Chatty AF 215: 2024 Summer Season Wrap-Up (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

CAITLIN: I’m still using Twitter. Sorry. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God. I have a Tumblr!

VRAI: I have a Tumblr, too, but I don’t share it because that’s just where I go to be excited that Alex Hirsch came back after ten years to confirm that my headcanon was correct.

PETER: I love that: “In my defense, I have a Tumblr account.”

[Chuckling]

[Introductory musical theme]

VRAI: Hello and welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. This is our wrap-up for the summer 2024 season, where we look back at the shows that were, as well as sequels and carryovers from this season or from spring. My name is Vrai. I’m the daily operations manager here at AniFem. You can find me on Bluesky sometimes @writervrai. And with me today are Caitlin and Peter.

CAITLIN: Hello, I’m Caitlin. I do stuff on occasion for Anime Feminist, and I write reviews at Anime News Network. This season, I’m going to be covering Ranma and Yakuza Fiancé, so enjoy that.

PETER: And I’m Peter Fobian, I’m an editor at Anime Feminist, and I’m @peterfobian on Bluesky.

VRAI: If you’ve never joined us for one of our seasonal podcasts before, what we do is we use our premiere digest. We keep that static because shows will obviously move up and down in how they’re handling things, how well they do things, if new caveats come up as they continue to air, but that would be a major headache to continue updating. So, just for ease of reference, we go with the list as it’s established after the premieres and discuss new information as it comes up. We start at the bottom and come up, and then at the end of the podcast, we will cover our sequels and carryovers.

I think it’s also worth acknowledging that wrapping up this season is a little bit weird because we did lose Nicholas Dupree very suddenly and tragically, and he was a major and beloved part of the anime criticism community, and he is extremely missed.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

VRAI: Yeah, if there’s a little weirdness on this one, we’re sorry about that.

Alright, as always, we invite you to look back at our three-episode check-ins and our mid-season. We will try not to linger too long on shows if we already talked a lot about them in the mid-season and not a lot has changed.

Peter, did you finish No Longer Allowed in Another World? Did it do anything interesting at the end?

PETER: Uh… I finished it. I don’t think it really did anything that would surprise or excite anyone if they weren’t interested in the initial premise of him making jokes about wanting to kill himself all the time.

CAITLIN: Alright!

VRAI: [crosstalk] Nope! Hardly at all!

Alright, VTuber Legend we’re going to pass over, mostly because Chiaki will be recommending it at our end-of-season because she, I think, really clicked with those big gay disaster streamers, and it seems like it really, really worked for her, and we spent a fair amount of time on it on the mid-season. So, look forward to that, folks at home.

The next show up is Pseudo Harem, which Chiaki did leave some notes for. I will quote from her here. “So, this show turned out to be really earnest, straight up having a first ending with a climax and credit roll in Episode 7. This show was kind of sweet and playful up till then, but the romance factor gets elevated to equal footing and enjoyable for me as Eiji enrolls in college and continues to date Rin as she finishes out high school. There’s nothing all that surprising about it, but it’s got a nice ending and I enjoyed it for what it was. 

Also, as a plural person, although Rin isn’t actually plural, it’s fun to have a tinge of that in the reading. I felt this when Eiji decided to ‘break up’ with his harem to focus on Rin herself, and she chides him that all her personalities have become a part of her. She proceeds to go on a date where she refuses to be her normal self and date[s] Eiji as her various other personas throughout the day. I know it’s all done with acting on her part, but it holds parallels to how I am sometimes.”

So that’s, you know, cool. It seems like a pretty mid-tier but enjoyable romcom at the end of the day.

PETER: Pretty shocking, actually. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Yeah. I mean, I guess those 4-koma work out sometimes. Alright, I will step back from that and allow you two to get your feelings out about The Elusive Samurai.

CAITLIN: I mean, I don’t actually have a ton to say about it for the purposes of this podcast. I really liked it. I am hoping and praying that it doesn’t end up descending into shounen mush. You know, it’s a really, really good-looking show. Good action. It introduces a teenage character who’s older than the rest of the… what’s the group called?

PETER: The Elusive Warriors?

CAITLIN: Yes. He’s older than the other Elusive Warriors, and he’s got the team mom kind of vibe. He’s spent a lot of time basically taking care of a village of children whose parents were all murdered.

But other than that, I don’t really have a whole ton to go into about it. Peter, maybe you’ve got some more thoughts about things to discuss with it?

PETER: I think we kind of just discussed at length the show’s various virtues in the last podcast. And I mean, it’s still going strong. It’s got a gorgeous adaptation. The characters are very charming. It mixes in a lot of humor along with some extreme violence. These kids are cutting adults’ heads off, and there’s a lot of blood during fights. But especially in the later half, something to discuss is how it’s able to kind of keep the tone lighthearted while not shying away from the reality of the violence they’re forced to commit whatsoever, the violence of the era. Even… you know, it’s tongue in cheek about the sport where they used to shoot dogs with blunted arrows. When it just comes to violence, it plays it pretty straight, which I respect. I also like Fubuki, and I’m disappointed that it ended just before Ayako’s arc, but I guess that’s something to look forward to since they already announced Season 2.

VRAI: So if you were enjoying Sengoku Youko and want more historical shounen or you’re waiting for Hell’s Paradise to come back, this might be one to look into.

We talked a fair bit about Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian on the mid-season. Alex left some notes about their thoughts, and from the looks of things, they have dropped it since then, so I guess it didn’t improve. Peter, do you have any last thoughts?

PETER: I feel like it just kind of had a non-ending. The show is really the Yuki show, and it kind of ends with them having a thing to determine who gets to be the next student council president, an election arc I can’t imagine anyone being interested in at all. The appeal of the show is really just the hijinks between Yuki and Alya being tsundere. And even Alya’s stuff is wearing thin, since the author obviously knows what they’re doing with Yuki more. Once again, a Season 2 has been announced. I wonder if they will have any actual narrative movement in that one, because this one, they just kinda found a stopping point and stopped it, and that’s all.

VRAI: So I guess Pseudo Harem ended up the stronger het romcom of this season.

PETER: Oh, my God, maybe. Yeah.

VRAI: There we go. Sometimes things are weird.

