If you liked last season’s
Made by Studio Wrong, The Collision is a simple story about a Youtube streamer trying to summon a demon, substituting tomato juice for blood, with mixed results. I wouldn’t mind seeing this spun out into a proper series, just like the original Milky Highway got spun into Ginga Tokkyuu Milky☆Subway.
New rule: if your fantasy anime stars a round faced, single digit aged waif, it’s gonna be a bad time.
Hell Mode: Yarikomizuki no Gamer wa Hai Settei no Isekai de Musou suru, Okiraku Ryoushu no Tanoshii Ryouchi Bouei: Seisankei Majutsu de Na mo Naki Mura wo Saikyou no Jousai Toshi ni and Majutsushi Kunon wa Mieteiru: that’s three more series like Kizoku Tensei: Megumareta Umare kara Saikyou no Chikara wo Eru in which an adult gets reincarnated into a young child or baby and you have to suffer through them growing up and learning magic. At least Majutsushi Kunon wa Mieteiru Tensei shitara Dragon no Tamago datta mixes it up a little by having its protagonist reincarnate into a dragon’s egg. It’s about the only one of those that I have any desire to watch more of, but even then its first episode was a slog.
So what’s the problem with these series? First, having a young boy as a protagonist — and none of these are older than six years — obviously limits what they can do. Can’t really send them on the sort of adventures that you could send even a teenager on. But more importantly, these series aren’t really interested in sending them on adventures, they’re only interested in dsicovering the wonders of magic. Which could be fun, if ‘magic’ here didn’t equate to making numbers go up on a status screen.
Hell Mode is the best example. That starts with a bored gamer trying out a new online game and selecting the worst possible difficulty settings, only for him to be reincarnated as a baby to a couple of serfs, farmers tied to their land by their overlord. As his chosen profession he had taken summoner, as that was the most difficult one. Interesting setup, but the first episode mostly consisted of him looking at his status board and creating low level beasties like grasshoppers and mouses as he levels his skills. This is occasionally interrupted by him having to do mock sword fights with the tomboy daughter of his parents’ friends. Compelling watching it does not make, but at least the monsters are cute. When you spent more time looking at your phone than the screen, you know you have a problem. And at least Hell Mode has decent looking animation and creature designs.
Ultimately the problem with all these series is a symptom of a wider problem with narou based anime. The obsession with world building and explaining magic systems is something that’s excusable in a light novel or manga as you can skim it, which you can’t do with anime. With an adult protagonist you can at least make it more bearable by having them beat up monsters or explore dungeons while doing so, but that’s not possible when your hero is barely old enough to crawl around. Worse, because the unique selling point of this sort of series is “the protagonist masters magic at an incredible young age” is also not really possible to make it into a five minute montage. Once they’re no longer a child, they’re the same as any other isekai protagonist…
In which laundry is done, childhood friends deny they’re romantically interested in each other and a poor little rich boy is in search of his middle school love.
Kinme Wakana runs Kinme cleaning, a laundry located in Atami, a smallish sea resort town. She takes an intense pleasure in cleaning laundry. (Sometimes too intense: there was one weird moment when a high school boy dropped off some clothing to be washed and Kinme got all flustered because his shoe had a little nick in it she needed to fix there and then). Based on a manga by Hattori Mitsuru, from what I remember reading it, the manga had an incredible sense of place and was a little bit horny for its protagonist. Both have been translated faithfully into the anime. This first episode was mostly about showing Kinme’s daily routine. It’s slow and contemplative and honestly, a little bit boring. What saves it is the beautiful animation and Kinme herself, who is exactly the kind of black haired pony tailed big sister type I like. From reading the manga I know there’s going to be an actual plot about how she ended up running the laundry and why her memories sort of stop two years ago, so it won’t be all watching her get a stubborn stain out of an old lady’s favourite shirt.
A classic case of having your cake and eating it too, as this romcom series has its romcom protagonist deny he’s in a romcom even as his two childhood friends get him in all sort of romcom shenanigans. The first climbs into his bed through the bedroom window, flashes her panties at him and rubs her breasts against any unguarded bodypart of his. The other does the classic tsundere move of calling him a pervert and a virgin as she dares him to kiss her. They both clearly want to get in his pants, but all he’s worried about is that they discover he’s horny for them and he’s determined to take that secret to his grave. It’s all very silly and the show seems to think that shouting about cliches is automatically funny but I can’t help but like it. Nothing you haven’t seen before but it’s done with some energy and verve at least. The opening promises two more childhood friends to join the harem as well, so that’s something to look forward to.
