Short post this week, but that’s because I did a ton of first impressions (sorry for spamming). As we go through the season, this series will fatten up a bit.
LIAR GAME Ep. 14
You can almost cleanly divide this episode in four. The first quarter has Kikuzawa detailing his history with Yokoya. I found this part inadvertently funny. Our little mini-Hitler transferred into a new school, started blackmailing the bullies, then imposed his iron will on the rest of the student body in no time flat. He even imposed his own class system on the school, and nobody could stop him. There was nary a teacher in sight… except, of course, when they were being bribed. I don’t find any of this remotely realistic for various reasons, but mostly because I don’t think humans are that simple and predictable. For instance, you might have a kid who doesn’t give a shit about getting in trouble with the law, so he would flout Yokoya’s weak attempts to blackmail him and simply beat Yokoya up without even considering the consequences. But that’s just my speculation.
In the next section of the episode, Country of Day has to decide what to do about Kikuzawa’s betrayal. Obviously, most of them want to beat him up. Ain’t nothing like mob justice. Nao, however, argues that this is exactly what Yokoya wants. She reasons that the mastermind must have foreseen Kikuzawa inevitably crumbling under pressure. The team can’t allow itself to turn on each other, because that would play directly into Yokoya’s hand! Well, I don’t really agree with Nao’s assessment here. I guess this is technically infighting, but the team isn’t really tearing itself apart. No, their hate is simply directed toward one person and justifiably so. Still, I guess I’ll give it a pass, since this is major character development for Nao even if i think she’s wrong. The Nao at the start of this series could never jump to Kikuzawa’s defense like this.
The third quarter of the episode has Country of Day falling into an age-old trap. They start mounting a furious comeback, which eventually puts them ahead of Country of Night. As a result, everyone starts playing scared. Suddenly, no one wants to smuggle any money and build on the team’s small and tenuous lead. It’s essentially prevent defense. No matter how well documented it is — no matter how many times you tell yourself that you need to stay aggressive — everyone succumbs to this losing mentality at one point or another. It’s amusing to see it play out within this particular round.
The last and final quarter of the episode, however, puts me to sleep. After all, we’re right on schedule for Akiyama, a.k.a. Mr. Exposition, to explain what everyone else has been overlooking. You fools, you thought you were winning? Well, let me explain to you how winning is losing! Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. Yeah, I tuned it out. Oh well, onto next week’s episode.
Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games Ep. 1
You got Aya, who desperately wants to be ladylike. She used to be a fighting game fanatic, but she got burnt out from mindlessly doing ranked matches all the time. Well, what happened to beating up the boys? Did they stop inviting her over to their tournaments? Somehow, Aya convinced herself that she needed to abandon fighting games completely and redirect her passions toward being ladylike. I don’t really understand the throughline here, so I wholeheartedly agreed with Mio when she called Aya’s monologue cringe. Speaking of which, Mio is the most popular girl in school, because on the surface, she’s everything Aya is not: naturally elegant and refined. But Mio has a secret: she is a fighting game fanatic (and she’s a trash talker too). As such, Aya has met her match both in real life and in fighting games. That’s cool and all. Too bad fighting games are one of my least favorite video game genres. Man, I wish they were into JRPGs or Dark Souls. Imagine an episode where they play as red invaders and troll random people online. But alas, it’s all about fighting games, so my enthusiasm for this show is considerably dampened. Plus, there sure is an assload of pointless yuri-baiting. Kiss or not, I don’t really care. I just hate this half-assed bullshit.
By the way, the school will go so far as to confiscate your phones at night to prevent you from gaming, but they overlook laptops (not to mention those bulky ass fightpads the girls are using)? Huh? You can install Doom on basic ass graphing calculators, so honestly, it’s impossible to ban video games completely unless the school goes 100% Luddite.
Victoria of Many Faces Ep. 1
Chloe, a spy for the Kingdom of Hagl, finds out that her country had betrayed her. From her memories, it looks as though she was torn away from her family at a young age just to become a spy. We can assume that did her job dutifully; she even mentions how she came to see her boss as a brother of sorts. But one day, she returned home to find her old village burnt down. Did they really go so far as to murder her family? What for? Did they really think their highly skilled and well-trained spy would never find out truth or even get mad? I dunno, seems kinda fishy to me… Nevertheless, Chloe is done. She’s out. She fakes her own death by throwing her personal effects off a cliff. It even sounds like her employer thought she might have had feelings for her boss. Is this another sly move on her part? Faking an obsessive crush just to cover your tracks?
