mono – Episode 1

What’s it about? Satsuki joined the photography club because she was inspired by (and enamored with) her senpai… and now that she’s graduated, Satsuki finds herself adrift, and the club is at risk of being shut down. But a missing parcel, a rotund white cat, and a manga artist with writer’s block all lead Satsuki down an unexpected path to rediscovering her passion with a whole new kind of photography.

Two hobby shows back-to-back? Don’t mind if I do. mono comes to us from the same manga creator as my beloved Laid-Back Camp, so the comparison is inevitable—mono has some big shoes (hiking boots?) to fill. For my money, this premiere is plenty fun, though I don’t quite feel like mono is hitting the same cozy atmosphere and intriguing character dynamics as Camp did in its premiere episode. However, it’s also going for a slightly different vibe and is driven by different personalities and character motivations, so I feel like this can and should stand on its own—while obviously sitting neatly within that niche school club genre.

And speaking of character motivations, let’s acknowledge the Yuri Overtones in the room, shall we? Satsuki clearly admires her photography senpai to a comedic degree, basically only taking photos of the older girl for an entire year. Satsuki’s friend and club co-member An, meanwhile, takes this devotion a step further with her apparent crush on Satsuki. She only joined the club to follow Satsuki, announces to the audience how much she loves her, and daydreams openly about the two of them sitting on a porch growing old together (which is a punchline, but did make me go aww! and get misty-eyed like the big dumb friends-to-lovers fiend I am).

All of this is played as goofy and over-the-top, but these are also our key character motivations at this point. Satsuki was driven by her wide-eyed, blushy desire to follow her senior; An is driven by her wide-eyed, blushy desire to follow Satsuki. Satsuki being in a heartbroken creative rut, and An trying to haul her out of it, is the inciting incident of the show. These girls’ crushes on each other are a crucial piece of the story’s mechanics! I’m not makin’ that up!

Now, I can only hope we’ll get to actually delve more into that and further develop those feelings and relationships, but… well, time will tell. I have a feeling this will be of the “soft yuri” variety and their straight line of unrequited feelings will continue to point towards the horizon, ultimately becoming a character-based joke and a background element among the hobby shenanigans. But hey, I could be wrong, and I would love to be wrong.

At the moment, Satsuki’s too busy falling back in love with photography via 360 lenses and time lapse sunsets, so let’s give her that for now. Her quest for a funky new camera leads her to the manga artist Haruno, who sold Satsuki her old 360 degree lens but forgot to mail it out due to a devastating combo of being sick and being on deadline (ouch, and also, mood). In a deeply meta turn of events, the next project her publishers want is a four-panel manga about a high school photography club, for which Satsuki and An are the perfect models. This series-within-a-series and the meta-humor of it all got a bit disorientating and self-indulgent for me when I read the manga—which is also a four-panel comic, making this hobby series ouroboros even more obvious—so I’m curious to see how the anime adaptation plays with this differently in its own medium. More to the point, this begins the slightly odd intergenerational friendship that forms the crux of the story.

As interesting as this setup could be, Haruno is, unfortunately, a potential sour note, in that she slides into the trope of the eccentric, goofy adult who makes the teens look responsible and wise by contrast. This juxtaposition is a common joke, and I get it: it’s topsy-turvy to have the grown-up guardian actually be the one who needs looking after. In Laid-Back Camp it was the club advisor getting drunk on every camping trip while the young people supposedly in her care tut-tutted and handled everything. Here, Haruno’s a whimsical, slightly flighty work-at-home artist who’s comically bad at driving. It’s not a bad joke, per se, but it feels tired, and I can’t help but feel it will be very un-funny to viewers who have had to deal with irresponsible, unreliable adult guardians in their own real lives. I have my fingers crossed that Haruno continues to get more depth, and that we stop getting “the vulnerable teen characters fear for their lives when they have to travel with this person” as a punchline.

So, this premiere has promise, but how much you enjoy it might depend on how you feel about those factors I’ve highlighted: your stance on that above-mentioned irresponsible adult joke trope, whether you’re willing to roll the dice on obvious yet likely unfulfilled sapphic undertones, how you vibe with self-referential meta humor. And, of course, what goofy hobby anime does to your brain chemistry—one person’s “ah, comfy~” is someone else’s “oh my god this is teeth-grindingly boring” after all. While it has elements that frustrate me, I still want to give mono a shot, to see how it evolves now that Satsuki is learning to pursue her own passions rather than just chasing after someone else; and, relatedly, to see how the show stands on its own as it inevitably follows in Laid-Back Camp‘s cozy footsteps.