Welp, show’s over, folks. Planet With already finished up last week, and with our last two contenders having now handed in their final assignments, the building is pretty much empty. This wasn’t really the most fortuitous week in summer anime – My Hero Academia essentially ended on a transition point, while Revue Starlight’s last episode was quite likely also its worst episode. Still, there are points worth poking at, and as long as I’m here, we might as well do one last session. Starting with our tragic stage girls, let’s run the summer’s final week down!
Revue Starlight ended on a whole bunch of nothing, I’m very sorry to say. After an inconsistent run through a thinly-constructed story and variably compelling characters, we returned to Karen and Hikari, and that was where the problems began. Outside of that one episode where Hikari was at least given some texture through her Homura-style desperation, Karen and Hikari have just never really been human beings in this show. They’ve been vehicles for the narrative and avatars for the show’s consistent spoken refrains, but they have never felt real, and their goals have never gained any more texture or humanity than “fulfilling the promise we made that day” or “shining together!” Given “the main characters are symbols, not people” was exactly the same problem I had with Tomohiro Furukawa’s prior Yurikuma Arashi, it at this point feels safe to say that the dude is just not great at humanizing his characters, or at least is personally much more comfortable leaving them as symbols than I am as a viewer.
The first half of this episode essentially doubled down on everything that made Karen and Hikari frustrating as characters, as the two of them repeated the same phrases and the same actions they’ve been repeating all season for a good ten minutes or so. Hikari’s Sisyphean task thus felt appropriate for all the wrong reasons – her toiling in circles became our toiling in circles, as dramatic beats that felt overplayed eight episodes ago were repeated for the umpteenth time. And when the fireworks actually started, the resulting clash wasn’t even all that aesthetically impressive, and was basically nonsensical in narrative terms besides. As the giraffe constantly redefined the already-vague rules that structure this conflict, Karen basically made up a non-solution to the show’s central question, drove the Tokyo Tower through a big cylinder, and that was the end of it.
Revue Starlight has ultimately turned out to be far less than the sum of its parts, as engaging as many of those parts were. The show had really cool episodes, but it was terribly hamstrung by its weak leads, and never really pulled its own ideas together. I don’t regret watching it, but man, this show could have been so much more.
Fortunately, while Revue Starlight turned what should have been a triumphant conclusion into a disappointment, My Hero Academia managed to turn pure transition material into something truly special. The introduction of U.A.’s Big Three frankly wasn’t much of a highlight in the manga, but the anime clearly understood it needed to give us something memorable to end the season on, and dazzled through striking layouts, far sharper-than-usual character art, and an altogether thrilling introduction to the talented Mirio.
Wonderfully unique design aside, Mirio is one of those characters who basically just leaps off the page, and feels indispensable the moment he arrives. His pinpoint demolition of 1-A was equal parts exciting and hilarious, while the general banter between 1-A’s regulars served as a nice final sendoff to these (mostly) charming kids. My Hero Academia generally saves its strongest directors and most polished productions for the big fight setpieces, so it was actually pretty great to see that care of delivery applied to a less action-focused episode, purely because it happened to fall at the end of the season. Polish alone can’t make for engaging drama, but My Hero Academia’s low-key material is strong enough to really benefit from the effort. This wasn’t the most consistent season on the whole, but I had a fun time with these idiots, and I’m ready for season four.