CAITLIN: Yeah, it was a pretty gay season, to be honest.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Yeah. It’s good to eat. Caitlin, you got all the way to the end of Shoshimin: How to Become Ordinary. Was it good all the way through?

CAITLIN: I honestly— Like, I don’t know how I feel! Like— So, the last arc is about Osanai taking Jogoro around to all of these different dessert shops for summer vacation. And then it culminates with her being kidnapped by these girls in her class, and it turns out that it was all kind of plotted by her. It definitely kind of brings through that whole idea where it’s like, yeah, Osanai is actually pretty fucked up. She does not play around. When she wants to get to someone, she’s actually really determined and creative about it. I just… It was a little strange the way they went about it. I don’t know. The last episode was a while ago since it’s a short series, so I’m trying to remember my feelings about it.

To be honest, I had a really hard time absorbing the last episode because I really, really don’t like Osanai’s voice actor, which I talked about in our mid-season check-in. She’s very breathy. She kinda uses that very high-pitched feminine voice. She doesn’t modulate a lot. Even when she’s kind of going into that whole “Oh, yeah, you got me,” the whole parlor room scene sort of thing, she doesn’t really change her performance for it. So I just find it— Maybe it’s misogyny! I don’t know! I have a really hard time staying engaged when I’m listening to a monologue specifically in that kind of tone. It’s just not easy for me to listen to.

VRAI: I mean, I guess it says something that it’s been, you know—and in fairness, a lot has happened—but that it’s been two weeks and you’ve already kind of forgotten the finale. That sort of says something in itself.

CAITLIN: It’s been… It ended early. It was only 10 episodes.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Right, you said it was 11. [Corrects self] 10.

CAITLIN: So it’s been nearly a month.

VRAI: Okay, fair dues to it. We’ll say mixed to positive and maybe check in on it when it gets its… Do you want to watch its sequel?

CAITLIN: I’m really bad at watching sequels even of shows I like.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: We’ll see what that season is like.

VRAI: There we go. And I mean, for what it’s worth, the folks in our Discord—which you can join by going to patreon.com/animefeminist for $5 a month—the folks who were following it seemed to really enjoy it all the way to the end. So, for that’s worth, which is not nothing!

Did Ossan Adventurer do anything interesting for the rest of its runtime?

PETER: Nah. They just had a big duel at the end. He fought his mentor. Whatever demon that everyone’s trying to defeat at the end doesn’t even make an appearance. So, maybe they’ll continue it later, but it just was like, “Okay.”

VRAI: It just stopped.

PETER: Yeah.

VRAI: And Nokotan is still a shitpost show?

PETER: Yeah, just… It’s not funny. I don’t know what to say.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Just “If the humor works for you, it works for you; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing there for you”?

PETER: Yeah. Yep. Same with VTuber, to be honest. [Chuckles] That was kinda my feeling toward VTuber.

VRAI: Alright, Alex actually finished out Dahlia in Bloom, and they left some extra notes on the finale. To quote them: “My favorite bits of this show are when Dahlia and Wolf are nerding out together about the logistics of making magic gadgets, often with him gushing over how clever she is and making sure she gets appropriate recognition for her skills. They maintain a really nice platonic-but-could-be-more chemistry throughout the show. The show overall, though, isn’t much to write home about. It still looks really stiff, there are long, dull stretches that just aren’t engaging to watch, and while there are some nice moments, Dahlia herself doesn’t really feel like a particularly strongly written protagonist. I think I can hand the mic to Vrai” (hello) “to reiterate their statement from last time that if this concept sounds interesting to you, you might be better off checking out the source material since that won’t have the animation issues and you can engage with it more at your own pace.”

CAITLIN: Weird shadows…

VRAI: Moment of silence for Dahlia in Bloom, yet another in the long, long line of good joseimuke source material absolutely wrecked by projects without enough resources. Silence, sadness.

CAITLIN: Would you say it was… underwatered? It was not planted in fertile ground?

VRAI: Withered on the vine?

CAITLIN: Withered on the vine, perhaps?

VRAI: [crosstalk] There we go. Uh-huh. Alright, I’m going to put you in bad joke jail now. Sit and think about what you’ve done.

CAITLIN: [Chuckles] Aw.

VRAI: [Chuckles] So, Suicide Squad Isekai, I didn’t talk about it the midseason, and frankly, I have very little more to talk about it now. [Sighs] Honestly, it’s on me for putting it so high up the list, thinking that it might actually engage with some of the theoretical themes that were present in the premise, because this show is not interested in doing that at all! It looks pretty. It has some fun one-liners, some cool action scenes. It has no thoughts in its head whatsoever. There’s sort of a limp girlboss-type plot with the princess that’s kind of nothing. There’s an incredibly stupid and contrived plot twist at the very last minute to get the Joker in there, because must have more Joker.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Bishounen Joker.

VRAI: I would say this is more of a Deadpool 2 than a Birds of Prey situation. Like, it held my attention and I wouldn’t say, if you’re interested in it, don’t watch it. This is very, still, a ‘90s Batman: Animated type Harley—although really underplaying the abuse elements. She’s a fun sidekick character who’s having an adventure on her own, as it were. And that’s fun, but not anything particularly groundbreaking with her. Yeah, it’s head empty, no thoughts, brr. And it was only ten episodes.

CAITLIN: It’s here for a good time, not a long time, in both that it is a short series and also you will not be thinking about it for very long afterwards.

VRAI: Mm-hm. I think one of our contributors and a member of the Discord, Caitlin Donovan, did a write-up for this show on her blog, Lady Love and Justice, that summed it up pretty well. So, shout-out to that. And let’s move on from it and not think about it anymore.

Senpai Is an Otokonoko. Caitlin. Do you want to talk? I need to take a drink of water.

CAITLIN: So, I have not actually watched the last episode yet. I hit a point in Persona 3 that was really dealing with a lot of feelings that I’ve been needing to deal with. Which, speaking of, this was one of Nick’s shows on Anime News Network. So… miss you, buddy! Rebecca ended up having to write the last episode summary.

VRAI: [Speaking through an exhale] Yeah.

