Spyce

Ok, stop me yf you’ve heard thys one before. A group of ioung gyr—no yts not K-On, god what ys wyth iou people and K-On? That show was 10 iears ago.

Startyng agayn, a group of ioung girls are trayned nyn–no no no, yts not Senran Kagura. Please never mentyon that show agayn.

Now, a group of ioung gyrls are trayned nynjas and assassyns yn a futur–Pryncess Pryncyple? No. That was STEAMPUNK not the future, man get your scyfy genres strayght.

Once agayn. a group of ioung gyrls are trayned nynjas and assassyns yn a futurystyc world where they represent the reyncarnatyons of–no Kantay Collectyon was a show about gyrls who were boats! There’s a byg dyfference between boats and samurays.

No more ynterruptyons. A group of ioung gyrls are trayned nynjas and assassyns yn a futurystyc world where they represent the reyncarnatyons of hystorycal Edo peryod samuray and warlords and eat spyci foods to become lethal kyllyng machynes.

Wow, Y just realized Y lyteralli just descrybed the plotlynes of 75% of anyme released yn the last fyve iears. Whi didn’t iou warn me? Whi?

So aniwai, Release The Spice? More like, Release The Generic, myryte? Aye iay iay iay iay iay! – ??????

RErideD – Derrida, who leaps through time.

In the words of Sir Alec Guinness: Yoshitoshi ABe-san, ABe-san, now that’s a name I haven’t heard since…oh…before you were born. Once upon a time he was at the forefront of TV anime’s seinen rennaisance, co-creating Serial Experiments Lain and Texhnolyze with Chiaki Konaka and developing NieA_7 and Haibane Renmei on his own time, all seminal titles in that era when Pioneer LDC was king of the anime mountain before Dentsu’s incompetence turned ’em into the dumpster fire that was Geneon. Yeah ABe was a real rising star in the anime world, and then…(poof) he just disappeared into a puff of smoke.

But now, he’s back! And its like he never went away too because RerideD looks like a show from 2005!

Yeah I don’t know who Studio Geektoys is, but RErideD is an embarrassing debut for them. Character designs are flat and bland. CGI is about on par with a low budget toy commercial anime of the era. And the animation itself is just plain lifeless. This is completely unacceptable now and it was only borderline acceptible back in the day. Guess ABe really needed the Pioneer money and studios like the long dead Triangle Staff to fulfill his purposes.

As for the first episode…well…remember Blue Gender? Well that’s what RErideD is. Blue Gender but with robots instead of cabbages. And the only reason I know this is because they shove it all into the last 3 minutes of the episode. The rest is just bulidup and exposition about why our cutrate Steins;Gate knock off scientist guy protagonist literally just stumbles into a cryogenic container right as the robopocalypse is about to occur. Also time travel is involved, because you can’t have a good robopocalypse story with time travel. Ain’t that right James Cameron?

God what a waste. ‘scuse me while I go back to watching Lain. – Lord Dalek

SSSS.GRIDMAN

If there was ever a studio that was the clinical definition of bipolar as of late, it must be Studio Trigger. Swinging from the dizzying highs of Kill La Kill, Space Patrol Luluco (well for some people), and Little Witch Academia to the soul crushing lows of Inou Battle, Ninja Slayer, Kiznaiver, and the dumpster fire that was Darling in the FranXX. This is a studio that hangs on a trapeze suspended over a vat of angry crocodiles constantly snapping at its legs and occasionally biting its feet clean off. And no show of theirs that I have seen could be viewed as a better metaphor for this than the first episode of SSSS.GRIDMAN.

A sequel of sorts to the early 90s Ultra-Series spinoff Hyper Agent Gridman, which got a surprisingly faithful US adaptation as Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad (the show title makes references to both), SSSS.GRIDMAN is about as entertaining as watching paint dry for its first 12 minutes. The animation is to put it mildly…limited, going from no frames, to recycled frames, to awkward pauses and actual stills. There is no background music of any sort. And the character designs, while more appealing on a surface level than Trigger’s usual scratch style, are of the “stare blandly into the camera variety.” And when the most dramatic moment of the entire episode pre-commercial break is that of a hot dog getting hit with a volleyball you get the feeling that they don’t have as much material on this script as you would like.

And then…the Kaiju attack occurs…and it is glorious.

Where once there was no animation to be seen, now there is too much. The episode’s musical score kicks in at about 15 minutes and it is stirring orchestral stuff from mah man Shiro Sagisu. Fitting considering all the blatant nods to Evangelion. And the injokes to other Tsuburaya products just coming. This…this is what I paid my monthly Crunchyroll dues to see, shame then that it only lasts 5 minutes, just like your average live action kaiju of the week show.

This then brings up the question…Is SSSS.GRIDMAN worth your time? From this episode alone? I’m not sure. While it does eventually hit a grand slam home run in its second half, by that point the away team was already up 15-2. Give it three weeks? Yeah sure, but Trigger really needs to work on their pacing if they want me to approve that opening slog.

But most importantly…where the hell is Baby Don Don? I was promised Baby Don Don in that concept short they did two years ago. Unacceptable, Trigger! 40 whacks with a wet noodle for ye! – Lord Dalek

Sword Art Online: Alicization

…

We meet again.

…

(sigh)

Yup its been almost five years since the last series of Shit Art! A hiatus brought on by everyone’s favorite light novel adaptation momentum killing brickwall: running out of stuff to adapt. You see kids, when the first anime season arrived in 2012, Reki Kawahara had a lot of material already published in the form of his original web serialization. However, midway through this arc, SAO was picked up for publication by ASCII Mediaworks Dengeki Bunko, and Kawahara abandoned the webnovel all together for proper light novel releases. This meant that Alicization which was already twice as long as Phantom Bullet would ultimately take SIX years to finish and the anime caught up, leading to this long dry spell broken up by the semi-canon anime only filler movie Ordinal Scale….which I still have not seen.

But now, here we are, Alicization, for all intent and purposes the FINAL SERIES OF SWORD ART ONLINE BECAUSE HE HASN’T WRITTEN A COMPLETELY NEW ARC SINCE IT NO MOON CRADLE DOESN’T COUNT. There have been casualties though. Long time director Tomohiko Ito and character designer Shingo Adachi are GONE. You can tell from the radically different look to the season with softer lines and lighter pastel pallet choices. It resembles abec/bunbun/whatever’s original llustrations far more than the previous series ever did. It actually looks really good. I’m shocked.

But really, visuals don’t matter. This is SAO of course! Its problems are far beneath the surface. And Alicization’s problem is that its “good SAO”. In other words…its boring. Alicization was a horribly overwritten arc which wasted 50 pages on Kirito and his new pal Eugeo cutting down a tree with a ripoff of the first quest from Lunar The Silver Star thrown in for zest. The kind of shit that gives editors coronaries.

…Guess what! Its all here! They actually made this episode twice as long to fit it in! And this is already a 52 episode adaptation because the arc was 9 volumes long! Oh god.

