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2025: My Second Quarter in Anime
One more three-month block defined by new anime series showing up opened with me aware something would be different in my case. My latest long vacation was scheduled for the block’s last weeks. For the moment still lingering behind many other people and awaiting their judgments on shows, this might not have been an overwhelming difference. Still, I did work through a bit of scheduling to make sure I could finish everything I’d been thinking about seeing before leaving. I also happened in the opening weeks of the quarter to view Princess Mononoke at the movies. Perhaps this could be seen as a more genteel version of “no wonder movies are the way they are with people only willing to spend money on ‘expected quantities,’” but I did seem able to find something added by “the theatrical presentation.”
As I pushed on through Albegas, I suppose I was always a little aware it had first come to my attention through comments it might have become “a third Voltron.” At some point, however, I started telling myself I just wasn’t ruthless enough to watch with an eye for imagining just how its action, its silliness, and its signs of being set in a lightly futuristic Japan would have been explained away through dialogue or just trimmed out. The goofiness of the series might have faded back in its very last episodes, heralded by what seems one of the familiar plot developments in these giant robot series, and that had followed up on the bad guy commanders turning over to some extent around the halfway point. Even that, though, might only have changed what angle I nudged up towards a recurring inward question. I’m selective, or picky, or cautious, about what recent anime I decide to watch, even when not lapsing into “let other people run the risk of ‘disappointment.’” When it comes to “older” anime, however, sometimes all it takes is “it’s available,” whether via Discotek or through “fansubs.” That then bumps into older series often being longer and taking up more of my limited viewing slots, and it might be a question as to whether every older, longer series indeed offers more “development” (as some make a big deal of these days) or just embeds better in awarenesses through sheer repetition. One counterargument to that I did ponder, anyway, involved older giant robot series being “meant” on some fundamental level for nothing more complicated or (now) controversial than advertising toys to kids, which then came straight back to the conviction I’d once seen the toys packaged as that “third Voltron” in advance of their part of the cartoon never quite making it to air.
A comment or two that Minky Momo had become more impressive over its run reached my eyes before I’d quite made to the episodes alluded to myself. As I’d said before, the variety of roles Minky magically grows into (with a casual, matter-of-fact “girls can do anything too!” feeling to them) had got my attention early on and could have kept the series interesting. Her adventures did become more grandiose, with some memorable, gentle spoofs of a variety of genres. “It all stayed consistent and appealing” might be a decent summary. I have to admit I did wind up contrasting its variety to Creamy Mami, the other magical girl series of about the same age I’ve seen, as something that made Minky Momo appeal to me that much more (and I’d thought Creamy Mami didn’t involve a rigid and unexciting “formula” when I’d seen it). It even seemed to start playing with its own assumptions that “Momo growing up will save the day” as it approached where I understood that infamous moment many people have brought up over the years lurked. Aware of when it was made, I did consider certain moments from my own tender years when I’d become convinced things were about to go altogether wrong for characters in shows and movies and flee from the TV, but the episode in question did manage to push on over its own length, from “this could be the end” to “this is just sort of a change.” How much of the way things were would be pared back in the episodes still to come is something I’m wondering about even as I watched two “clip shows” in a row delving back into everything that had shown up before.
Moving on with Attack on Titan, I crossed from the opening “season” (or “six months’ worth,” given the flexible way “season” gets applied to anime) I’d watched long years ago to the anime I’d long left waiting with thoughts of “watching it all at once.” The final surprise of where I’d left off with the anime had stuck in my mind and might have combined with recollections of reading the manga to leave me with a certain impression of where the anime would go next, and the sense this would get to the first of the more controversial bits of the story. As it turned out, though, a lot of the manga’s story had slipped my mind. The anime stuck with “people versus grotesque force-of-nature giants,” and gave a bit more of a spotlight to characters who might have been thought secondary. I was still noting moments I could suppose enigmatic to those watching the anime for the first time but which I could see as grim anticipations with memories of the manga in mind, but I did somehow appreciate the unexpected action. Whether this was a bonus of sorts before the controversial parts of the story do show up is still an open question at this moment.