CAITLIN: You know, I feel pretty secure that my assessment early on was pretty accurate, that it was going to be about three kids figuring themselves out, figuring each other out—figuring themselves out in the context of their relationships with one another, I should say—and that sometimes it would be messy, and that’s fine because identity is messy. The show hasn’t really touched, since we last checked in, on Saki’s potentially aro-ace elements. Apparently, there’s going to be a movie, so maybe it’ll talk about that then. I haven’t seen the last episode where Makoto comes out to their mom.

VRAI: Yeah, this show is definitely quite… Spoiler alert: this is one [where] we’ll have another write-up, so folks can check back then, but yeah, it’s definitely heavy, especially the stuff with Makoto and their mom. So just watch your headspace when you’re watching it. Even though it’s often very gentle and sweet and funny, yeah, it can get rough.

CAITLIN: Yeah. So, I was thinking about, partially, the arc where Ryuji and Makoto tried dating. And Ryuji, after a couple of dates, breaks up with Makoto being like, “I kinda feel like I’m gross doing this. Don’t you?” And it’s crushing to Makoto because I don’t think they did feel like it was gross, necessarily. But it was kind of touching on how figuring out your identity is a process, embracing yourself is a process. You have so many societal messages to try to sort through. Ryuji—

VRAI: Yeah, Ryuji… his internalized homophobia is, oof, heartbreaking, and there’s really nobody in show to reassure him at any point.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. Yeah! And I really appreciated how it didn’t present it as shaming him, it didn’t present it as he needs to get it figured out right away or that Makoto was just okay with it right away. What he said was really hurtful to Makoto. And it is something that he needs to work through. But it’s also not his fault that he’s feeling this way. And I think that is really… It’s heartrending, but it’s also very beautiful in how real it is.

VRAI: Yeah, I think this show doesn’t necessarily have the level of deftness as Shimanami Tasogare: Our Dreams at Dusk, which I think is pretty much the king of “Inter-Community Struggles: The Manga,” but I think it is reaching for the same place of things I think a lot of us wish we could see more in anime, multiple characters who are marginalized in different ways having the hedgehog’s dilemma, basically. You know, sometimes figuring out your shit will clash with other people figuring out their shit, and neither of you are necessarily wrong but you’ve still hurt each other. And it’s nice to see. It’s a good show, and I’m looking forward to the movie. I’m not entirely sure the movie will cover the whole comic. I know there are 10 volumes serialized, but it looks… I don’t know. Just looking at the list of chapters that haven’t been bound yet, it looks like it could be as many as 12. Chiaki would know better than me. So, we’ll see. I think it’ll probably at least reach a nice conclusion.

CAITLIN: My guess would be that the movie is going to be focused primarily on Saki’s family situation.

PETER: Yeah, they do leave that off.

CAITLIN: Yeah, that didn’t really get a lot of resolution in the show. And I really like how it’s handling it, because absent parents is another messy situation. We don’t know what the whole deal with her mom is; her dad is just not a good parent. He’s not a bad guy, but he is not someone who should be raising a child on his own. I don’t know, her mom definitely has the vibe of just “There’s something really wrong here,” and that’s why her grandmother is coming down so hard, like, “No, please don’t do it,” even though Saki needs to. She’s going to get hurt but she needs to face that. And, yeah, so I’m definitely looking forward to the movie and seeing how all that shakes out.

VRAI: How about Makeine [pronounced “mah-keh-EE-nay”] (which I will continue to pronounce wrong, I’m sure), Too Many Losing Heroines! Both of you watched this. How did it go? Well, I hear.

CAITLIN: I mean, it’s my favorite show of this season. It’s really good! I don’t really usually like this kind of show, but it just brings me so much delight every week. I think part of it is that while Nukumizu is… he has questionable taste in light novels and he’s kind of a gloomy guy, [but] he’s never shitty to the girls. Like, I feel like in Monogatari… I mean, we all know that Araragi sucks, right? This is just widely known.

VRAI: [crosstalk, whispered] So much!

PETER: Yep.

CAITLIN: The other one that comes to mind is… God, what is the really bad English title?

PETER: Bunny Girl Senpai?

CAITLIN: Rascal Doesn’t Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai?

PETER: Yeah.

VRAI: Uh-huh.

CAITLIN: What an awful title, by the way. Just terrible translation. Anyway, I haven’t watched it, but I know that in the first episode he makes a remark about a girl being cranky because she’s on her period, and that sucks!

PETER: Mm.

VRAI: Mm… I don’t like that series. It wishes— It’s “We have Monogatari at home.” Anyway, moving on!

CAITLIN: Anyway, Nukumizu is not that kind of guy. He still has a personality. He has enough personality of his own. The one in the series who is kind of shitty and selfish is Anna, the main girl. But Nukumizu— They all have relationships with each other. You know, it’s not just Nukumizu being a void of all of these girls being drawn straight to him. The girls make friends with each other and they support each other, as well as him supporting them. Yeah, no, it’s stunningly animated, which can make the difference between a pretty good series and a great series, especially when you have stuff that involves a lot of character acting. Yeah, Peter, do you have any thoughts?

PETER: I think I just kind of agree.

[Chuckling]

PETER: I do like that they kind of— You’re correct. He doesn’t— I think it is in most cases, the writer would have made the social group revolve around Nukumizu, but they’ve done a good job of making it so that he is a friend within a group so that it doesn’t feel like all the girls are just radiating toward him for no reason. I like that they’re just sort of a support group of people whose high school romances really didn’t work out well for them. But on the other hand, it also makes sure not to make any of them like a perfect victim, so you can see that all of them are weird or shitty or some combination of weird and shitty, as most teenagers are, so that it doesn’t seem like fate has put upon them that they don’t get the love life that they deserved or anything like that.

CAITLIN: And all the winning heroines are great!

PETER: Yeah, that too.

CAITLIN: I love spending time with them. Every time Anna’s friends, Karen and what’s-his-name are on screen… it’s hilarious how there is a run-on gag that those two are constantly fucking. They’re just so horny for each other, and Anna is horrified. And I love it because (A) it’s really funny, just consistently, just super funny; (B) it’s acknowledgment that, like, hey, teens who are dating have sex, and it is a strike against the sexlessness that I have complained about in anime quite frequently. You know, it’s fun. Oh, and the last episode was great. The anime-original last episode.

PETER: In which those two are shown dual-fellating an ice cream cone, yes.