Well anyway, the second half of the episode is basically catching up with the SAO gang durring their long hiatus..of sorts. Sinon’s found a new Brew Crew in the Moar Deban gang of Kline, Lizbeth, and Silica (and Kirito is still playing as pretty girl for no apparent reason). There’s some guy named Subtilzer (an American asshole who’s probably Kawahara’s version of that Player Unknown guy) whom Sinon wants to smash a shovel over. Asuna now has a silly cellphone app that monitors poor Kazuto’s heartbeat like any creepy doting e-waifu would (oh just fuck for real and make Kuroyukihime already). And then Kazuto GETS MURDERED! YAAAAAAAY

…alas no. Its just the setup for the first ½ of this episode involving Kirito’s new day job beta testing a new fulldive machine and its pseudo-Westworld simulation of real life moving at 5000x. An “Accel World” if you will…goddammit.

Also long discussions of pipes and electrons and how they tie into the human soul. Yeah this is just SAO again Fuck you Kawahara! – Lord Dalek

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime

Isekai shows are like Mad Libs at this point. (BLANK) gets killed by a (BLANK) and reincarnates as a (BLANK) in a fantasy world that suspiciously resembles a standard JRPG where he hooks up with a (BLANK) girl, a (BLANK) girl, and an underage (BLANK). It’s been more copied and standardized than anything from Joseph Campbell’s books. The only difference in this subject in particular is the main character turns into a little blob of slime. Something that sounds like a funny subversion of the tired cliché at first, but then I read some chapters ahead and see he becomes overpowered and gains his own harem anyway just like many, many shows these past years. This past year. This past season. Seeing our lead play around as a slime ball is only a distraction for what’s going to come after, and in fact what we get in this very episode.

Instead of letting the main character figure out things for himself, we get this obnoxious narration that explains all of his bodily functions and abilities like this was meant to be a video game instead of a show. The first episode feels exactly like watching a game tutorial, with all the handholding that goes along with such a bizarre and unhelpful creative decision. If I wanted to watch a guy play a tutorial of some bog-standard game for twenty minutes, I would watch some guy on Youtube fuck up for half an hour. Or maybe that will be the point. Maybe it will be like Re:Zero and show all the horrors of a person getting trapped in a video game-like fantasy, but nothing implies that will be the case.

Like when the slime ball meets a giant elder dragon who further explains to him parts of the worldbuilding, while acting standoffish to him at the same time. And just to hammer home how much of an anime this anime is, the slime actually says the word “tsundere”. Just so we can go “Ahahaha! This anime’s referencing tropes! The tropes it’s using at this very moment! It’s so meta!” It’s not dialogue that sounds like something from real people. It’s dialogue which sounds like the creator’s only idea of dialogue came from other anime, games and light novels. And because this anime apparently has some hype to it judging from reception on other sites, future creators are going to look up to this anime, and pattern their dialogue after this, whose works will influence creators of their future, and so on and so on until dialogue in anime sounds like an imitation of an imitation. Devolving and simplifying with each incarnation until even a random text generator could come up with more human-like speech patterns. And if that were to occur, anime years from now will be as detailed and as fully formed as… well, a blob of slime. – BloodyMarquis

ZOMBIE LAND SAGA

It starts like any other idol show. In 2008, a bubbly middle schooler, who looks like she missed the casting call for Aikatsu, wants to be a member of her favorite idol group. She lives her life in a care free world where everything is sunshine and rainbows. Yup, for this girl, NOTHING POSSIBLY COULD GO WR—oh wait she just got run over by a passing truck (probably the same one that was supposed to hit that bitch Fuuka last year if it was actually an adaptation of the manga)! And then everything goes straight to hell! That charming bubbly soundtrack gets replace by DEATH SCREAM METAL!!!(TM) The title credits are covered in BLOOOOD SPLAAAAAATERS! And it all ends with a bone crushing THUD!!! as her lifeless corpse smacks the pavement!

….congratulations Zombie Land Saga you’ve already won the season and I’m only three minutes in!

What follows is almost as amazing. In the present day, an unhinged man with delusions of grandure and a copy of the Necronomicon says to himself… “Hey! Just trying to bring the dead back to life to cause the end of civilization is too passe! What we should really do is play Idolm@ster with zombies!” In order to carry out his devious plan, he gathers up the corpses of several famous idols from the early 80s to the present who all died premature deaths, including Ai-not-su from the opening teaser for some reason. Why? Who cares! This show is a laugh riot! Also because only main girl zombie is capable of speech at the moment (most of the rest start talking by the end), our idol group can only do one kind of music…scream metal…WONDERFUL!

Zombie Land Saga is this year’s sleeper, a show that I had little to no interest in that immediately starts winning and winning and doesn’t stop winning. It almost makes this season worth living for–*sees SAO: Alicization and Raildex 5 coming up on Saturday* …almost. – Lord Dalek

A Certain Scientalogical Accleraildex V

La comedia e finita!

So I was seeing all the hype for that Crossover Nexus short on Cartoon Network, and saw an interesting amount of fan attention to the titular character from Whatever Happened to Robot Jones pop up. And it was weird, because compared to the other Cartoon Network shows that aired in the early 00s, Robot Jones was like the stepchild. Only airing 13 half-hour episodes before disappearing into the void, as any fans the show could find desperately scrounged through their tape recordings to see if they can find one where he has his original synthetic voice or the Bobby Block version. Unlike other short-lived shows like Time Squad or Sheep in the Big City, fans had to find the ones with the original voice or overlay the original voice on copies with the altered one. Like a much tinier equivalent to what occurred with the Star Wars Despecialized Editions. It’s a cult fandom within a cult fandom, one too tiny for Cartoon Network to acknowledge but big enough for Ian Jones-Quartey to use the original voice all these years later. And after watching some of these episodes for the first time in over a decade, it’s not hard to see why.

I find it funny to compare Robot Jones with the other Cartoon Network show that came out in 2002: Kids Next Door. KND was a show where kids could build weapons, go on adventures, and fight back against their adults. That show portrays a universe where any child can become a spy who goes on fun missions and larger-than-life thrillers. Robot Jones was a show where the kid has an intelligence and abilities that no other human in their prime could ever possess, yet Robot’s treated like a second-class citizen. He doesn’t live an extraordinary life. He doesn’t even live an equal life. For all his talents, Robot Jones is a misfit in his society. Even when he tried to show off, he failed either due to lack of tact or outside elements like his bullies the Yogmans.

And there’s a cynicism to that which other Cartoon Network shows lacked. As much as Johnny Bravo or the Ed boys were attacked, they often started the trouble. The Ed boys were schemers. Johnny was a hopeless flirt. But Robot Jones didn’t have that. He was just a robot who wanted to go to school and make friends. He only wanted to do well and be seen as good. And for that, he was often dealt the short side of the rod. Imagine if Rolf were the main character of Ed, Edd, n’ Eddy, and he was treated as badly as the Eds were even though his personality, behavior, and actions were completely unchanged. That’s what Robot Jones is, a first-generation immigrant leaving his sheltered existence only to find out society is nothing like he assumed it would be. Every time he tries to do his best, there are rules or principles he’s never previously heard of getting in his way and throwing him right back into the ground again.