Poor little rich kid Arisu was infatuated by the internet radio streams of “Apollo”, a girl his age, back in middle school. She abruptly stopped broadcasting and to find her again, he enrolled in the high school she hinted at she would go to too. Now he’s asking every girl in the just recently gone co-ed Furin High School to tell him they love him, so he can hear what their voice sounds like, that having been Apollo’s end of broadcast sign-off. He has no success until he hears the first broadcast from the broadcast club: one of the four girls there has to be Apollo, but which one? For whatever reason Apollo keeps her silence so he has no choice but to join the club and hunt for clues… Another somewhat cliched harem show, but Arisu is just the right amount of self confident asshole to be interesting. The girls so far are little more than stereotypes, but I expect that will change in the next few episodes.
The flood of new fantasy anime continues this season, no fewer than three debuting today. Because I don’t have too much to say about any of them, I thought I’d tackle them all in one post.
An overworked accountant is accidentally caught up in the summoning of the Holy Maiden — a Japanese high school girl — and sets out to work for the royal accounting department. Hard to break the workaholic habits of his old life, he quickly finds himself knee deep in trouble, trying to solve the department’s inadequacies as the eye of the ambitious prime minister falls on him… A solid first episode, but to call the animation and character design ‘adequate’ is to over praise it. This is a series I’d only watch for the plot, to see how our hero tackles his workaholicsm as well as the economical and political problems he wants to fix. There’s also a bit of unresolved (romantic?) tension between him and the head of the Third Royal Guards, the improbably named Indolark.
the Demon Lord Ahriman has a problem, one big enough to stop his world conquest: his daughter Doux is just too, well,
Yoki is isekaied into a fantasy world about to be overrun by a demon lord. As you might expect, he’s overpowered, as you might not expect, he’s just another mini boss of the Demon Lord, the first the Hero Party will face. He quickly overpowers them but then finds out their healer, Cecilia, is just his type and falls in love immediately. After a few months of the Hero and his party getting defeated over and over again he makes a deal: he will let them through if they leave Cecilia behind, so he can confess his love. He does so but she turns him down (what do you expect from cornering a woman you’ve been fighting for so long) as the Hero finally defeats the Demon Lord. Now he’s an adventurer but Cecilia is worried that his great strength will make him a pawn in the new power struggle to fill the political vacuum the death of the demon lord left behind… Okay animation but a bit of a slog to get through this first episode leaves me unsure whether I want to watch more of this.
While watching these three series I realised I’d read at least some of the manga version of all of them, but none of them left much of an impression. Of the three, Maou no Musume wa Yasashi Sugiru is the one I most like to watch more of. There are enough good series coming out this season that I don’t really feel the need to watch mediocre ones just because they’re mildly entertaining or I’m curious what’ll happen next.
Goumon Baito-kun no Nichijou is one of those cutesy slice of life series about people with unusual jobs, only in this case the job is torturer?
This is a world where killing and torture are legalized. Sero, a part-time worker at a torture company, enjoys torturing people every day with his senior colleague, Siu. With the addition of new part-timers Mike and Hugh, fun torture life continues!
One of those days when you truly believe anime was a mistake. I went in blind with this one, but once it became clear what it was about and how it presented itself, I noped out quickly. This is pure fascism:
I do understand that the incongruity is the point and, to many people, the appeal. Still, I just can’t find it in me to chuckle as Cero thinks in the opening sketch about what a waste of his time it’ll end up being if the guy he’s tormenting doesn’t actually have the information he’s seeking out. I grimaced at the posters promoting torture as a way of helping keep the world clean and safe, and the assurance that the men strapped to their chairs are all confirmed villains, so it’s totally okay.
[…]
What’s most baffling about this anime, however, is how it attempts to make our heroes seem not just “normal” but “good.” In this world, a torturer is apparently a legal job. All the people sent to them are guilty of something—even if it’s not the crime they’re being tortured for. So it’s totally okay that they’re being crippled and/or disfigured, right? Well, the show sure seems to think so.
Caitlin Moore and Richard Eisenbeis there nailing exactly why it is. It’s that whitewashing of what torture is, that insistence that everybody being tortured deserves it, that it’s good as long as it only happens to bad people, that makes it fascist. Because if you insist only bad people get tortured, the opposite is true as well: getting tortured means you’re a bad person. Some people are inherently bad and lose their human rights so can be tortured. How more fascist can you make it. It’s the same thinking behind Guantanamo and the idea of “illegal combatants”, people arbitrarily put outside the protections of the Geneva conventions so you could waterboard them.