CAITLIN: [Laughs]

PETER: Yeah. I do think that that’s the other component. It’s not like the people who they didn’t end up with are jerks either, but you can also see the way in which even though those people are good people and you’re a good person—or the main girls are good people, also—hanging around the romantic couple can be intolerable, sort of necessitating that they find a friends group where they can just not have to be constantly afraid of being traumatized by seeing the person they like sucking down an ice cream cone with another person or something. And I think that’s good because in a lot of other high school romcoms of this type, you would see just the person, the osananajimi who doesn’t end up with the main character, just kind of passively accepts their fate and hangs out with them anyway, even while they’re obviously doing romantic things with the actual love interest of the story, which is nice because usually all you’re left to do is feel sorry for those characters and admire how passively they’re willing to accept being in the presence of their constant… a reminder of their failure to get the thing they wanted most.

CAITLIN: They’ve come to root for them.

PETER: Yeah.

CAITLIN: You know, sometimes you’ll have a climactic scene where the childhood friend is like… well, like Anna does in the first episode: “You gave so much for this love! You can’t give up on them!” And, you know, that’s that. Oh, it’s supposed to be that she’s totally cool with it now, but that’s not how feelings work.

PETER: Especially teenage feelings.

CAITLIN: Yeah, I also really liked the arc with Lemon and… I can’t remember any of the boys’ names. But Lemon and Chihiro [sic], where Lemon’s going and hanging out with him and Chihiro [sic] is like, “I’m fine with it. I just want him to be happy. I’m cool. Also, I am doing all of this very elaborate spycraft, trying to catch up with them.”

PETER: Mm-hm. Oh, yeah!

CAITLIN: [Chuckles] You know? And it’s such a very balanced sort of “I want to be okay with it but I’m not okay with it, and I’m totally cool with their friends, but also I know that she has feelings for him, so I’m not actually totally cool with it, but I want to be okay with it, because I’m nice, she’s nice… What should be the problem here? There shouldn’t be ‘But also, I don’t feel okay about it,’” and I just really appreciated that it was able to kinda go into those feelings, even without having a bunch of explicit declarations of “That’s what she’s feeling about it.” You can infer it from the dialogue and from the story. And, you know, I love a show that has faith in its audience’s intelligence. It acknowledges that you can feel a lot of different ways and it’s not tidy, and in the end, they get it figured out and Chihiro [sic] is delightful. Love that all of the girls are fujoshi in that, by the way.

PETER: Oh, true. Yeah, yeah, the—

CAITLIN: Except for Anna, who’s the most normal girl in the world.

PETER: Somehow. Yeah, yeah, it really captures the humor and the tragedy of the human condition, that being our inability to control our own emotions and act rational. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Alright, is this one getting a continuation or is it just nice and concluded?

CAITLIN: I don’t think they’ve announced anything.

PETER: I don’t think so.

CAITLIN: But I would be shocked if they didn’t.

PETER: Same.

CAITLIN: Because the novels are still going, and it was… assuming it’s not just my bubble…

PETER: It was popular. It was popular.

CAITLIN: It is popular. Okay. Well, because here’s the thing: light novel fans love it, but also, people who don’t like light novels, myself included, also really loved it. It’s a crossover hit between those two groups.

VRAI: That’s a little bit “Everything is either a potato or not a potato,” but I get what you’re saying.

CAITLIN: Yeah, listen. It’s not often that friend of the site Frog and I agree about a light novel anime.

PETER: [Laughs] That’s the real crossover, yeah.

CAITLIN: Yeah! [Laughs]

PETER: If we can all agree Frog was completely right about this one. [Laughs]

VRAI: Alright, rock on. So, this is the actual winner het romcom of the season.

CAITLIN: Yeah! By a large margin.

PETER: The one where nobody gets the relationship they want! [Chuckles] Yeah.

VRAI: I am moving us on…

PETER: [Chuckles]

VRAI: … to a show nobody watched but me, I think, because… well, because Aniplex. I don’t know, Peter. Am I wrong? Did other people besides me watch Atri?

PETER: I don’t believe it was very popular.

VRAI: [Laughs] Alright then. So, I did finish this one all the way out. It turned out better than I was expecting. I think it’s still gonna turn a lot of people off that it went the romance route. I will say it probably did the least bad version of the romance between this 17-, 18-year-old boy and this robot who looks about 12 and was the one who saved him when he was a child and… it’s a whole thing. And she feels indebted to him because she was built for his mom. I still think that’s conceptually extremely side-eye because it’s one of those “Well, you could have done anything and you chose to do it this way” that’s always worth talking about when it comes to very young, very childlike characters as romantic heroines. I think that if we take that at its face, it’s probably the most sexless version of the trope that you can get, which made it easier to power through all the way to the end. I was sort of bracing myself for “Well, there won’t be a sex scene in this anime, but if there was one in the visual novel, there’ll be some kind of fade to black.” And they veer away from that explicitly at a certain point in the story.

And then when it starts to get into nakige territory, it’s a little bit cheesy. Not quite entirely what I was expect— I’m just gonna spoil this because nobody who isn’t already a fan of the game is probably going to seek this out. So, it turns out that his grandmother, who built Atri, the robot, was working on this island project that would be a biodome. And she has a failing battery, Atri does, but she was programmed to be the AI system to run this biodome that would help revitalize the Earth, which means, you know, he won’t be able to see her anymore, or she doesn’t get in the pod and dies and forgets all about him anyway.

CAITLIN: [Gasps lightly]

VRAI: I know. Drama.

CAITLIN: Tragedy!

VRAI: I know! So sad. So, you know, they part and he goes off to become a scientist. I will say, a lot of what I liked in the first couple episodes was how it dealt with the sort of post-apocalyptic climate change stuff. That really gets lost in the sauce once it starts going into the romance “Do robots feelings?” thing, which is pretty basic in most respects and not very interesting, except that I did enjoy the main character and failed childhood friend having a conversation where he’s like, “Well, how do I know she feels anything about me? She’s a robot. You know, she’s just following her programming and predicting the response that she wants me to hear, and—”

CAITLIN: “She’s just a large language model!”

VRAI: Uh-huh. And his friend is like, “Well, that’s kind of like what I do as a human.”

CAITLIN: No.

VRAI: “Aren’t we all just sort of calculating inputs and trying to modulate a response?” And I don’t know.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Boo!