Not only that, but the show itself lacked that polish other CN series had. The Schoolhouse Rock style has been harped on for ages, but the comparison still rings true. The show doesn’t reference the 80s, but embodies the decade to the point where Robot Jones feels like a series out of time. One developed, then forgotten, only to be unearthed by archivists and aired for novelty’s sake. And as a series that got so little attention from its network, that lack of supervision allowed the show to delve into topics like politics, puberty, and even gender fluidity. Not quite to the level of later CN shows, but definitely a building block. A prototype, if you will. With all that unclean artstyle, and a setting where bad things happen to good people, the work almost feels like a G-rated Bakshi movie. And I don’t mean Bakshi’s actual G-rated material, but his grungier work such as Heavy Traffic, with all the nudity and swearing cut out but the bittersweet rumination of life and failure still kept in tact. Take the Finkman episode or the Rubix Cube one. Robot Jones attempts to win his crush over, or tries to show to the kids that he has a talent. But thanks to another robot who has a better ability to befriend and manipulate humans, or two kids who just want to ruin Robot’s life, he fails. And those episodes end with him unable to do anything about the bad hand he’s given.

Yet when you look at the show superficially, it’s all rather by the books. Here’s a boy. Here are his nerd friends. Here are his bullies. Here’s the girl he has a crush on. Here’s his clueless teacher. Here’s his angry principal. Here’s his embarrassing parents. A similar structure that you can apply to so many other cartoons like all the variations of Doug. In fact, during the second season, the series loses grasp of its original voice in more than one way. In the first season, the series creator Greg Miller has a solo writing credit on half the episodes and directed them all with Rob Renzetti helping him on the fifth. But in the second, he doesn’t direct any of the episodes and only has a solo writing credit on one. As a result, the show loses that personal touch and produces typical episodes about Robot Jones playing hookey or having a house party. Typical school plots were also aplenty in the first season, but this lack of development was far from Greg Miller’s original idea of where the show should go. Like his planned ending involving a robot apocalypse.

But while Robot Jones was swept under the rug almost as soon as it started, the series could still be said to be ahead of its time. The smorgasbord of 80s references were later refined in Regular Show. The garage band soundtrack reminds greatly of FLCL’s The Pillows which would swoon the hearts of Adult Swim executives not too long after Robot Jones was cancelled. The Macintalk voices which Cartoon Network despised would eventually be used in Wall-E to great effect. Perhaps if Robot Jones were made years later, the series would have found greater appreciation. A period piece cartoon that paradoxically aired too early. And thanks to this mistiming, you have viewers genuinely asking to themselves “Whatever happened to Robot Jones?”

100 Sleeping Princes and The Kingdom of Dreams: The Animation

I can only imagine this show came about because some fujoshi at a video game company thought “What if…Kirby but they were all bishies.” Now 20 years ago this would have gotten you an instant pinkslip, but such is Japan’s incresasing degree of depravity that it actually got made. And somewhere along the way that half-assed premise was deemed worthy of a tv adaptation so here we are with this instantly forgettable crap.

There’s barely a story here. Our nameless Otome Game girl heroine used to be an office lady but now she’s been summoned to some isekai dump under attack from leftover Precure monsters. To save the world, she must awaken a bunch of pretty boy princes who have been turned into rings and scattered across the countryside. Assisting her in this task is her butler, a leftover Precure reject fairy rabbit. So yeah, on top of being every Non-rapey Otome game anime ever, this is also Precure now. Splendid. >_>

You know its funny, the last few times I’ve done Otome shows for the clusterfuck, I have at least found something that made me wanna throw up about. 100 Sleeping Princes? Forget it! This show is about as interesting as watching paint dry. And that might be the greatest irony. How a show about dream-land can actually cure insomnia. In which case, job well done moronzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. – Lord Dalek

Back Street Girls: Gokudolls

I’m not sure why you would greenlight an anime but funnel absolutely no money into the project. Through twenty minutes of what I could only assume were colorized panels of the manga with no hint of animation whatsoever, Back Street Girls is a show that offers no thrills or gaffs. Only confusion and yearning for death. Perhaps it’s appropriate, to subject ourselves to the same trials that the main leads, former yakuza given severe training and surgery to become idols, are put through. And it would be admirable if that was the intention, but this is clearly marketed to fans who like Cromartie High or Sakamoto. This is meant to be this season’s wacky comedy that puts stone-faced men in absurd situations. And it fails in that regard. This show is a joke that could have been sort of funny for ten seconds, stretched out to an entire series. It’s the Heil Honey, I’m Home of anime, a novelty that wears out its welcome before the opening credits are even over. And that shouldn’t be the case. Idols turning out to be hardened yakuza members? You can make something interesting out of that. Some clever critique over how the idol industry is no better than organized crime. But this show doesn’t do this. It churns out the cheapest animation this season, and turns any emotion that could possibly be gained into an aching bore. Even if you were offended by the show’s premise, don’t bother. The show can’t even do offensive jokes. I wish I was triggered watching this. Some kind of emotion. Anything. But I couldn’t bother, because this show couldn’t either. – BloodyMarquis

Banana Fish

Ash Lynx, a former gay porn star and sex slave groomed by a pedophile kingpin becomes a leading force of a criminal empire, in order to find out why his older brother who served in the military committed friendly fire and shot several of his soldiers in a fit of insanity. Meanwhile, a journalist assistant who has apparently never watched a single mobster movie in his entire life and has the genre blindness of a slasher movie victim gets tangled up in this case, becoming a hostage in a situation he couldn’t predict would spiral out of control. All based off of two words. Two words the older brother said after killing his fellow brothers in arms. Banana fish. Oh, and this is adapted from a shoujo manga.

Once again, Studio MAPPA pulls out a wildcard to make and distinguish themselves from the oceans of phone game and isekai anime. It’s all over the place yet keeps a consistent tone, the sort of thing that Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens show should have been. Even the dialogue is wild at times. I would love to say the episode is great and everybody should watch it, but I don’t know. For all of its setup and action, all I could think of after the episode was over was “Well, that happened.” I’ll admit it’s the highest quality anime to premiere so far this season in terms of animation and storytelling, something sorely needed after how stupid shows like Island or Back Street Girls can be. But there’s something off. Maybe it’s because the show’s adapting an 80s crime manga while trying to modernize things by adding iPhones and having a character make a CSI reference. It’s a sort of uncanny valley but applied to changing the time period of a story. Like when you watch Homer Simpson playing with a laptop. It’s a particularly anal nitpick, and the rest of the episode was fine. But then I remember 91 Days, a show very similar to this one, started off great but quickly screwed itself into mediocrity. So it’s easy to be wary. – BloodyMarquis

Calamity of a Zombie Girl

What IS a zombie? Are vampires zombies? Are homunculi zombies? Are little sisters zombies? Is Frankenstein’s Monster a zombie? Well, the answer to that last one is probably a “yes” when you think about it, but no. Being a zombie is, in fact, the act of spending eighty minutes arguing with a friend about what the hell qualifies as a “zombie” while accidentally watching an eighty-minute movie with him, as you were both under the pretense that it was going to be a weekly show. And I’m kinda sad that it wasn’t, because after a bland first twenty minutes filled with banal dialogue and enough “fade to black” scene transitions to last a lifetime, Calamity of a Zombie Girl, ended up being some ridiculous, gory fun. Even if it allegedly doesn’t know what a zombie is, according to Marquis.

