Anime

She’s a Mira-cle — Kenja no Deshi wo Nanoru Kenja — Anime 2022 #19

Anime
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If I had a dime for a gender swapping isekai anime that came out in winter 2022 ?I would’ve two dimes. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s strange it happened twice.

Mira is a young white haired girl striking a kung-fu pose

For reference the other series is Fantasy Bishoujo Juniku Ojisan to in which two best friends get isekaied together and one of them turns into a girl, which the other does his best not to fall in love with. In Kenja no Deshi wo Nanoru Kenja on the other hand we get our protagonist reincarnating into the future of the VRMMORPG game in which he played an archetypical overpowered mage character complete with Gandalf style beard, to find himself to be a young teen girl, an alt character he’d created the night before. As per usual for this sort of series, he’s not all that bothered inhabiting a girl’s body, though slightly annoyed at needing to re-establish himself. Because he can no longer pass himself off as Danblf, the character he played, he instead calls himself Mira and passes himself off as his own disciple, which is what the title refers to. Mira then sets out to discover what has happened that made the game world real and why he was reincarnated into it thirty years into its future, meeting up with old friends along the way. The series rapidly devolves into a series of typical RPG adventures with increasingly difficult challenges. It’s clear that something is going on but no real conclusion is reached by the time the series ends.

Danblf the wizard looks like Gandalf and is the ideal self of his creator

When the first episode dropped it was widely derided for its ‘quality’ as there were some rather unfortunate CGI animation sequences and also because it ended on a minutes long montage without dialogue as Danblf woke up as Mira and discovered he was now a girl. Or at least had a girl’s body. I had therefore been loath to try this, but once I watched that first episode I thought it wasn’t that bad? That ending sequence without dialogue was clearly intentional and while it didn’t quite succeeded, I like that it tried to do something different. It was a pretty good way of introducing all the secondary characters. Likewise the frequent CGI battles were not that bad. In the end this was a perfectly acceptable isekai fantasy, a step above something like Leadale. I liked that the main gag about Danblf reincarnating as Mira was that she still spoke in the same grandiouse language as he did, rather than any sexist bullshit about now being a girl and not respected or anything. The times Mira was judged according to how she looked it was because she looked so young rather than because she was a girl. In another season I might’ve skipped this, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching this.

An innocent fetish — Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku — Anime 2022 #18

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Watching Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku means you will see a lot of this sort of shot:

a toe nail is being clipped in the foreground while a girl enters the classroom in the background

Yes, this is an anime that knows what it likes and one thing it likes is feet. It’s not its only fetish, but it is its most obvious. In general Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku is obsessed with the ways in which its middle school characters move and act, an obsession taken straight from the source material, the manga by Hiro, which had whole chapters devoted to seeing a character dance. Anime of course has the advantage over manga of actually being able to show movement, but nevertheless the care and attention which it lavished on showing this movement is amazing. This is an anime that knows the appeal of its source material and knows it has to do justice to it. The character designs are spot on and lose none of their uniqueness in the translation from manga to anime, looking like no other slice of moe series. The sheer joy with which Hiro depicts Akebi moving and dancing has been captured perfectly. This isn’t fan service in the usual sense. The shot above may be fetishistic, but not sleazy. There’s a certain innocence to it, as I argued after viewing the first episode.

Consider the high light of that first episode, Akebi trying on her sailor outfit for the first time. There are elements to it that certainly are fetish coded, like her putting on her socks for example. But the overall scene is innocent and infused with the happiness she feels finally wearing the uniform she had waited so long for. There’s no feelings that this was drawn for somebody to get their rocks off to. It is indicative of the series as a whole, which always respects its characters even when (especially when) it focuses on them moving their bodies around. Much more than in many series, the characters act through their bodies as much as through their dialogue. You don’t need words to know what Akebi’s feeling in this scene. It’s this level of quality and attention to detail that made this my favourite series of Winter 2022, together with My Dress-Up Darling. It’s this that elevates it from a regular slice of moe series, when the story itself is as simple as “girls makes friends through the power of her sailor uniform”.

A girl in sailor uniform in a sea of blazers

That’s after all what Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku revolves around, as you might’ve guessed from the title. Akebi-chan has always been obsessed with sailor uniforms ever since her favourite pop idol wore one. That’s why she wanted to join her mother’s old middle school, not realising that the school had already moved on to blazers as its uniform until the opening ceremony. Fortunately for her and her mother’s efforts having made her uniform by hand, the kindly principal allows it as it is technically still the school’s uniform. It immediately makes her stand out in her class and the school, but it’s her personality and charm that really captivates her class mates. Throughout the series she functions as a catalyst, getting involved with a new friend every episode, getting to learn their stories. Week in week out it was a pleasure to see Akebi, who came from a primary school where she was the only pupil in her class, discover the fun in being in a class with your friends, getting to hang out with somebody else than your teacher or younger sister. I’d love to see a second season, if it can keep up the high quality.