VRAI: As a neurodivergent person, I sort of enjoyed that. Like, you know…

CAITLIN: Mm, sorry. [Chuckles]

VRAI: It’s okay. That sort of idea of “Isn’t the whole ‘Do robots have a heart?’ thing kind of stupid when you get to a certain level of contact and interpersonal relationship? Aren’t we all sort of just evaluating stimuli at a certain point if you have all these other data points that this person is clearly experiencing? Joy and sorrow. It doesn’t matter if it’s quote-unquote ‘real,’” And yeah, I don’t… I don’t think it meshes quite well to talk about it with AI data language models. This is a little more Her.

CAITLIN: So, the Chinese room kind of situation.

VRAI: Uh-huh. And the epilogue is kind of nice, where we blast forward like three generations and finally Earth has revitalized itself enough that this first island doesn’t need to be online anymore, and it turns out that she’ll only have one day left to live when she pops out of that pod, but he’s built a neural network where her data can exist and uploaded himself, and then they both exist there, and both of their avatars are children, forever, going to see his mom. And I thought, “Oh, this is schmaltzy, but it’s kinda cute.”

Atri is sort of like a show of middling ideas executed very prettily, middling and sometimes very frustrating ideas. I don’t know that I recommend it to people because, like I said, the most interesting things about it, the environmental stuff and the disability stuff, doesn’t really make it all the way through to the end as strong themes, but it definitely ended better than I thought it would when I hit that midpoint. So, yeah.

CAITLIN: Okay.

VRAI: Let’s talk about Twilight Out of Focus, which I’m behind on because I like the manga so I got lazy about following the anime. But you finished it.

CAITLIN: I did. So, did you read in the manga up to the point where the anime ended?

VRAI: I think so. I’ve read the first three volumes. So, I think… Yeah.

CAITLIN: So, where did the three volumes end?

VRAI: So, the first volume is like the first four episodes. Which, by the way, I think, is probably the anime’s greatest weak point, is that you can tell this series was a one-shot that grew legs, so the first four episodes kind of complete and then it has to start back up again. But so, the first volume is their first love story, and then the second volume is the club president’s sort of B-side Story, and then the third volume comes back to Mao. I gotta say, the anime is doing a heroic— I sort of assumed they would just cut them and have a fade to black, but I think they’re doing their damnedest to preserve those character moments of intimacy and weave in the sort of—I will give them the grace of assuming—deliberately sort of student-ish cinematographic language without… you know, we can’t show dicks, which is fine, I think. I do think it loses a little bit of the sensuality of the art of the manga, which it’s a little bit freer to express because it doesn’t have to worry about broadcast standards. But I think the emotional core of it translates really well, and I really applaud them for trying to walk that line, honestly.

CAITLIN: Yeah, because here’s the thing that a lot of the puritans on social media won’t tell you: sex scenes are important to character building quite often. And here, they’re very important. They are presented as major moments in their relationships. They are [at] a time where they are figuring out their feelings for each other. They are discovering new sides to themselves as they have these first experiences. The sex scenes are extremely important in informing their relationships, which I love. I think that’s great. I should probably check out the manga because I do really enjoy a really good character-driven sex scene. Also, you know, it is just sexy. Like, I’m gonna get canceled for “Oh, no, I’m reading sex scenes about teenagers. Oh well.” [Chuckles]

VRAI: I strongly believe in the “assuming they’re 18” rule with series like this.

CAITLIN: I mean, at some point I stopped caring. It is like the question “Is this feminist or not?” It’s not an interesting conversation to me. You know, as long as they don’t look blatantly underage or there’s not crappy relationship dynamics… because it still remains that my kink is a healthy relationship with good communication between people that love each other. And I mean, that’s my personal taste. But as long as it has not blatantly got the stuff that I don’t like or it’s not like blatantly child characters, it’s all good. I can just roll with it.

VRAI: I think that’s a deeper conversation than we have time to get into on this podcast.

CAITLIN: Yeah. Yeah, but whatever. Anyway,

VRAI: I think… You know, Toni has brought this up in the past and they’re right, that there is this sort of issue with a lot of really good recent BL that it’s also very G-rated, like Given, the TV series, SasaMiya are both very… they’re not getting any further than their first kiss in those series. And they’re very good and emotional, but, you know, sometimes also queer people would like to have sexy content that is sexy. I don’t know. I think it’s good. I think it’s worth checking out as long as slice-of-life high school romance is your thing and you don’t mind that it does have a little bit of that stop-start pacing because of the nature of how the manga was serialized, so it kind of draws to a close and then picks back up again and then… duh-buh-duh-buh-duh-buh. But it’s good.

Alright, I am going to move us on to Narenare: Cheer For You! Which, if Atri is a show of middling to bad ideas executed beautifully, Narenare is a series full of good ideas executed middling to badly. I compared it in the mid-season to Action Heroine Cheer Fruits, and boy, does that continue strongly, because that is also a series that I didn’t end up recommending on the site—spoilers for this—because I really liked the things it was doing well, but ultimately, those things got dragged down by these long stretches in the middle where it was just doing club show things and not particularly well, and its messages kind of got muddled in the middle. 

Like, there’s a lot of really strong content in here. You know, we have the heroine. The main character throughout is dealing with the yips, and that’s a persistent issue for her character, dramatically. She goes to see a doctor regularly about it. It’s very serious about it. You’ve got another character who has got a serious injury and uses a chair and is going through physical therapy, and that’s an ongoing part of her character and her relationship to sports. It’s very heartfelt about cheering as being there for your community and wanting to reach out to people around you.

But it’s also just kind of slipshod. It’s got— When I think about looking at it on paper, I can see how it all was a really good idea for a show that all came together and worked, as this idea of: our main character was traumatized by this sports accident, she makes this club and ultimately is able to sort of reconcile the trauma of that event and the other people who are traumatized by it as well. But it gets so lost in the weeds in the middle that by the time it comes back around to that plot, it’s suddenly introduced a character in the 11th hour who we’ve seen once or twice in the background in the first half and then went away for most of it, so that totally fails to hit.