Getting around to another series I’d been waiting for Sentai to release on Blu-Ray (which at least brings to mind those antique days when I’d get a sense at last of what “big titles” were airing in Japan only to then shrug and suppose it was too late now to catch up to the “fansubs” and I might as well wait however long it would take for the legitimate licensed DVDs to show up), I opened up Oshi no Ko. Despite that wait, I am stuck wondering how much I can describe the show as opposed to just alluding to things. Its own take on the “it’s nice if you can manage it” scheme of having several episodes’ worth of story ready all at once amounted to an extended opening episode, beginning with a doctor in a small town who happens to be a dedicated fan of an “idol singer” with enormous six-pointed sparkles in her eyes. One day a pregnant teenager shows up at his hospital, and then he sees her eyes... Well before the end of the episode this has become a mere curtain-raiser to further events, but even after a reincarnation angle has developed (and the business of the sparkles becomes a bit more peculiar) the episode winds up the prologue to a murder mystery to be solved by rising through the ranks of the Japanese entertainment industry.
Whenever the subject of idol singers comes up, some people seem quite ready to make a big deal of the miserable constraints on those entertainers. I’ve tried my best to compartmentalize and think of the Love Live franchise (where the main respite its “school idol” characters may have from the unsettling idealization of being imagined “ideal girlfriend candidates” stuck awaiting deluded, possessional attention is being “slashed” with their fellow singers), and most of the other “show business” anime I’ve seen, as amiable fantasies. I had known Oshi no Ko had a different take on things. As it started off with low-grade productions (including a “live-action adaptation of a manga”), though, I did wonder about that take including a certain amount of “people who know the hard truth, but not necessarily through unpleasant personal experience, lecturing people, or one person, who ought to know.” The series might also have softened a bit as “plot arcs” concluded (even if this involved the business of the sparkles getting still more complicated), and yet I wasn’t altogether displeased with that. Finishing this block of episodes meant going back to waiting for the next block of them to be released on Blu-Ray over here. However, I am conscious the enthusiasm of others faded at that continuation, which also leaves me wondering about the original manga I have piled up.
My interest in The Apothecary Diaries had picked up over my first three months of viewing it at an episode-a-week pace. Certain half-remembered impressions other people had become still more impressed during the back half of its six-month run premiering were at least in my mind as I got to those episodes myself. The story just previous to that (or, to look at it another way, the adaptation of the first novel) had ended with the apothecary Maomao’s position shifting somewhat in an imperial court pretty much “ancient China” where, not knowing a lot about historical fashions, I could only tie things down in time only by references to certain crops that showed up after the Columbian Exchange. (The new episodes did mention something arguments continue over as to whether it was part of the exchange, syphilis...) I have to admit, though, that I started missing the high-status imperial consorts and female servants who’d featured when Maomao had been more or less stuck in “the rear palace.” It was something that the men she now spent more time among didn’t all boil down to “oppressors as opposed to oppressed,” but for some reason a certain focus on the well-placed and clever eunuch Jinshi who’d noticed her particular talents at the beginning of the series didn’t interest me as much as it might have been meant to. There seemed something about Jinshi’s unique situation we appeared expected to piece together from hints (while Maomao seemed to keep thinking putting things together herself would just mean getting in trouble), and perhaps I got to thinking I somehow would have preferred an exploration of a more “conventional” state of being a eunuch, with Jinshi’s status a simple matter of his cleverness. Maybe I also started thinking of those “post-Evangelion” anime where explanations were withheld from viewpoint characters and viewers alike. Around then, I have to admit, I did begin to contemplate how I’d already gone and bought four further novels in the series following the first I’d read, and even recalled a comment or two that production values looked to have slid a little in a further adaptation streaming at that very moment. At the very end of the block I was watching, though, the focus shifted a bit and my interest ticked up a little again.