You need to understand both languages — Martin’s increasingly petty translation rules

Anime, Art & Criticism, Lost in Translation
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That sounds obvious right? If you want to translate something, you need to understand what’s being said in the original language, then adapt it for the language you want to translate it in, making sure it still makes sense there and hopefully mean the same. More difficult then you might think. Here’s a good example, not taken from anime this time, but from the Danish version of Taskmaster, as presented by the official Taskmaster Youtube channel.

the Taskmaster asks: do you sometimes move down from the purple to the red field

This sentence makes no sense in English. Clearly there’s some Danish expression or saying being used here that’s been translated literally. From context you can sort of guess that it’s about Julie being angry and needing to calm down, but this whole exchange made no sense in the subtitles. I don’t even know if moving from the purple to the red field means she’s getting angrier or more calm. A clear translation failure where the translator didn’t realise this was some sort of expression and therefore didn’t get the meaning across in English. Had they understood this was an expression and understood what the expression meant, they could’ve either used an English equivalent, or chosen to just get its implied meaning across. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.

That’s why just being able to recognise words and sentences is not good enough. You need to understand the source language well enough to know what’s being said, but also what is meant by what’s being said. You then need to understand the target well enough to be able to get the meaning across in a way that both makes sense in it and is reasonably faithful to the original. If you lack the former, you get this mess. If you lack the latter, you get what you see in a lot of scanlations of manga and especially Korean manhwa or Chinese manhua, where the translator recognises the expression in the original but has no clue as to the equivalent in English, so translates it literally and plops down a translation note. (Occassionally you get somebody who does think of the equivalent in English and just plops that in the translation note.)

What you see with this translation of the Danish Taskmaster in general is something that’s just functional enough to have as Youtube subtitles, but that’s it. A pity because the series itself is hilarious, with a nice group of competitors and a great Taskmaster and assistant. If you like the original, you’ll like this one as well. Having those substandard subtitles however makes it just that little bit harder to enjoy.

Mediocre Isekai Adventures — Leadale no Daichi nite — Anime 2022 #016

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If I had a dime for every isekai anime airing in Winter 2022 that featured a protagonist being send to the future of their VR fantasy game I would’ve two dimes. Which isn’t much, but it’s weird it’s happened twice.

Cayna and her adorable fairy companion

Yes, telling isekai apart by how the protagonist got trapped in fantasyland gets harder every season and we had two “protagonist gets trapped in the future of the game world they were hugely important in” airing in Spring 2022. Worse, there was a third series with a similar setup, in which protag-kun deliberately reincarnated himself to gain better magical power. We’ll get to those series at some point, but for now let’s look at Leadale no Daichi nite. To distinguish it from the other two, this is the one where the severely disabled girl whose only escape from life is the Leadale VRMMORPG, dies in hospital during a power cut and is reincarnated in the far future of the game she played, as Cayna, an overpowered magician. A quick and easy way to cure anybody’s disabilities. If you hoped that this background would matter at all you’ll be disappointed, as it all quickly turns into yet another massively overpowered character travels the world getting dragged into low stake adventures against her will type of story.

Cayna punishing her wayward son with an uppercut for embarrassing her

Not much more to say about this series. The idea of a severely disabled woman learning to use her healthy new body could be interesting, but it’s quickly skipped over and her disability doesn’t feature in the rest of the show at all. the other point of interest is that she ended up in the future of her game, with some of the things she did as a player having shaped this world, but again little is made of this. The only thing that really comes out of it is that she has several children still kicking around hundreds of years later, now all grown up to be powerful, important people and she treats them as naughty teenagers. There are attempts at humour there, but it’s all of a same peace: her children praise her too much, she gets embarrassed and mad and punishes them for it.

The plot is no good and animation and character design wise this is all cookie cutter, bog standard isekai anime quality. Not a bit more effort than the bare minimum has been lavished on this series. Watching it week by week was a decent distraction but I feel no great need to rewatch this any time soon. Looking back at it for this post I barely remember anything about it. Completely unremarkable isekai adventures that are not even bad enough to be memorable. It was difficult even finding interesting screenshots… Just thoroughly mid.