Calamity of a Zombie Girl is your standard “don’t mess with the dead” story: a bunch of a idiots loot a corpse of its mysterious, eternal life-granting stone, so said corpse and her maid wake up and start shit in order to get it back, with all the idiots dying one-by-one because they lack both common sense and the need for self-preservation. Granted, the one guy who immediately realizes that they’re being targeted by super-powered zombies and says that they should just give the stupid stone back gets his head accidentally caved in by a toilet for his troubles, so they were all probably screwed regardless. My favourite death has to go to the “I know kung-fu” girl who tries to avenge the decapitated friend she was tsundere for, only to get throw around Bam-Bam Rubble style, with the titular zombie girl hitting her against every tree in the immediate vicinity before tossing the corpse (breasts now flapping in the wind) over a cliff. Good stuff. Dumb stuff. And the deaths and fights only get more silly as the movie goes on, leading to a climax that would make Michael Jordan proud. There’s nothing groundbreaking about Zombie Girl, but if you treat it like the B-grade horror movie schlock that it is, then it’s not a bad pick for movie night. – RacattackForce

Happy Sugar Life

Happy Sugar Life is the heartwarming tale of Little Shio-chan and her adopted mother-type figure Sato-san. Sato-san loves Shio-chan so much that she’s having to work difficult hours at a mid-range maid cafe where she rejects the advances of her co-workers because she just loves little Shio-chan sooooo much. Happily it all works out in the end as Sato-san makes her manager see the error of her ways and thus can be togethre with Shio-chan more. Clearly this will be a simple slice of life about to get around those simple life problems and thus I can stop writing this review right now…

…Yeah no. Turns out that Sato-san is actually a mentally unhinged serial killer and Shio can’t leave the house because her real parents (or somebody to that effect) are desperately trying to find her. Because…anime.

So yeah, this is School Days again, except Kotonoha ended up in a creepy, borderline pedophilic relationship instead of Makoto’s head. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and this show is definitely better than last season’s exercise in domestic abuse revenge porn, Magical Girl Site. That said, everything about this is immediately colored by how utterly cringe worthy Sato’s personality is and why said personality being a mask for her true homicidal tendencies makes her even less sympathetic (which is probably intentional). Why should I be emotionally invested when I hate your guts and am rooting for the federales? Then again, shoulda seen this coming as the first scene depicts Shio pushing herself and Sato off the roof of a burning building, presumably ending the series with their deaths. Great, now I have even less of a reason to watch. – Lord Dalek

How Not to Summon a Demon Lord

Sixteen Steps on How Not to Summon a Demon Lord:
1. Don’t forget to baptize your firstborn.
2. Don’t scare away or anger any nearby mystics.
3. Don’t spill blood on sacred territory.
4. Don’t read the works of Aleister Crowley while high on black tar heroin.
5. Don’t go on a trip to Gehenna.
6. Don’t perform any rituals, especially rituals that involve animal sacrifice.
7. Don’t speaks the ancient dead languages long purged from the face of the Earth.
8. Don’t commit impure things on a picture of Jesus Christ.
9. Don’t participate in blood orgies anywhere, especially in your basement.
10. Don’t say “Beetlejuice” three times.
11. Don’t wear a behelit around your neck.
12. Don’t inadvertently piss off somebody wearing a behelit around their neck.
13. Don’t do butt stuff with a jackal while bathed in the light of a blood red moon.
14. Don’t star in any Poltergeist movies.
15. Don’t carve a pentagram on your forehead and then practice meditation while using binaural beats.
16. Don’t watch this anime.
– BloodyMarquis

ISLAND

…..sigh.

Why do I keep doing these write-ups? Its clear they’re not benefiting me or anyone else. It was so much easier five years ago when I was just taking the piss at these lousy shows…but now?…its just a struggle with futility. I have officially lost all hope in humanity. Why is Pop Team Epic popular? Why goddammit? Why?!? ANSWER ME!!! AAAAAAAAAAANSSSWWEEERR MEEEEEE!!!!!

…anyway here’s ISLAND, a show based off a Front Wing VN which begins with implied child ra–oh god this is just Grisaia again isn’t it? Yup its another story of some weird guy falling in with a bunch of broken girls and having to fix all of their problems. In this case, its Joe Amnesiac Player CharacterTM (we’ll call him Setsuna because why the hell not), a young man who thinks he’s a time traveler for some reason. Setsuna’s been sent to this island to save some girl and the world as well as to kill some other girl. Which one is it? The dumb blond tsundere with faternal issues who gave him an accidental BJ? The dorky wallflower miko with extreme bedhead who’s obsessed with quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity? Or the creepy girl who dresses like a ship captain and is apparently also a time traveler or maybe a vampire?

Yeah… its clearly the last one. Or is it? You see JAPC(tm) is actually here to kill… Setsuna…which means he’s not Setsuna which means…I honestly don’t care. Yes, this is a mystery show but the mystery is hampered by the fact that A: I hate all the characters, and B: knowing Front Wing they’re just going to fuck it up anyway.

But hey! At least it hasn’t had a scene of rabies induced cannibalism! That’s a plus ri—NO. – Lord Dalek

The Master of Ragnarok and Blesser of Einherjar

You know everytime I have to write up one of these shitty isekai shows I hope I might get surprised and end up with a Grimgar or Re:Zero (you know… a GOOD show) instead of having to type “This is Sword Art…again”.

Alas…

This is Sword Art…agai—no actually its worse.

This literally everything I hate about Isekai distilled to its most putrid form. A black, soulless expanse from which no light emerges. I think it was trying to be a parody? But no….no there is noting good about Ragnarok. It is already a strong competitor for worst anime of the year and this is a year that already gave us Death March and Darling in the Franxx. But none of those shows had a plot point where the main protagonist threatened to rain death and distruction on his captured princess’ kingdom unless (and I’m being perfectly seriously here) she became his imouto. You see friends this is the harem show from the hell. The one where literally everybody wants to fuck the guy in a bizarre orgy of pseudo-incest. Every time I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.