When a series called Zenshu that had caught my cautious attention from afar when starting to stream three months before appeared to maintain a bit of enthusiasm from others during its final episodes and even placed well on Anime News Network’s end-of-the-season review, I thought I could get around to watching it even if there’d been a few “well, I don’t see why anyone else would be satisfied by it either” complaints in the reaction thread. There at least remained the possibility of it being an example of “no label is altogether dismissive,” as Zenshu involved “reincarnation in a fantasy world.” Its main character Natsuko Hirose differed from the typical accusations levelled at the typical mass of those series, being an up-and-coming anime director. Struggling even so with the storyboards for a movie (and with her hair grown out to where it can completely hide her face), she eats an expired supermarket meal with “bad clams” and keels over. When she comes to, she’s in a fantasy world with many near-generic elements (including a mixture of people and anthropomorphic animals, although there could be a distinctive tweak to an element or two later on), but which does happen to be the setting of an anime movie that had a considerable impact on her in her childhood. (The brief glimpses of the actual work we get look “older” than the actual anime, although Natsuko doesn’t react with something like “good grief—this is the live action version!”) It also just so happened to have had an everyone-dies ending. Regardless of whether you imagine Natsuko thinking “I convinced myself to accept the whole thing... but really, I liked the beginning better than the end” or “catharsis through witnessing tragedy is one thing; having to live it is another”, as she falls in with the dwindled band of heroes and enemy monsters attack, the animator’s peg bar in her pocket becomes able to summon an animator’s desk where she can whip up “pencil test”-like apparitions calling other famous bits of anime to mind. I watched the first episode with interest. It was only afterwards that I happened to think of something a bit older than “reincarnated in a fantasy world” anime, namely certain notorious works of fanfiction familiar from my own past where fans dropped into story worlds (or, sometimes, attempted to maintain plausible deniability by dropping in a “really cool” new character) and proceeded to solve everyone’s problems for them...
In the days of MSTings I have to admit I was never that moved by insistences that “this story is better than the ones you try to needle.” With Zenshu, though, the insistence did seem likelier to apply at last. For all of the visual impressiveness of Natsuko’s new power, she didn’t come across as utterly overequipped for thin reasons to deal with the problems at hand. The character development was also gradual enough that she wasn’t loved at once by the characters we appear supposed to like ourselves (and neither was she detested by characters we appear supposed to dislike). In a certain way, it also helped that the “movie inside the series” was, well, “inside the series” rather than something we might have become attached to ourselves. As I’ve already alluded to, the sense of the series touching on issues of “being a fan” might have raised questions in my mind that didn’t seem addressed all that much in the actual content, which could have had as much to do with “being inspired to create as well.” That might have accounted for why some wound up disdainful. If personal shallowness helped me out, though, then the sense the show looked consistently appealing while offering something summed up in perhaps too simple terms as “production values” could have done something there.
After indulging in the novelty of “a mecha anime at the movies,” I supposed I’d go on to watching the full series Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX. In this case, though, “waiting to see what others thought of it” seemed somehow counterproductive. For whatever reason, and despite having seen many super robot and mecha series from the 1970s and 1980s, I’ve stayed able to take a “glass half full” perspective on more recent shows of that type, but I’m also all too inclined to slide into gloom over how that seems the minority perspective compared to many other fans. Beyond whatever problems anticipating “knee-jerk condemnation” might hold, that the series would be limited to twelve episodes appeared something people were ready from the start to see as a fatal flaw.
The series did rearrange its theatrical preview so that its own first glance was of the characters who’d been in the promotional material preceding the preview’s big twist. I did wonder about that opening feeling somehow diminished on a smaller screen, and not because of “I’ve already seen it.” The second episode featured what the preview had begun with, including different character designs making it clear it was a different sort of “alternative universe” than have been familiar in Gundam for thirty years now. However, that beginning had run for longer in the preview than would fit in one television episode, which made for a somewhat abrupt jump back to the continuing action already shown in the preview.
When things did get to events not seen before, though, things did seem to grab my attention and the attention of some other people I was at least noticing. The story kept mutating from there in ways I found interesting. Three “young characters” in their own part of the story didn’t overload the cast, but still offered different ways to think about the world they were part of and what was drawing them deeper into the plot. With the matter-of-fact way this series could feature a female protagonist after The Witch From Mercury having made a bigger deal of that, I did wonder about a male character now filling an “enigmatic” role I’m at least tempted to suppose female characters have tended to be stuck in before.