The cheer sequences are really limited by the rigs and… Not even the rigs—the blocking and storyboarding that has to be done around the rigs. It ends up looking really flat. There’s not a lot of dynamic movement and camera angle that they can do with it, and that’s kind of a bummer that’s in this series that’s supposed to be so extremely about the athleticism and artistry of cheer and these other athletic traditions that have fed into it. The yuri subtext in the two background characters goes a fat lot of nowhere. Like, I think you can interpret that they’re dating, but we’re confirming nothing and also we dropped that plot thread halfway through, like so many other things.

It’s, by far, not the worst show that I’ve watched, even this season. But it’s kind of a disappointment because P.A. Works is known for their high mark of quality, and this is just kind of confused and I wish it had had longer in the cooker. And… yeah. So that’s that.

CAITLIN: Not up to P.A. Works’ usual standards.

VRAI: Mm-hm. Which is a shame, especially because it hits on a lot of themes and subjects that you don’t see covered as often in anime. Although I’m told that Uma Musume, its later seasons, does do some pretty good stuff with sports injuries, according to Dee, so that’s cool.

PETER: Hell yeah. It does.

VRAI: Speaking of P.A. Works shows that could have been gayer…

PETER: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Mayonaka Punch. I liked it, but yeah, my point stands.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: I do agree it could have been gayer. Now, I also think that this was a series that I ended up doing the last episode review in place of Nick because it was one of his series. It was also his pick for the best show of the year. So, you know, I have a lot of feelings tied up into it right now—even though it’s a goofy comedy! Normally it would be something I would just be laughing about, so if my emotions around it are coming across kind of disjointed, that is why. So I just want to get that out there for the listening audience.

So, anyway… So, it could be gayer, yes. Now, I do think that there are some implications that, when they did their whole plan, the name that they came up with for this mysterious figure from Live’s past was Ai. Also, I’m very inconsistent with how I pronounce her name. Just roll with it. Anyway, you know, their name was Ai, which is a very feminine name. There were romantic implications. So it could have been gayer, yes, but I do think there is a good amount of subtext there. Men don’t matter in… [Chuckles]

VRAI: [crosstalk] Oh, yeah, it’s rich in subtext.

CAITLIN: I really like how it concluded, actually, with the whole plot and the fact that the big thing that had Live remembering Masaki and craving her blood was that, in a fit— It was so anticlimactic. It was just like the last thing in the show. In a fit of rebellion, Live is just like, “Fuck this! I’m going outside! I want to go in the sunlight! This is bullshit!” Goes out in the sunlight, gets her shit wrecked, falls down as a bat. Little five-year-old Masaki comes along because, like, “Oh, what’s this?” Live bites her, and it’s the last taste of blood she had before falling asleep for 20 years. And that’s it! That’s it. You know, a lot of people were just like, “That’s so anticlimactic!” I’m like, “But that is so in spirit with the show.”

VRAI: Mm-hm. Yeah, no, I appreciate the throwing away of it like that. I think some— You know, everybody was really moved by Fu’s backstory episode, and I feel like that threw off the calibration for the rest of the show, because that one is really quite sincere, and then everybody else has, like, comedy tragic backstories. And you’re like, “Okay, but where’s the…?” But I did a cry.

CAITLIN: I mean, Ichiko’s backstory is still pretty sad.

VRAI: [crosstalk] I mean, it’s sad, but the imagery and the level of it is kind of silly, like with the old-timey peasant clothes and the…

CAITLIN: They went silly with the bells.

PETER: Yeah, she was kind of like the match-selling girl type background or something, and you’re just like, “Wow, this is saccharine, to the point where it’s a little ridiculous.”

VRAI: Yeah. So, you have that episode really on, that’s very Zombie Land Saga, and then the rest of the show isn’t really doing that, which is fine. That’s a perfectly valid choice for the comedy, and I think it’s often very funny, but I don’t think one can blame the viewers for having been set up for another emotional experience to some extent. 

It’s kind of like… I watched this show with my partner, because, of course, I did: it’s gay vampires. And they brought up a really interesting point, that the event that kicks off the series is Masaki punching one of her collaborators, and that’s treated as a serious thing, not unjustifiably, and the ways in which Masaki is a shit and digging herself in deeper with this. And then the rest of the series is sort of about the way that trauma lingers with her, and there’s kind of some nice closure in the finale where she talks about, like, “Yeah, I did. I fucked up, and I can’t just make it better with this one live stream.” And I appreciated all that. But there is sort of this element in the same way as with Fu’s backstory versus the rest of the girls. You know, you have this very serious episode where we’re meant to take the punch seriously and the fallout of it seriously, but then the rest of the show takes place in vampire slapstick wacky land where characters punch each other around, no problem, all the time. 

So, because that’s the reality that we’re living in, it, I think, very unintentionally, creates this dichotomy where it’s not just that Masaki is being traumatized by the fact that there are people who like to jump on the bandwagon later, because, you know, it’s fun, but it starts to, at a certain point, make them feel like, “Oh, well, they overreacted in the first place, because we’re seeing all this cartoon violence all the time. It’s not a big deal.” You know, it starts to diminish the fact that it kinda was a big deal, this culmination of this thing she did.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. Yeah, I could see that.

VRAI: And I think it’s a very good show. It’s a very funny, creative, beautiful show that has a lot to say about social media and working online, and I think it’s probably struck one of the better balances between talking about how it can be stressful to be an influencer without going over into, you know, “Oh, the woke agenda canceled me on the internets and… rawr!” about it. So, I think I point out the inconsistencies like this because I think, in many ways, it elevates itself very highly otherwise.

CAITLIN: Yeah, no, I could see that. I didn’t really think about that, I guess, because… I mean, I’m not saying this in like, “Well, I am smarter than everyone,” but because I am trained to kind of automatically create that separation between “This is slapstick violence” and “This is violence that is being treated seriously.” I think that media trains us for that, whether or not that is something that is right or correct. So, yeah. So it didn’t bother me.

I think that as people who create content online, who have… I don’t think any one of us has fucked up in the way that Masaki has, right? Like, you know… None of us are punching each other on stream.