And then… upon typing those words that you have just read I realized what I was doing wrong. 7 years it had taken me to learn what kind of caressing gaze was hidden beneath the dark rimmed glasses. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two espresso-scented tears trickled down the sides of my nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. I had won the victory over myself. I loved Reki Kawahara. – Lord Dalek (appologies to George Orwell)

 

Miss Caretaker of Sunohara-sou

So here’s another show that was probably pitched as a hentai, but somehow became an anime on TV instead, meaning anyone who looks at the poster and goes “Mmm! Straight shota!” will be inevitably disappointed by how softcore this is. Sure, there are inhumanly sized boobs and a modestly sized harem, but even by the first episode, it knows the audience has a short attention span. So it throws the main girl in a school uniform while making the boy touch her breast. It’s not interesting cheesecake. It’s Baywatch cheesecake. Something that would have been alluring decades ago but now looks dull and conservative in an age of internet porn and H-doujins.

I guess if you wanted to pretend you were a twelve-year-old boy getting seduced by women twice your age, this show would appeal to you like honey to bees. And I suppose the show might know that. It knows it’s just gateway ecchi for people who want to try slightly safer material before getting into actual hentai. Maybe I should be happy this show doesn’t have slavery like Death March or the dumb metaphors Franxx made. But at least those shows weren’t boring, while Sunohara-sou is just there. It’s background noise, and no fanservice show should ever aim to be background noise. – BloodyMarquis

Planet With

Planet With is a show that is completely and utterly incomprehensible. Completely and utterly. Scenes seem to be glued together from parts of random other anime. Characters are either barely developed or in the case of the class rep, severely overdeveloped. The plot twist doesn’t seem to be much of a twist as it is the plot showing up at the very last minute. And then it doesn’t end as much as the episode just kills itself right before your eyes. Kind of an interesting trainwreck innit.

But…

It DOES have a cat that turns into a giant Kamen Rider mech, and a storyline involving killing a bunch of phoney-balloney Sentai types for… revenge…I guess? I mean that’s clearly worth the price of admission right?

…yeah what was this show supposed to be about again? — Lord Dalek

The Thousand Musketeers

Oh, they’re guns this time. And they’re French now.

The Thousand Musketeers or Senjuushi is the latest in the “historical things from some time period turn into pretty boys/girls” saga that Axis Powers Hetalia cursed upon the world all those years ago. We had samurai swords. We had World War II-era boats. Now let’s go with Napoleonic era guns, because that’s what the kids in Japan are into. An untapped market that only this show has discovered. Let your girlhood tremble as this one gun owned by Napoleon turns into a hot guy, or your boyhood if Upotte disappointed you. We won’t judge, as long as you spend all your money on doujins and dakimakuras of our characters. No, not characters. Your idols. Your graven idols. You think you’ve grown up and can avoid all those franchises meant purely to sell merchandise, but you’re wrong. Now buy all the keychains and figmas you can find, and become the kind of person the PreCure executives wish they could milk to death. Buy all the Drama CDs that Soma Saito phoned in. Consume each weekly episode as society all around you collapses into the kind of hellhole that created Napoleon in the first place. And be sure to buy our phone game. I hope you spend hundreds of hours spending money while playing it. Let the aura surrounding you become nothing but grime as your stubby fingers push on your phone, playing all day and all night while your mother begs you to go outside. While your friends ask where you’ve gone. While your carers can do nothing but stare. Without The Thousand Musketeers, you are nothing. With The Thousand Musketeers, your flesh is granted validity. It’s blisssssssssss.

Also, I get it. They’re musketeers. But they’re also muskets. That’s adorable. – BloodyMarquis

Butch Hartman has made his mark as one of Nickelodeon’s most prolific creators, having produced over 300 episodes and several made for TV movies for that network. From Fairly Odd Parents to Bunsen is a Beast, he spent two decades crafting Nickelodeon’s animated content. If it weren’t for Spongebob, he potentially could have had a monopoly on the channel unseen since the Klasky-Csupo days. But as it stands, Butch mentions in interviews that he was never given the full freedom to do what he wanted with his cartoons, getting forced to add characters or having pitches rejected. And in the end, alongside two other long-time Nick producers like Cyma Zarghami and Dan Schneider, Butch left the network for new ventures, signaling the end of an era for not just the network, but for children’s entertainment in general.

And that would be a shame if Butch was actually as good as his reputation suggests. For all his years of work, I struggle to think of a magnum opus of his like Helga on the Couch is for Hey Arnold or Bad Bad Rubber Piggy is for Invader Zim. I’ve heard people suggest FOP’s Channel Chasers or Danny Phantom’s Ultimate Enemy, but neither grab me the same way other best episodes of Nicktoons do. The best of Hartman’s output has never risen above “acceptable” or “okay”, and even that level of mediocrity faded with each year into production. The once whimsical Fairly Odd Parents became a tired shell of yelling and forced running gags, and branched out into crossovers and live-action movies even when the show’s still running. It’s like those later Flintstones or Scooby-Doo movies where Fred meets the WWE or Shaggy meets KISS, except without any of the camp or novelty value that make a cheap nostalgic cashgrab ironically entertaining.

Then of course, there’s Butch’s other famous show. Danny Phantom was never that funny, and the action was never that great. The drama and comedy never fused into anything or complimented each other, instead contradicting the other side where attempts at genuine emotion were undercut by typical wacky jokes and shots at humor were muddied by inconsistent characters and redundant fight scenes. It floundered and never knew what it wanted to be, and whenever the show was ever actually close to figuring itself out, Butch would steer it back to his simplistic Spider-Man homage with no ambition other than churning out cheaper versions of what kids could get from watching other superhero cartoons. Yeah, that JelloApocalypse video praised the show for having plot progression and changing the status quo, but did he forget all the times Danny conveniently wiped people’s memories so they wouldn’t know he’s half-ghost? In fact, I’d say anything Danny Phantom did is already done better in recent dramedy cartoons like Steven Universe and Star VS, and even those carry the previous show’s flaws like characters meant to be the voice of reason but come off as hypocritical nags or the inability to ever follow through on interesting plots in favor of catering to a silly gag.

The problem with Butch’s shows is they never went above and beyond. They always sat in their place as children’s entertainment and never tried to do anything the riskier Nick shows did. I suppose that inability to challenge the executives or break free from formulas was what let Butch create so much content for the network. He was the safe, reliable creator who never oversteps his boundaries. But submissiveness in a job where you’re meant to be creative doesn’t work if you want to actually be creative. It’s why TUFF Puppy and Bunsen is a Beast feel so samey and generic. And even though I consider shows like The Loud House to be samey and generic, that show is finding success where Butch’s recent efforts aren’t. There’s a creative stagnancy to his work, where his cutesy throwbacks to cartoons of yore have now become his crutches. Butch is playing with sticks and arrows when other storytellers in the animation field have already leaped to lasers and thermal lances. He’s in the same situation that Seth MacFarlane and the Simpsons writers are in, that he’s let his prior success stall his ability to innovate or move forward, resulting in work that would have been seen as stale 10, 20, or even 30 years ago.