With that said, I was at least wondering about those characters having to compete with what might threaten to be dismissed as “notice this reference? Wasn’t that a great show?” (There were a certain number of Evangelion references mixed in with the Gundam ones, befitting the studio and the people working on this series.) At a certain point the characters did appear to become aware of the “alternative universe” status the audience had been aware of from the beginning. However, in the end the series to me didn’t just shrug and hold up “one true story.” I suppose the ultimate surprises of its plot delved towards “familiar characters” rather than “familiar political conflicts,” but there I could see a certain resemblance to how the first decade of the franchise had played out. The conclusion took place on a big scale, and it might have helped that the series made a point very early on of Gundams having been built and equipped with the ability to transcend their apparent “real robot” reality. I suppose it’s possible to wonder if one character wound up revealed as having done the most to settle things in a certain way and became an unusual “pivotal” character, but in being able to see development as shared out among all the other characters, in the end the series did seem to amount to something interesting. Of course, as I’ve said I’m stuck choosing to be positive and wondering when if ever I’ll manage to find the time to go back through even a twelve-episode show.
Six short (and shorter than “one-reeler”) episodes might not have been all that much of an addition to the quite popular Lycoris Recoil, but I did happen to think they’d be easy enough to squeeze into busy vacation days. Understanding in advance they focused on the charming back-streets cafe the two teenaged “girl with gun” deputized assassins of the original series just happened to work at, I did wonder about them really amounting to an idea I’d thought of before, namely “they’re charming; what more do you want?” However, there were in the end a certain number of small nods to the larger world of the series. The subtitles of the first episode seemed a bit stiff, and I have to admit to recalling certain complaints about other Aniplex of America subtitles; things improved later on, though.
During the less busy days of the vacation, I also managed to get through six sample episodes of a much older series. Himitsu no Akko-chan (the “fansubs” translated that showing up in the opening theme as “Akko’s got a secret,” which was a bit more interesting than my very limited understanding of Japanese would have made it) is an early magical girl show. As I understand it, its first anime followed Sally the Witch by a few years, but the manga it was adapted from preceded the other series. Unlike Sally the Witch, it begins with a “normal” girl, who happens to have buried a broken mirror in her back yard. When the spirit of the mirror ascends to the heavens and becomes a star, it thanks Akko by giving her a new compact mirror that can transform her into different people and animals too. I did get to thinking back to some early, perhaps even patronizing assumptions that Sally the Witch would have moralized more than “cartoons aimed at boys”; this show did seem to make a bigger deal of appropriate behaviours with and without a magical mirror of transformation. At times, too, the mirror didn’t seem central to the resolution of particular episodes. Even so, I found something interesting to the sample that didn’t just amount to the welcome continued novelty of another glimpse back to formative days.
As I pushed on through Albegas, I suppose I was always a little aware it had first come to my attention through comments it might have become “a third Voltron.” At some point, however, I started telling myself I just wasn’t ruthless enough to watch with an eye for imagining just how its action, its silliness, and its signs of being set in a lightly futuristic Japan would have been explained away through dialogue or just trimmed out. The goofiness of the series might have faded back in its very last episodes, heralded by what seems one of the familiar plot developments in these giant robot series, and that had followed up on the bad guy commanders turning over to some extent around the halfway point. Even that, though, might only have changed what angle I nudged up towards a recurring inward question. I’m selective, or picky, or cautious, about what recent anime I decide to watch, even when not lapsing into “let other people run the risk of ‘disappointment.’” When it comes to “older” anime, however, sometimes all it takes is “it’s available,” whether via Discotek or through “fansubs.” That then bumps into older series often being longer and taking up more of my limited viewing slots, and it might be a question as to whether every older, longer series indeed offers more “development” (as some make a big deal of these days) or just embeds better in awarenesses through sheer repetition. One counterargument to that I did ponder, anyway, involved older giant robot series being “meant” on some fundamental level for nothing more complicated or (now) controversial than advertising toys to kids, which then came straight back to the conviction I’d once seen the toys packaged as that “third Voltron” in advance of their part of the cartoon never quite making it to air.
