After years of isekai protagonists getting underage slave girls for their harems, I guess turnabout is fair play as we have an adult woman fantasying about having the 15 year old protagonist work as one.

This woman, the protagonist’s case worker at Hello Hello Work Station, this series version of the Adventurer Guilt, is not the only adult woman lusting after him. So does the adventurer who hires him to help her mine the mountain she owns to pay her tax debt. Granted, the white haired cute, un-threatening young boy protagonist is not rare in fantasy anime like this (see last season’s Izure Saikyou no Renkinjutsushi e.g.) but I can’t remember seeing this level of thirstiness bordering on sexual harassment before. A new milestone in anime has clearly been (b)reached.

Otherwise, Kanchigai no Atelier Meister is depressingly familiar in its setup. Our hero, Kurt started out as the jack of all trades for a famous group of heroes, until he got kicked out for being useless at the start of the episode in a much ruder fashion than was necessary. He sets about finding new work but the tests at the job centre show his skills to be abysmal across the board. As he starts doing odd jobs like repairing the city walls it becomes clear he’s actually overpowered but years of abuse have left him with such low self esteem he can’t see it himself even when everybody else does. This first episode’s title even lampshades this: “the common tale of how the guy in charge of chores with low self-esteem turned out to actually possess incredible skills”. The only real twist is that Kurt’s skills do not lie in combat, but in support, especially alchemy related tasks and that his views of what is normal are skewed by his upbringing in an isolated village where everybody could do the things he does.

And even these are not particularly novel ideas; Izure Saikyou no Renkinjutsushi‘s protagonist was also some sort of alchemist with support skills while we had the naive hero who doesn’t understand his own strength because everybody else in his village was stronger all the way back in 2021 with *deep breath* Tatoeba Last Dungeon Mae no Mura no Shounen ga Joban no Machi de Kurasu You na Monogatari. The combination of these two tropes with being kicked out of the hero’s party is somewhat new, at least for anime, but is it enough to keep interest?

Having read some of the manga version of this series, the appeal lies in the tension between Kurt’s blithe ignorance of his own worth and everybody else’s dawning horror of what a monster he is and their increasingly desperate attempts to keep him from realising the truth. It could get a bit grating. So far the actual animation quality has been decent enough with strong character design. I particularly like Yulishia, who reminded me of Togame from Katanagatari. Whether I will keep watching this will depend on the rest of the season, which does look packed so the likelihood is great I’ll drop this a few episodes in.

Anon got rizz with the audience. Taki is not impressed:

Or, the animator’s obvious fetish:

Remember, this only happened in Anon’s fantasy

But what an insight in her personality. From Bang Dream! It’s Mygo!!!!! episode 11, as Anon tries to get the other band members invested in her costuming ideas. That she has to be in the center of attention is no surprise, nor is her need for glamour. She consistently wants to dress the band up when everybody else is happy to just perform in their street clothes or school uniform. What is surprising is how thirsty her fantasy is.

BangDream has never been a very horny franchise; there has been occasional fanservice but much less than in say IdolM@ster. And MyGo!!!!!/Ave Mujica have been even less interested. Only in Anon’s fantasy here has any hint of sexiness been shown. interesting too is that not only does she have Tomori clinging to her, which you may have expected, but Taki on her other side, glowering somewhat but still looking at her. Soyo, next to taki, looks a bit amused by it all but again still looking at her. Raana is the only one not either connected to or looking at Anon. Is this some hint at how Anon sees her bandmates romantically?

Now for all its psychodrama and not so latent lesbianism undercurrents, both series have been remarkably chaste when it comes to romance. Even stalker girl Uika seems only to want to be with Sakiko, not do anything with her regardless of how down bad she seems. Anon’s fantasy here truly is the only hint of anything sexual in either series so far. Honestly, this may be just because every other girl in either band has just too many mental problems to even think about being thirsty, so it’s all up to the relatively ‘normal’ Anon to carry the flag for proper yuri.

Did you know there’s an actual ANON TOKYO website?

Episode eleven of Ave Mujica and Uika finally gets to tell her backstory. In MyGo we had seen her as a confident, smart, friendly person, able to give Tomori some good advice just when she needed it. That image quickly shattered once this series started to delve more into her obsession with Sakiko, didn’t it? And now we finally got to know what started that obsession and it sounds familiar:

From the interview with Iori Miyazawa, the writer of Ura Sekai Picnic had with Rikimaru Mizoguchi, a Hayakawa Books editor, all the way back in 2018 where he went into the details of his philosophy of yuri and how it made him human:

I.M.: You’re seriously on point there. I actually didn’t have any interest in writing about human emotions, originally. There’s a famous saying, “sci-fi is all about the image” (TN: this quote is attributed to Masahiro Noda, a prominent SF writer in Japan). I shared that point of view and, if anything, preferred to only write the setting and the scenes, the sights. But to write yuri you have to focus on the feelings and emotions of the characters, so in the end I had face humans.

R.M.: You first faced humans to write yuri.

I.M.: You could say that “yuri made me human”.

A sentiment Uika seems to echo here. As shimeji spirit corp has it on Bluesky:

there’s a line in hatsune’s monologue that illustrated once again that miyazawa iori was *years* ahead of the curve with “yuri made me human”

This interview was also my first association when I heard that line. As she tells it, Uika is completely miserable until she meets Sakiko for the first time and falls in love with her all through Saki’s subconscious rizz. And like everybody else except Tomori who falls under Saki’s spell, she cannot be normal about it. Understandable though, now that we know where she came from.

At this point in the series MyGo had had its catharsis and was warpping up its story, but Ave ?Mujica still seems to be building up for a climax. Can’t wait for these last two episodes.