And instead of noticing this, or doing anything to show that he can be his own creator outside of Nick’s claws, Butch is making his own all-ages streaming platform. One where his pitch is heavily focused on bringing the family together again and blocking kids from all of those naughty sex and violence scenes. It doesn’t seem like Butch has learned from his prior mistakes, but rather the popularity he’s gotten from his “look at this character when they’re 10 years older!” YouTube videos have led him to believe he can form his own media empire. Leaving Nickelodeon to make his own Nickelodeon, forgetting how that Noog Network thing never went anywhere. Let’s go make garden shows, fitness shows, sports, and user-submitted videos, because it’s not like people can’t already do these through YouTube. But remember, keep it clean! Because after seeing the Danny Phantom fans get mad that season 3 wasn’t as dark as season 2, the TUFF Puppy fans draw rule 34 of Kitty Katswell, and the Fairly Odd Parents fans coming up with creepypasta, Butch came to the conclusion that his fans want a network that makes PBS children’s shows look edgy.

But that’s not to say Butch Hartman is completely out of his element these days. I fully respect and appreciate how outspoken he’s been in his YouTube videos and his Speech Bubble podcast. It’s cool that he’s been connecting with his fans and opening up about his history in the animation business. And anyone who can make all these cartoons and still want to make a network to go along with it? That takes heart. But I wish he would recognize that storytelling and comedy in cartoons are in a far different place than they were in the start of his career. You can’t keep telling the same old jokes for decades. Even when you’re a creator of masterpiece after masterpiece, you need to re-invent and freshen up your writing on a consistent basis to keep being a master of the craft. But who knows? Maybe he’ll actually do this with Elf Detective.

So a new re-imagining of Thundercats has been announced, and the fire from it all has been intense. On the same time that a school shooting took place and a royal wedding was being prepared, the loudest thing I saw on social media was “Did you see the new Thundercats trailer? Look what they did to Thundercats! What the fuck did they do to Thundercats?! Damn you, CalArts! Aaaaaaaagh!” This cartoon that I haven’t thought about in years is now the center of this cultural zeitgeist where everyone took arms not even a few hours after the announcement. Friends, brothers, lovers were torn apart by whether they were for the new Thundercats or against. Tensions brewed. Creators all over the internet struck blows. And then there was the third faction that went “Dude, it’s just Thundercats. Come on.”

The old Thundercats was never a particularly good show. Even when I was a little kid watching reruns of it on Toonami, I knew how repetitive and boring it could get. It always teetered on the line between He-Man level camp and generic cartoon, and occasionally it would fall to the left and be entertaining, but for the most part, it was disposable. Aside from the furries, it did nothing to differentiate itself from the rest of its contemporaries like Jem or Star Wars Droids. And yet, its fans yearned for something more. All these 80s and 90s cartoons were getting reboots or re-imaginings, so why not Thundercats? And then we got it in 2011, opening off with a great premiere that dragged the series into a post-Avatar world. But then that premiere turned out to be beginner’s luck, and the rest of the show became a slow churn that didn’t impress either kids or the CN executives, leading to its cancellation. So the franchise slept again, only acknowledged by old school fans or an Egoraptor. Then fast forward to seven years later, and now a Thundercats show is something people can’t shut up about.

It’s ridiculous, and now I’m unwittingly part of this by writing an article about it. But yeah, as I type this, there are thousands of tweets, posts, blogs, you name it about how the new Thundercats is a sign of the times, a pandemic that has plagued cartoons for so long, a degenerate trend, and something that vaguely involves the product soy. And I’m sitting here thinking, “Why is Thundercats the tipping point for you guys?” I might understand if it was Gargoyles getting rebooted into a wacky OK KO clone, but Thundercats was always a dumb show to begin with. How are they going to make Snarf more annoying? How would they make some of the episode plots even stupider than what happened in the first show? One of the 1985 episodes involved Snarf’s nephew buying Mexican takeout and getting accosted by this Robocop knockoff. Maybe if you were hoping for another season of the 2011 show, it would suck to see this. But whatever the case, it’s overblown. Once you see detractors getting mad at the showrunner’s hair over the actual show, you know it’s overblown.

But that’s not to say we should defend this show. Because even if I don’t care about Thundercats at all, I don’t like the style here personally. It looks too derivative to other Cartoon Network shows, and to say “but what about how all the 80s cartoons looked the same” is a weak argument because I didn’t like the style there either. We shouldn’t use tired aesthetics to defends other tired aesthetics. And the “It’s for kids, and they’re gonna like it!” argument doesn’t work either, since Cartoon Network’s ratings have been dropping so hard that even cable companies like Xfinity are moving it up to premium. It’s a bold assumption to make that kids will instantly like it. And besides, if this was really aimed squarely at kids, why adapt a property from over thirty years ago? Don’t you think children deserve more than hand-me-downs? I’m sure the creators have a lot of passion for this, but almost every cartoon has a lot of passion put into it. Passion is a basic ingredient at this point. Zack Snyder said he puts tons of passion in his DC movies, and look what happened there. Thundercats was always a dumb show, and the reboot looks like it will be another dumb show. So all the tension and furor is confusing. And once it all simmers down, I expect people to go up in arms again once the new She-Ra comes out, and people born one or two decades after the old show’s syndication run ended talk about how their childhoods are ruined.

After two and a half years, Digimon Adventure Tri, the third installment in the Digimon Adventure subseries, has finally ended. And instead of praise or satisfaction, I can only feel malaise. A delirious, yet somehow sobering malaise. What was meant to be a milestone series celebrating 15 years of the Digimon anime finished on a halfhearted slog. One that did not highlight the fine points of the franchise or add new moments of gold, but only a reminder of banality and fatigue. It would be easy to blame Toei, yet even their most merchandised and aging series like Pretty Cure and Dragon Ball show more energy and creativity than what was put forth here. Even the weakest points of the Universal Survival Saga, where Goku was drawn in scribbles whilst fighting off-model Pride Troopers, carried more ambition than these biannual films. While expectations were high, it would have been easy to deliver a reunion trip or a bridge between 02 and the epilogue or even erase the epilogue altogether, but rather than all that, Tri produced an unending web of tired plot threads that only tangled further into knots with each movie, producing a rat king of arcs that not even divine will could cut through.

It’s easy to see as hyperbole, but the concept of a Digimon Adventure 03 was a huge deal during the heights of the Digimon fandom. While Tamers eventually became accepted and lauded as a classic season in its own right, fans were still itching for another season set in the first show’s continuity. Mountains upon mountains of fanfiction was written in the years after 02 ended, wondering what became of the Digidestined, giving them new threats to vanquish, and taking a weed-whacker to that pesky epilogue. And why not? 02 was a bad season, but one full of ideas and concepts that left viewers interested in what would happen if they were implemented in a good show. It was diesel fuel for the fanfiction writer’s mind, a fierce desire to figure out what happened after killing MaloMyotismon and how the universe would carry on. But eventually, the bubble burst for Digimon as a whole. The money and drive to make new shows every year just wasn’t there any more, and the franchise would go through multiple hiatuses. There were attempts to start the fire again, but the bandwagon just didn’t go. Even shows that succeeded in getting a sequel like Xros Wars fell on their faces. The latest season on TV, Digimon Universe Applimonsters, came and went without fanfare or even merchandising success, leading to what used to be one of the most heavily-imported anime to become a quiet entity collecting dust, while other series of its kind, including a certain show that Digimon has been hastily compared to, soldier on year after year without rest.