A comment or two that Minky Momo had become more impressive over its run reached my eyes before I’d quite made to the episodes alluded to myself. As I’d said before, the variety of roles Minky magically grows into (with a casual, matter-of-fact “girls can do anything too!” feeling to them) had got my attention early on and could have kept the series interesting. Her adventures did become more grandiose, with some memorable, gentle spoofs of a variety of genres. “It all stayed consistent and appealing” might be a decent summary. I have to admit I did wind up contrasting its variety to Creamy Mami, the other magical girl series of about the same age I’ve seen, as something that made Minky Momo appeal to me that much more (and I’d thought Creamy Mami didn’t involve a rigid and unexciting “formula” when I’d seen it). It even seemed to start playing with its own assumptions that “Momo growing up will save the day” as it approached where I understood that infamous moment many people have brought up over the years lurked. Aware of when it was made, I did consider certain moments from my own tender years when I’d become convinced things were about to go altogether wrong for characters in shows and movies and flee from the TV, but the episode in question did manage to push on over its own length, from “this could be the end” to “this is just sort of a change.” How much of the way things were would be pared back in the episodes still to come is something I’m wondering about even as I watched two “clip shows” in a row delving back into everything that had shown up before.
Moving on with Attack on Titan, I crossed from the opening “season” (or “six months’ worth,” given the flexible way “season” gets applied to anime) I’d watched long years ago to the anime I’d long left waiting with thoughts of “watching it all at once.” The final surprise of where I’d left off with the anime had stuck in my mind and might have combined with recollections of reading the manga to leave me with a certain impression of where the anime would go next, and the sense this would get to the first of the more controversial bits of the story. As it turned out, though, a lot of the manga’s story had slipped my mind. The anime stuck with “people versus grotesque force-of-nature giants,” and gave a bit more of a spotlight to characters who might have been thought secondary. I was still noting moments I could suppose enigmatic to those watching the anime for the first time but which I could see as grim anticipations with memories of the manga in mind, but I did somehow appreciate the unexpected action. Whether this was a bonus of sorts before the controversial parts of the story do show up is still an open question at this moment.
Getting around to another series I’d been waiting for Sentai to release on Blu-Ray (which at least brings to mind those antique days when I’d get a sense at last of what “big titles” were airing in Japan only to then shrug and suppose it was too late now to catch up to the “fansubs” and I might as well wait however long it would take for the legitimate licensed DVDs to show up), I opened up Oshi no Ko. Despite that wait, I am stuck wondering how much I can describe the show as opposed to just alluding to things. Its own take on the “it’s nice if you can manage it” scheme of having several episodes’ worth of story ready all at once amounted to an extended opening episode, beginning with a doctor in a small town who happens to be a dedicated fan of an “idol singer” with enormous six-pointed sparkles in her eyes. One day a pregnant teenager shows up at his hospital, and then he sees her eyes... Well before the end of the episode this has become a mere curtain-raiser to further events, but even after a reincarnation angle has developed (and the business of the sparkles becomes a bit more peculiar) the episode winds up the prologue to a murder mystery to be solved by rising through the ranks of the Japanese entertainment industry.
Whenever the subject of idol singers comes up, some people seem quite ready to make a big deal of the miserable constraints on those entertainers. I’ve tried my best to compartmentalize and think of the Love Live franchise (where the main respite its “school idol” characters may have from the unsettling idealization of being imagined “ideal girlfriend candidates” stuck awaiting deluded, possessional attention is being “slashed” with their fellow singers), and most of the other “show business” anime I’ve seen, as amiable fantasies. I had known Oshi no Ko had a different take on things. As it started off with low-grade productions (including a “live-action adaptation of a manga”), though, I did wonder about that take including a certain amount of “people who know the hard truth, but not necessarily through unpleasant personal experience, lecturing people, or one person, who ought to know.” The series might also have softened a bit as “plot arcs” concluded (even if this involved the business of the sparkles getting still more complicated), and yet I wasn’t altogether displeased with that. Finishing this block of episodes meant going back to waiting for the next block of them to be released on Blu-Ray over here. However, I am conscious the enthusiasm of others faded at that continuation, which also leaves me wondering about the original manga I have piled up.