Finally, Chloe takes the name and identity of a woman who disappeared years ago. After crossing two borders, Chloe, now Victoria, is confident that she will never be found again. Ooof, I don’t know about that… Not that I can speak from experience or anything. Like the average person, all I know about espionage comes from James Bond movies. Even so, I highly doubt Victoria managed to escape scot free if only because fiction would never allow this to happen. In fiction, the old “ex” always come a’knockin’, because it creates drama and intrigue. What will the Kingdom of Hagl do when — not if — they discover that one of their spies is still alive? I mean, you gotta cover your bases, right? Even if she hasn’t betrayed them — nor does she ever plan to — they still gotta play it safe and take her out. Let the woman who knows all of your secrets walk free? No country would ever take that bet.
Ah well, Victoria can always just pick things up and leave again if the Kingdom of Hagl come for her, right? Well, it looks like she’ll eventually be tied down with her own little nuclear family. Strange how there’s a conveniently abandoned child sitting on a bench for Victoria to scoop up. Also strange how she ends up helping a platinum blond guy stop a purse-snatcher and thus help out an old woman. These parallels are starting to feel spooky… but no one has superpowers just yet, so I think we’re safe for now. More importantly, however, why would possess her to go and form a family? It would be one thing if Victoria merely waited around until the officials decided what to do with Nonna, the lost child. But she goes and plays dress up with the kid. Welp, now you’ve gone and formed a bond. Now there’s an attachment. She even knows it’s foolish. She tries to remind herself that this is crazy — that she can’t just take the reins and become this kid’s mother. And yet, she does so anyway.
SPYxFAMILY is a comedy, so putting Loid through the ulcer-inducing ringer by adding a rambunctious 4-year-old psychic and a deadly but ditzy wife is just funny. But Victoria looks like she’s in a much more serious anime with serious concerns and serious people. So why would you want to give your enemies ways to acquire leverage over you, especially in the form of a kid you can’t bear to abandon? I’m afraid the answer is quite trite: it gives her a reason to live. I’m not saying that having a family is the end all and be all of life, but it’s a pretty easy and obvious solution! Without Nonna, Victoria would just be an aimless wanderer with no emotional attachment to anything. Her family is gone, she has no friends, she has no ties to her new country, she has to find a new career (if she even cares to have one), etc. People generally need a purpose in life. People generally aren’t hedonistic flesh machines, drifting from one pleasure party to the next. It’s a bit of a cliche, but Victoria needs her family, fake or not. She can’t go back in time and give herself a proper childhood, but she can certainly get it right with Nonna.
Having said all of that, there are few oddities about this opening episode that ultimately leaves a strange aftertaste. I know the knight captain vouched for Victoria, so the authorities eventually acquiesce and allow Nonna to go home with a relative stranger (again, Victoria literally met the kid just a day ago by this point). But that’s still odd, right? Like why would the knight captain trust Victoria this much after having only just met her? And even with him as a guarantor, no one else has any objections? No one else finds it strange that a woman no one has ever met before — an immigrant from another country — just decides to become a random child’s guardian? Or that nobody even spent more than 24 hours looking for Nonna’s mother? Hell, did they even try at all? Most of all, the kid sure acclimates quickly to Victoria. Granted, her life with her mother probably wans’t full of sunshine and rainbows. But if I know anything about kids (which isn’t a lot, mind you), it’s that they tend to be deathly loyal to their parents no matter how shitty they’ve been treated. The fact that Nonna doesn’t even cry for her mother is very strange to me.
I wasn’t blown away by this opening episode. I also doubt that every single episode will have this much for me to talk about. So yeah, I’m going to relegate it to the “Everything else” pile for now.
Red River Ep. 1
This show isn’t technically an isekai, but the mechanics are familiar. Rather than traveling to a new world, Yuri gets sent back in time. Imagine, however, almost being transported while taking a bath. Man, that’s gotta be one of the worst ways to go. I guess the only way it’d be worse is if our protagonist was in the middle of taking a dump.