And after a while, even the most ardent fanatics grew to accept that. The third season that absolutely, totally was going to happen according to someone whose dad worked at Bandai and got Tamagotchis in exchange for sexual services became nothing more than an old story. So many years passed that it made no sense marketing wise. The kids who watched Wargreymon and Metalgurumon fight Myotismon on Fox Kids became teenagers, and then twentysomethings. With exceptions like the Cyber Sleuth fans, most of them aren’t going to buy Digimon toys or games. The only grade-school kids who knew what the hell a Digimon was were scarce. It would make more sense financially to make a new intellectual property and milk episodes and toys out of that. By all accounts, the ship sailed and went to the other side of the world. But against all odds, Tri was announced. Fans broke out of their caves, screaming that it was a sign of the times. A season they waited for even longer than the third season of Full Metal Panic was coming out. And all they had to do was wait. And wait. And wait. And—oh, surprise. The season’s actually a set of movies. And wait some more. Then you find out the director helmed a little series known as School Days, and none of the original staff are there. And you wait. And you get sick of waiting so you watch Blood Blockade Battlefront. But then that show’s last episode gets delayed so you wait. And you wait. And finally, you get the first movie of Tri, where you get to see what the Digidestined are up to, and you get a wonderful set of episodes where Tai spends most of his time shell-shocked over the sight of a broken cellphone.

That’s not to say the first movie didn’t have any hype to it. We were given an immediate mystery about what happened to the cast from 02, a mysterious new girl with her own Digimon, and a fight between Alphamon and Omnimon. While there were pitfalls and some odd character regressions such as Sora’s, it delivered a hook. Something to remind people why they watched Digimon, and a light to where it could go next. And if only that light kept shining. With each further part, the destination was littered with silly hot springs and school festival episodes, a Kansas City Shuffle of villains whose importance and motives fluctuated at the drop of a hat, detours into amnesia plots, animation that was poor even when compared to other Toei shows, and an almost contradictory stance as to whether to ignore Adventure’s past or grab onto it. Villains like Himekawa were prepped up as manipulative and in charge only to fall down and become crazed wrecks with unresolved fates. Characters such as Sora were so mistreated that in one movie, characters stop to mention how motherly Sora and how in touch she is with her feminine side, in such a way that the gender politics felt like something out of a 1950s public service announcement. And characters who didn’t regress became stagnant. We have Joe too busy with his exams to help out the team again. We have Kari possessed by the overseeing entities of the Digital World to give out exposition again. The direction kept zigzagging, and with each misstep, Tri went from a welcome addition to the Digimon Adventure series, to a nostalgic reminder of times past, to a mediocre show you have to be reminded came out last Friday, and then to a broken down horse who doesn’t even know where the finish line was.

And that’s bullshit, because like 02, Tri peddled some ideas that could have made for a cool show, like the first Digidestined before Tai and the gang growing up and becoming corrupt, the kids learning how to take the lead now that they have become adults, and how they can pick up the slack now that Davis, Yolei, Cody, and Ken were missing in action. But very little of that was ever utilized, and only brought forward without any elaboration or detail. Instead, the majority of the run time consisted of Meiko acting miserable while everybody else coddled her. It didn’t have what hooked me onto Digimon, and what kept me hooked for years. The first season knew what it wanted to do. Explore exotic realms of the Digital World. Develop character arcs where kids who could barely handle summer camp became champions who could overcome threats to both the Digital and the real world. Show this ugly yellow lizard evolve physically and mentally into a warrior in knight’s armor. Even 02 had good offerings like the Daemon Corps and the Dagomon episode, detailing how the Digital World is far more eldritch than previously thought and questioning if a Digimon’s life matters as much as a human life. And Tri doesn’t do that. Its few high points are merely okay, and there’s no real innovation. And as for shows like Tamers, that’s a whole other beast. Even anime aimed at the most high-brow fail to do what Tamers achieved. The show is such an exception to the norm that its even more of an anomaly in its medium than the Lovecraftian villains within its later story arcs.

But Tri doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t take risks or even have fun. Each movie was often an hour of the main cast talking among themselves, delivering exposition at the speed of one new factoid per thousand words of dialogue. The cast doesn’t explore or go out of their way to fight. Like the mystery with the 02 kids, Tai and everybody else for the most part don’t even acknowledge their disappearance. Occasionally, TK and Kari will knock Ken’s door hoping to find an answer, but that was largely it. The gang went on trips to public bathhouses and had fun dressing up as cheerleaders before they even so much as acknowledged that four of their friends have vanished from the face of the earth. And when the series eventually reveals what happened to them, it felt more like an after note than a grand revelation years in the making. Instead of feeling like a resolution was delivered, it left me thinking the original eight kids were uncaring psychopaths. If your friend, not just a casual one but somebody you have fought wars and saved the day with, suddenly disappeared and there was no way to contact them or their family, you wouldn’t just ignore that and get on with your day. You would think something horrible happened, and that you needed to call the cops or organize a rescue team. But that didn’t happen in Tri. What would be a crisis to someone else is treated like a misplaced sock. The opening mystery of the series and what should have been the driving plot is given little to no stakes whatsoever. That’s a recurring problem with Tri. Nothing feels as important as it should be. The Digimon that the Digidestined have bonded with for years at this point getting amnesia gets resolved within four episodes and only becomes relevant again at the finale. The world on the brink of annihilation because of the reincarnation of Apocalymon feels so hollow and lifeless that the first movie’s fight against a bunch of simple Kuwagamon seems more dramatic. Even a Roland Emmerich movie could convey more emotional stakes from cities getting destroyed than what happened in the finale. Because the most integral key isn’t any of the main players, or even most of their Digimon. It’s fucking Meiko.