VRAI: [crosstalk] No, but you work on the internet long enough, you will fuck up. We’ve all been there.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Yeah, you will fuck up. Yes, we’ve all been there. You know, I don’t need to start citing specific examples. Like, you know, we all have done it. And so, seeing Masaki go through that process of “Well, now what’s next?” is really interesting and figuring out “How much do I care? How much do I say, ‘Well, fuck them’? I can’t just say, ‘Well, fuck them,’ because that’s my audience and I can’t just alienate everyone, but also, some people are commenting bad faith.” That encounter with the girl at the bathhouse where the girl’s like, “I’m such a big fan!” and then she’s out there just glibly starting shit online because she doesn’t really realize what she is saying, the kind of impact it’s having, I think that really rang very true.

VRAI: Yeah, yeah, because it’s very easy to say, “Oh, well, you should just say, ‘Well, fuck ‘em!’” but no, sometimes you did fuck up and you need to address that and people are telling you things you need to hear and respond to. And then sometimes, also, after you’ve heard the things you need to hear and respond to, it continues to happen for three more months because people are discovering it for the first time.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. And people treat it like this one mistake is a… [like] that alone is a whole picture of who you are or that it is building an accurate picture of what you think and what you believe. And it’s not, necessarily. It’s just that, you know— But also you fucked up— I love that this show is like, it’s both: you fuck up and you face the consequences, but also people are so shitty about it and it really fucks with your head. And it’s not just one or the other. Both things are true, and I really appreciate that.

VRAI: Yeah. I think when MayoPan is cooking, it is some really good stuff. And I think it’s an easy… I don’t know if I’d pick it as my best of the year, but I think it is an easy recommendation as a very gifted, good show.

Alright, so, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, I am not going to talk about here because we did an entire retrospective about it. I know my audio on it is kind of shitty. Sorry, I have a new mic now. But yeah, what I will say about it—

CAITLIN: Don’t they sound so much better, folks?

VRAI: Yay! It’s a very, very good show that I think was severely slept on. Not to say, “And you didn’t watch it, and you’re bad people.” I think it wasn’t really very well advertised, it dropped at a weird time, it’s heavy subject matter, but it’s an excellent show about an everyday apocalypse and the, both, complicity and atrocities that we have, living in…

CAITLIN: Society?

VRAI: In society and in turbulent times.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] We live in a society.

VRAI: We do live in a society, I think that you’ll find. But also, just the ways we need to cope, to just be normal to cope when the world is horrifying. I think that it delves into very dark subject matter while keeping a certain amount of levity and care for characters that you can invest in and want to see do well and that the narrative wants to see do well, also. It’s also pretty gay. So, yeah, I really don’t know how better to sell it to you than that, but that probably says more about my taste. [Chuckles] It’s a very, very good show and is— I will say, if you watch it, do not watch Episode 0. Watch episodes 1 through 16. That’s a complete, contiguous story. Episodes 0 and 17 are meant to be watched one right after the other and, because of some of the changes from the manga, I think don’t fit in as well with the anime adaptation but are kind of interesting. Listen to the retrospective for more.

Alright. We are going to make a quick dash through the sequels. Oh, God. Oh, God. This is just going to be me talking more, isn’t it?

PETER: Could be.

VRAI: It is.

CAITLIN: [Obscured by crosstalk] chime in occasionally.

VRAI: Monogatari: Off & Monster Season will not be eligible for a recommendation this season because it is still ongoing. But Toni, our resident Monogatari enjoyer, did leave me some notes about it, so I will quote them here:

“AniFem resident Monogatari appreciator here. Monogatari: Off Season & Monster Season is fantastic. I’m so happy to have our favorite autistic-coded corpse Ononoki back to replace Araragi as the girl-helper-in-chief, especially as her dynamic with both Nadeko and Tsukihi is truly delightful. This season bears more similarities to Monogatari’s second season than just Araragi being put on a bus. They’re both deeply meditative turns for the series as they bring on a new creative team and focus in on the girls’ relationships with each other and allow them to reflect on their journeys and come to form some sort of self-actualization.” [Clears throat] [Speaks in a whisper] Sorry, folks, I ran out of tea!

[Returns to normal voice] “Similar to Itamura’s entrance in the second season, our new director, Yoshizawa Midori, takes confident control of the reins of the behemoth to lend her distinctively experimental and baroque style to this entry of the series. And having a woman in the director’s chair—for the first time—could not be more important to this particular set of stories. Similar to Hanekawa in ‘Tsubasa Tiger,’ our formerly-fetishized-by-the-camera Nadeko has to confront her own tendencies towards dissociation and running away from parts of herself that are angrier, hornier, and generally messier. While Nadeko has been one of my favorite characters by far since Nadeko Medusa, seeing her reflect on how all those messy characters she once was were necessary steps to get to the place she is and that she will continue to change, was deeply satisfying.

“But the real crown jewel of this core is Shinobu’s backstory arc, ‘Shinobu Gourmet,’ which uses a fairy tale structure reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen by way of Undead Murder Farce and Ikuhara to tell a gothic lesbian vampire story that is both campy and delightfully tropey, but also exquisitely rendered in shot composition, animation, and storytelling. There were several moments I teared up during this arc. Much of that credit goes to Yoshizawa Midori for this, as her innovative storyboards, often using silhouettes, extremely abstract imagery, and just plain badass ways of looking at women, along with the huge step up in animation that came this season compared to the borderline slideshow quality of previous seasons, has made Monogatari once again a pleasure to behold.

“Even the reentrance of Araragi back into the narrative couldn’t ruin the show for me, largely because there is no fanservice to be found. Monogatari has changed, y’all, but it’s still here and still going strong. Long live the former harem show that will never end.”

I look forward to getting there someday, but, you know, I have to suffer through Nisemonogatari first. We’ll enjoy that next year, folks.

Alright, next, we are going to talk about Oshi no Ko’s second season, which I believe I am the only one who watched, yes?

CAITLIN: I fell down on that one!

VRAI: [Chuckles] It’s okay. I think this will probably show up on the recommendations. I’m sort of waffling about it now because of spoilers from later in the manga, but I think I’m going to end up doing it, because I think this show is still so good when it’s doing entertainment industry stuff. It’s not as, probably, sharp-toothed as the first season is, but it’s also, in that vein, not as irresponsible as the dating show arc ended up being. We have an article about that, by the way! I think it’s more just in the vein of: this is interesting backstage information about how, in this case, the creation of a 2.5D stage play works, the backstage dealings when it comes to casting, competition between actors. I really loved that Kana and Akane get to go full Glass Mask this arc. That run of episodes was just a delight to roll around in for me.