You know how whenever protagonists travel to a new world or back in time, they often ignore the fact that they ever had friends and family? So many of them never even consider trying to to go back home because their new life in their new world is too much more fun? Well, not only does Yuri get her first kiss with her lifelong childhood friend, she also has such a warm, loving family. I’m thus glad to see that she is actually devastated to leave them behind. Don’t get me wrong, because I don’t enjoy the fact that she’s sad. It’s just nice to see one of these characters actually give a damn about their past life. It’s just too bad that this won’t last, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
If you think about it, it’s not just the protagonist who should be devastated, right? Their friends and family must also be devastated to lose them! And yet, that’s a perspective we rarely ever see. We rarely ever get to know how the ones left behind are coping with the protagonist’s sudden and inexplicable disappearance. In fact, I kinda want to see a series that explores this idea. Guy or a girl disappears, but we don’t go with them. We don’t see them reincarnate or whatever. Instead, we’re stuck watching how their loved ones deal with the loss. Then again, I guess this would be no different from any mystery anime where someone goes missing (oh, Laura Palmer…). Ah well, it was a fun thought experiment.
Man, I wrote all those words instead of talking about the actual anime. But I mean, you know how it goes. Girl finds herself pulled back through time, girl wakes up as a stranger in a strange land, girl learns that she’s only here to serve as a sacrifice, girl gets saved by “hot” prince, girl makes out with “hot” prince, so on and so forth. Not necessarily in that order, but you get the gist. Like I mentioned earlier, Yuri is initially heartbroken to lose the only life she’s ever known. But the anime already spoils it for us that she will not only lead an army against the woman who summoned her, she’ll likely fall in love with the prince who saved her. Hm, I don’t think this girl will find her way back to modern Japan…
Personally, I can’t imagine losing modern plumbing. Sorry, but people take this for granted. Go shit in a hole for a week and see how that makes you feel.
One last thing… these are the Hittites, right? I mean, that’s what they call themselves. Are they supposed to be this light-skinned though? I feel like these characters should have a complexion typical of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean people, so more olive-colored or somewhere in the medium brown range. I shouldn’t say more, because like with the Jaadugar anime, I’m relatively clueless about the Hittites.
The Drops of God Ep. 13
The contest for the Fourth Apostle is all about first loves, and I think the results of this one is actually kinda interesting. Spoiler: Issei takes it this time, but they’ve been trading wins back and forth anyway. No one’s going to build a big lead, so I wasn’t surprised to see him come up on top this week. What I find fascinating about the result, however, is why Shizuku lost. When he heard his father’s poem, he tried to find a wine that reflected his mother. After all, it’s a fair assumption if somewhat naive. Meanwhile, Issei pursued a vintage that reminded him of his first and lost love. After all, who here can say they managed to get with the first person they ever had feelings for? It isn’t unheard of, but it isn’t common either. As a result, Issei better understood what their father’s feelings this time around. It’s sweet of Shizuku to think that his mother and father were fated for each other, but also wholly unrealistic. Our parents are humans too, and just like everyone else, they probably have their own messy history of lost loves, sordid affairs, and/or painful regrets. Shizuku’s naivete here reflects his naivete with wine in general, which is a not-so-subtle reminder that he needs more experience in all walks of life. And this brings me to my next point…
…it’s funny how they keep emphasizing Issei’s history with women. This is a guy who fucks. He’s been with his first love Julietta, he’s been with Maki, and he’s been with Loulan. And that’s just the ones we’ve seen. Who knows how many women he’s been with! Meanwhile, you get the sense that Shizuku is probably still virgin.
Everything else about everything else:
If you’re curious what falls under this series of posts, here’s the current list:
- Goodbye, Lara
- Iron Wok Jan
- The Insipid Prince’s Furtive Grab for the Throne
- LIAR GAME
- Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games
- Victoria of Many Faces
- Red River
- Clevatess
- The Villager of Level 999
- Mebius Dust
- Draw This Then Die!
- I Became a Legend After My 10 Year-Long Last Stand
- The Drops of God
- Jaadugar: A Witch’s Life in Mongol
As you can see, next week’s post will have a lot more to chew on. For a show like Clevatess, it airs Wednesday morning, so I can’t really watch and write it up before this post goes up. After all, I have a day job. As a result, Clevatess‘s first episode will be covered in next week’s post. Where are the rest of the shows? Where are the bog standard villainess series or the generic isekai anime? I’m doing something a little different this season, but I’ll still cover them.