Meiko Mochizuki is the centerpiece of Tri. Mimi loves her. Tai’s attracted to her. Yggdrasil’s agent is fascinated with her. She becomes the best friend and main cause for concern to almost everybody in this season. She has a Digimon coincidentally named Meicoomon, and they often call each other Mei just to further confuse us. Whenever she gets sad, the cast get together to make her feel better, giving her all the care they don’t appear to give to their missing friends. She even looks a little like Yolei to boot, and her Digimon also fuses with Gatomon like Yolei’s did. Plus, Meicoomon digivolves into curvier and more endowed Digivolutions so this character can appeal to the furries too. And if you think since she’s an original character that must mean she gets an arc, well sorry! She ends the main arc no different than she was before, except without a Digimon because that’s in case Toei greenlights Digimon Adventure Quad. And just like in Tri, she’ll be timid, get sad, and apologize a lot. And in Digimon Adventure Quints, she’ll be timid, get sad, and apologize a lot. And in Digimon Adventure Hex, she’ll be timid, get sad, and apologize a lot. And in Dig—what I’m saying is Meiko’s a lame character. She’s underwritten and feels more like parts of previous characters taped together, and that would be fine and dandy if she weren’t the main character of Tri. So while she gets more screentime than characters like Izzy or Mimi, there are no layers to peel. It’s like if in Breaking Bad, instead of giving hours of time to Walter White and how he changes from caring father to cold drug kingpin, you give an inordinate amount of focus to Skinny Pete, Jesse’s addict friend. And instead of developing his character or uncovering his personality traits, you just let the camera sit on Skinny Pete. That’s what Meiko is. She’s what happens when a series puts too much focus on a one-note background character.

Tri is the equivalent of a nature documentary that spends an hour on unremarkable grass and one minute occasionally glancing at the wildlife. For a series that took more than a month per episode to air, and was years in development during its episode premieres, there are other anime with no source material to work from that can get a tighter story out on a weekly basis. Instead, we got almost delirious situations. Like Huckmon, one of the background players appearing throughout the show, mentioning that he and the powers that be have to reboot the real world in order to save it. Without any explanation as to how you can reboot the physical real world or what that actually means. It’s like in King’s Game where a biological virus became a technological one, and nobody batted an eye to how that made no sense. And then there’s the evil Gennai who pops up occasionally, and he dresses up as the Digimon Emperor even after everybody figures out he’s not Ken. He doesn’t offer anything in terms of fear factor or screen presence, he’s just there to chew the stage and quote Nietzsche while giving more questions than answers as to what his deal is. And he doesn’t even die. He goes back to his home realm while teasing the audience about Daemon and Diaboromon, because even if Digimon’s not a big franchise anymore, Toei knows they can milk it with even more and more movies where the Digidestined fight recycled versions of old villains. Like in the fourth movie where they fought the Dark Masters again. Or in the finale where Angemon fights Devimon again. But none of them talk because it’s too much effort to write dialogue for them. And if you’re sick of Adventure by this point, here’s some copied shots from Tamers where the main villains shoots purple goo that melts buildings, all while the Shinjuku Park Tower is in focus. You loved Tamers and were okay with Savers, so here’s a watered down Yggdrasil ordering a Digimon to do D-Reaper shit. But if you want an actual Tamers 2 like Konaka does, tough fucking luck. You’re getting Digimon Adventure Cuatro, Cinco, Seis, and so much more in the upcoming years. More Matt playing his harmonica. More Izzy on his computer. More Kari getting weird incestuous subtext between her and Tai. More Leomon deaths. More villains who make Jiren look like Michael Corleone. You thought other companies milking their franchises until they’re shells of their former selves was bad? You haven’t seen nothing yet.

As Trigger budded off from Gainax, the comparisons were inevitable from the very beginning. A two-cour mecha anime featuring heavy sexual imagery. A timid, teenage boy thrown into a cockpit and forced to fight giant monsters, while finding himself in a love triangle between a hot-blooded foreign girl in a red suit and a blue-haired girl whose feelings for said boy feel more familial than romantic. Even from the first episode, astute audiences took pictures, matched them up with screencaps from Evangelion, and went “See! See! Trigger are full of hacks!” While complaining about shows ripping off Eva has been an old game since the early 00s, all the parallels have left fans and critics curious. Is it because Darling in the Franxx might be a badly-written show, or because Evangelion is still that influential decades after its original airing? Or a combination of both?

As I specified earlier, accusing other anime of plagiarizing from Evangelion has been common since the original show’s ending. You could use the timid teenager in a love triangle example and apply it to many other shows like Gurren Lagann, or look at any show with a giant robot that makes even a scant mention of puberty and say that series is made by thieves. It’s depressingly easy to look at dozens of shows or movies from far away, and say they’re all the same based off of basic attributes. Some critics don’t like to dissect what makes works of media different, and only group everything together because that’s simply less effort than analyzing what makes X different from Y. Sure, there’s always the genuine knockoff like Space Thunder Kids, it’s funny to poke fun at shows for their similar plots and imagery, and many anime are indeed derivative from each other, but it undermines what the writers and directors want to do in Darling in the Franxx to say they’re just tracing Anno’s footprints. After all, Studio Khara has done animation work on several episodes, so it’s not as if Anno isn’t aware of this show’s existence.

But that’s not to say this series is safe from such criticism. For all its interesting ideas regarding youth culture and society’s view on sexuality, the show misses so goddamn much. So much of the imagery is too silly to take seriously. All of the forced innuendo turns what are meant to be dramatic scenes into laugh riots. Characters who have been in the show for over a dozen episodes have so little personality that I can only describe one as “the fat kid who eats bread a lot”. All this in mind, I’m wary as to whether Trigger knows what they’re doing with this series. And with an uneven path like this, maybe one could say it doesn’t know its own road but rather following someone else’s.

While Franxx has been going through a steady pace and started going through a series of eye-opening plot reveals during episode 13, was Evangelion not going through a similar phase at that part of its run? From Asuka’s introduction but right before the episode where Shinji is absorbed by Leliel and taken on an introspective journey, eight to fifteen, Eva had a more lighthearted tone than its latter batch of episodes would eventually deliver. There were still important episodes in this period that would serve as puzzle pieces for the end, but they were still more straightforward than what would come after. And perhaps that’s the similar case with Franxx. Franxx’s episodes from seven to eleven have been derided by viewers as episodes where nothing happened, where any intrigue was replaced by beach episodes and the boys peeking at the girls when they’re bathing. Not quite ‘thermal expansion’, but close. The plot structures as of this writing go like this: Hiro/Shinji become robot pilots who despite a success or two, feel inadequate at the job. Then they win a monster fight with the power of teamwork, leading to a run of episodes more lackadaisical than what came before. But after that period is over, plot twists start being chucked while Hiro/Shinji has a mental breakdown in the middle of a fight, and discovers that one of their co-pilots was actually an important figure in their childhood. And then the dysfunction spreads among the rest of the cast, while a giant monster pops up from nowhere and consumes several people. Though individual episodes are far from a complete match up, and several characters like Zero Two and Asuka don’t sync up beyond their superficial appearances, it does lead to curiosity as to how far these similarities will go. Maybe the last two episodes of Franxx will also be a clip show/introspective dialogue followed by a movie? Maybe Nine Alpha will offer to play piano with Hiro? Maybe Hiro will masturbate to a comatose Ichigo, and find out that Zero Two is actually a clone of his mother? Or they could feel lucky and rip off the ending of Gurren Lagann instead?

Or you could say this entire article is nonsense, since this show is ripping off Eureka Seven instead.