My interest in The Apothecary Diaries had picked up over my first three months of viewing it at an episode-a-week pace. Certain half-remembered impressions other people had become still more impressed during the back half of its six-month run premiering were at least in my mind as I got to those episodes myself. The story just previous to that (or, to look at it another way, the adaptation of the first novel) had ended with the apothecary Maomao’s position shifting somewhat in an imperial court pretty much “ancient China” where, not knowing a lot about historical fashions, I could only tie things down in time only by references to certain crops that showed up after the Columbian Exchange. (The new episodes did mention something arguments continue over as to whether it was part of the exchange, syphilis...) I have to admit, though, that I started missing the high-status imperial consorts and female servants who’d featured when Maomao had been more or less stuck in “the rear palace.” It was something that the men she now spent more time among didn’t all boil down to “oppressors as opposed to oppressed,” but for some reason a certain focus on the well-placed and clever eunuch Jinshi who’d noticed her particular talents at the beginning of the series didn’t interest me as much as it might have been meant to. There seemed something about Jinshi’s unique situation we appeared expected to piece together from hints (while Maomao seemed to keep thinking putting things together herself would just mean getting in trouble), and perhaps I got to thinking I somehow would have preferred an exploration of a more “conventional” state of being a eunuch, with Jinshi’s status a simple matter of his cleverness. Maybe I also started thinking of those “post-Evangelion” anime where explanations were withheld from viewpoint characters and viewers alike. Around then, I have to admit, I did begin to contemplate how I’d already gone and bought four further novels in the series following the first I’d read, and even recalled a comment or two that production values looked to have slid a little in a further adaptation streaming at that very moment. At the very end of the block I was watching, though, the focus shifted a bit and my interest ticked up a little again.
When a series called Zenshu that had caught my cautious attention from afar when starting to stream three months before appeared to maintain a bit of enthusiasm from others during its final episodes and even placed well on Anime News Network’s end-of-the-season review, I thought I could get around to watching it even if there’d been a few “well, I don’t see why anyone else would be satisfied by it either” complaints in the reaction thread. There at least remained the possibility of it being an example of “no label is altogether dismissive,” as Zenshu involved “reincarnation in a fantasy world.” Its main character Natsuko Hirose differed from the typical accusations levelled at the typical mass of those series, being an up-and-coming anime director. Struggling even so with the storyboards for a movie (and with her hair grown out to where it can completely hide her face), she eats an expired supermarket meal with “bad clams” and keels over. When she comes to, she’s in a fantasy world with many near-generic elements (including a mixture of people and anthropomorphic animals, although there could be a distinctive tweak to an element or two later on), but which does happen to be the setting of an anime movie that had a considerable impact on her in her childhood. (The brief glimpses of the actual work we get look “older” than the actual anime, although Natsuko doesn’t react with something like “good grief—this is the live action version!”) It also just so happened to have had an everyone-dies ending. Regardless of whether you imagine Natsuko thinking “I convinced myself to accept the whole thing... but really, I liked the beginning better than the end” or “catharsis through witnessing tragedy is one thing; having to live it is another”, as she falls in with the dwindled band of heroes and enemy monsters attack, the animator’s peg bar in her pocket becomes able to summon an animator’s desk where she can whip up “pencil test”-like apparitions calling other famous bits of anime to mind. I watched the first episode with interest. It was only afterwards that I happened to think of something a bit older than “reincarnated in a fantasy world” anime, namely certain notorious works of fanfiction familiar from my own past where fans dropped into story worlds (or, sometimes, attempted to maintain plausible deniability by dropping in a “really cool” new character) and proceeded to solve everyone’s problems for them...
In the days of MSTings I have to admit I was never that moved by insistences that “this story is better than the ones you try to needle.” With Zenshu, though, the insistence did seem likelier to apply at last. For all of the visual impressiveness of Natsuko’s new power, she didn’t come across as utterly overequipped for thin reasons to deal with the problems at hand. The character development was also gradual enough that she wasn’t loved at once by the characters we appear supposed to like ourselves (and neither was she detested by characters we appear supposed to dislike). In a certain way, it also helped that the “movie inside the series” was, well, “inside the series” rather than something we might have become attached to ourselves. As I’ve already alluded to, the sense of the series touching on issues of “being a fan” might have raised questions in my mind that didn’t seem addressed all that much in the actual content, which could have had as much to do with “being inspired to create as well.” That might have accounted for why some wound up disdainful. If personal shallowness helped me out, though, then the sense the show looked consistently appealing while offering something summed up in perhaps too simple terms as “production values” could have done something there.