I also really liked that Aqua is a character this season, as opposed to a vehicle for shitty monologues where he knows more than all of the other characters. I think it’s really helped by the fact that other characters sort of have a grasp on him and have expertise in things that he doesn’t. And also, the show is explicitly dealing with the fact, and even name-drops the fact (so, golf clap for that), that he has PTSD and a panic disorder because of witnessing his mom’s murder, as you would. So I think he is able to be more of a flawed character that I can root for and that doesn’t just feel like our dude protagonist that all the women are swooning for—although [Grits teeth] we’ll come back to that. [Returns to normal voice]

There’s also a lot of just good stuff with the secondary characters, male and female. Ruby kinda gets put on a bus until the last couple episodes. But in fairness, the finale does really set up for the next arc to give her a lot to do, so that made me a little bit more okay with it.

There are some really, really beautiful experimental sequences when it’s personifying these big, long monologues about the artistic process and what it means to be an artist and yada-yada and so forth, and I am an absolute sucker for that stuff. I know that this season’s production was a lot more troubled than the first season, but honestly, the show did, itself… it told me what it was doing on screen with the characters, and then it did it. You know, it focused on the parts it could do really well and that it cared the most about, which was the stuff on stage. And it absolutely nailed those bits such that I didn’t mind so much when corners had to be cut in other areas.

I will say that this second season really makes it stark how bad this series is at romance. All the characters become actively worse whenever the romantic subplots come round. You know, the best parts of Kana and Akane’s arc is getting to do their Glass Mask rivalry stuff. The season starts out really leaning into, heavily, how they don’t like each other because Kana’s got feelings for Aqua. And it’s almost like halfway through the season, the show realizes it’s doing that and shifts away to this much more complicated discussion of their animus toward each other because they have different philosophies about acting and also this past history with each other that’s a lot more interesting. 

But those early scenes just flatten Kana out to being this very paper-thin tsundere that’s not the interesting character that I know she can be in her best moments. She goes on a date with Aqua at one point. And… [Sighs] The post-play part of this season is frustrating, because a lot of those episodes—and the end of the first season, even—were really emphasizing that Aqua is becoming mentally like a 17-year-old and a separate person, basically, from Goro, the guy he was in his previous life. And then we come back to the romantic subplot, and all of a sudden we’re back to emphasizing how he was actually like an adult, 30-year-old man who knows how to plan a date, and Kana is griping about how everybody’s all into gender equality now, because she secretly wants Aqua to pay for them at their date. And I’m like, “I die.”

Oh, so, actually, this is the— It really is reminiscent of the worst parts of Kaguya-sama and kind of makes me think, in hindsight, that Akasaka kinda has a lowkey gender-essentialist view of romance and a very childish one and it’s just that Kaguya-sama happens to take place in a very childish but playful framework that covers up a lot of his weaknesses, but they look real bad here in this serious, dramatic entertainment thriller. And, yeah, this also means we have to come back to [Sighs]… to Ruby still having her feelings for Sensei from her previous life. And that sucks. And… ah! It’s just like the looming sword of Damocles.

And, you know, I’ve complained about these elements a lot because they’re so glaring when they do pop up and they make such inconsistencies of the characters, but the rest of the stuff is so good, either insightful or pulpy when it’s not insightful and so clearly beautifully made by the production team that I’m still here. I’m still gonna power through what I know is coming next season. So, yeah. Oshi no Ko is still doing what it does.

Oh, the new opening and ending are vastly inferior to the first season, but how do you compete with “Idol” and Queen Bee?

CAITLIN: “Mephisto” was an incredible song.

VRAI: It was so good!

Alright? Is Yatagarasu cour 2 the only other sequel that we are talking about? I believe? Am I missing one?

CAITLIN: I believe that’s it.

VRAI: Alright! Then it’s still me talking, except it is Alex through me, because they finished this up and left notes. So, to quote:

“As I said when covering this last season, the ladies are the element of the show that I’m most interested in. So unfortunately, I consider the second cour of Yatagarasu a massive downgrade because they’re barely in it. While I’m happy that my favorite, Lady Hamayu, gets some screen time being cool as hell at court, it’s tiny compared to how the new plotline overwhelmingly focuses on the dudes. Said new plotline is about the kingdom being invaded by ferocious flesh-eating monkeys who turn into people, as opposed to the main characters, who are crows who turn into people. And I’m not sure how deep to read into that, but depicting foreigners or outsiders as savage and animalistic in comparison to the civilized locals is an existing trope and a whole uncomfortable thing. So, overall, this one still has interesting elements and some moments of compelling political drama but lost me in a big way in part 2.”

Which is kind of a bummer. That’s one that I absolutely wasn’t able to fit into the schedule. See also part 2 of the NieR: Automata anime, which I’m going to hopefully finish in time.

CAITLIN: It has been marked “Oops!” on the screen—

VRAI: Yep!

CAITLIN: —on the spreadsheet!

VRAI: Yep, yep! Just marked “Oops.” Oops, I didn’t do that! Oops, I meant to do that and I did not do that! The plan is to hopefully get it done. And I assume if it continues on like it has, it will pop up in the recommendations list, but I’m sorry: I don’t have anything for you right now. [Chuckles]

PETER: RIP.

CAITLIN: Alright.

VRAI: Alright, but you know what? We did it.

CAITLIN: Yay!

VRAI: [crosstalk] I’m very proud of us.

PETER: That’s it.

VRAI: There was a lot of anime this season, and we’re already deep, deep into the mires of fall.

Okay! Thank you so much for joining us, AniFam. If you liked this, you can find more from the team by going to animefeminist.com. If you really liked it, consider throwing us a couple bucks, either on our Patreon, patreon.com/animefeminist, where you can get a monthly subscription with some bonuses, or if you just want toss us a one-off, we have ko-fi.com/animefeminist, which is where we pay for one-off projects, where right now, incidentally… Have you ever wanted us to do a three-episode check-in of every show in the season and not just the ones we found most interested? You can do that. If we can fund it. We are happy to do that for you.

You can also find us across the socials by looking at our Linktree, linktr.ee/animefeminist. Thank you so much, AniFam. We’re sorry that this was kinda weird and we’re kinda sad, but we love you and we hope that you’re taking care of each other. Alright? Be well.