After indulging in the novelty of “a mecha anime at the movies,” I supposed I’d go on to watching the full series Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX. In this case, though, “waiting to see what others thought of it” seemed somehow counterproductive. For whatever reason, and despite having seen many super robot and mecha series from the 1970s and 1980s, I’ve stayed able to take a “glass half full” perspective on more recent shows of that type, but I’m also all too inclined to slide into gloom over how that seems the minority perspective compared to many other fans. Beyond whatever problems anticipating “knee-jerk condemnation” might hold, that the series would be limited to twelve episodes appeared something people were ready from the start to see as a fatal flaw.
The series did rearrange its theatrical preview so that its own first glance was of the characters who’d been in the promotional material preceding the preview’s big twist. I did wonder about that opening feeling somehow diminished on a smaller screen, and not because of “I’ve already seen it.” The second episode featured what the preview had begun with, including different character designs making it clear it was a different sort of “alternative universe” than have been familiar in Gundam for thirty years now. However, that beginning had run for longer in the preview than would fit in one television episode, which made for a somewhat abrupt jump back to the continuing action already shown in the preview.
When things did get to events not seen before, though, things did seem to grab my attention and the attention of some other people I was at least noticing. The story kept mutating from there in ways I found interesting. Three “young characters” in their own part of the story didn’t overload the cast, but still offered different ways to think about the world they were part of and what was drawing them deeper into the plot. With the matter-of-fact way this series could feature a female protagonist after The Witch From Mercury having made a bigger deal of that, I did wonder about a male character now filling an “enigmatic” role I’m at least tempted to suppose female characters have tended to be stuck in before.
With that said, I was at least wondering about those characters having to compete with what might threaten to be dismissed as “notice this reference? Wasn’t that a great show?” (There were a certain number of Evangelion references mixed in with the Gundam ones, befitting the studio and the people working on this series.) At a certain point the characters did appear to become aware of the “alternative universe” status the audience had been aware of from the beginning. However, in the end the series to me didn’t just shrug and hold up “one true story.” I suppose the ultimate surprises of its plot delved towards “familiar characters” rather than “familiar political conflicts,” but there I could see a certain resemblance to how the first decade of the franchise had played out. The conclusion took place on a big scale, and it might have helped that the series made a point very early on of Gundams having been built and equipped with the ability to transcend their apparent “real robot” reality. I suppose it’s possible to wonder if one character wound up revealed as having done the most to settle things in a certain way and became an unusual “pivotal” character, but in being able to see development as shared out among all the other characters, in the end the series did seem to amount to something interesting. Of course, as I’ve said I’m stuck choosing to be positive and wondering when if ever I’ll manage to find the time to go back through even a twelve-episode show.
Six short (and shorter than “one-reeler”) episodes might not have been all that much of an addition to the quite popular Lycoris Recoil, but I did happen to think they’d be easy enough to squeeze into busy vacation days. Understanding in advance they focused on the charming back-streets cafe the two teenaged “girl with gun” deputized assassins of the original series just happened to work at, I did wonder about them really amounting to an idea I’d thought of before, namely “they’re charming; what more do you want?” However, there were in the end a certain number of small nods to the larger world of the series. The subtitles of the first episode seemed a bit stiff, and I have to admit to recalling certain complaints about other Aniplex of America subtitles; things improved later on, though.
During the less busy days of the vacation, I also managed to get through six sample episodes of a much older series. Himitsu no Akko-chan (the “fansubs” translated that showing up in the opening theme as “Akko’s got a secret,” which was a bit more interesting than my very limited understanding of Japanese would have made it) is an early magical girl show. As I understand it, its first anime followed Sally the Witch by a few years, but the manga it was adapted from preceded the other series. Unlike Sally the Witch, it begins with a “normal” girl, who happens to have buried a broken mirror in her back yard. When the spirit of the mirror ascends to the heavens and becomes a star, it thanks Akko by giving her a new compact mirror that can transform her into different people and animals too. I did get to thinking back to some early, perhaps even patronizing assumptions that Sally the Witch would have moralized more than “cartoons aimed at boys”; this show did seem to make a bigger deal of appropriate behaviours with and without a magical mirror of transformation. At times, too, the mirror didn’t seem central to the resolution of particular episodes. Even so, I found something interesting to the sample that didn’t just amount to the welcome continued novelty of another glimpse back to formative days.