Guys, it is friggin’ December 26th. I got back from holiday events with family mere hours ago, and yet here I still am, heroically typing up the opening paragraph of my Week in Review. Thank god I have such foresight and professionalism that I already wrote most of my episode blurbs – I’m not sure where we’d be if I were any less diligent or forward-thinking. Anyway, as the tenor of this intro may suggest, I am a little preoccupied with end-of-year shenanigans at the moment, and so am content to just straight dump you all into the episodic reflections. I’ve actually got plenty to say this week, so let’s quit with the rambling and get on with the show. It’s time for the Week in Review!
Tsurune hit one of its biggest climaxes this week, as Seiya’s arc came to a close in an episode that seemed to reflect all of this show’s various strengths. This episode was unsurprisingly left to one of Kyoto Animation’s greatest directors, and Yasuhiro Takemoto knocked it out of the park. Tsurune is always a show defined by its consistently purposeful blocking and visual compositions, but Takemoto’s influence lent this episode a certain sense of cold austerity and emotional consequence that worked perfectly for its material. From Hyouka’s cruelest points to much of Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, Takemoto seems like the KyoAni star who’s most comfortable handling genuinely uncomfortable material, with his shows making up in incisiveness and dramatic clarity what they tend to lack in effortless warmth. This episode felt less idyllic in general than Tsurune’s usual fair, and it was much better for it.
Direction aside, the actual narrative material here was also fundamentally solid. Perhaps my favorite single sequence was Masa’s sad reflections on adulthood, and how his drive to inspire his students resulted in him repeating his own master’s mistakes. Minato’s preeminence in this production has made Masa feel a little unapproachable, and this sequence was a welcome and convincing peek behind the curtain. My only real complaint is that Shu’s emphasis on archery being something you do alone feels like a very simplistic way for this season to tie up its themes. Tsurune is a show about friendship, but it generally expresses that with a little more grace than “I’ll prove that friends make you weak!”
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure had a relatively low-key episode this week, and seemed to demonstrate that we’re now sadly past the ambitiously animated spectacles of the show’s healthy production phase. It was always inevitable that a show with such demanding fundamental designs, and with such a brutal, lengthy production cycle, would eventually get more conservative in its visual execution, but it’s still a shame to see. Episodes like this one are certainly the best place to take a breather, though; concerned largely with exposition and “you’ll never figure out my trick!” grandstanding, there wasn’t truly a great need for fluidity here. What I found myself missing more was Diamond is Unbreakable’s approach to visual compositions – this sort of fight, where the enemy creates a whole new reality to trap our heroes, seems ideal for Diamond’s style of creepy, stylish, full-screen layouts. Instead, we got a whole bunch of Golden Wind’s own preferred shots – dramatic, heavily shadowed closeups on very stern-looking dudes. But again, even Diamond had plenty of breather episodes, and Fugo’s backstory here was handled perfectly well. Low energy JoJo is still a very entertaining thing.
SSSS.Gridman also arrived at its finale, which was just as much a delirious spectacle as you could possibly hope. Both of Gridman’s two sides put their best feet forward this time – Akane’s psychological drama was elevated through some harrowing and wonderfully inventive dreamscapes, while Gridman’s battle against Alexis was almost certainly the most technically impressive fight this show has offered. It was a culmination in all the ways you might hope, and sent this show off on the best possible note.
Of course, with the show actually finished, my thoughts now shift from “that was a great episode” to “but was it a great show, though.” Ultimately, while I greatly enjoyed Gridman, I feel somewhat emotionally distant from the production for a variety of reasons. The biggest issue, one I consider a pretty damning flaw of the show, is that it tended to prioritize the sanctity and allure of its mysteries over the emotional solidity of its characters. Yuta himself was never a person, just a mystery waiting to be solved – and even though Akane received far more characterization, her ultimate reconciliation with Rikka felt hollow to me because the two never actually possessed an active relationship. Akane’s situation ultimately felt more like a clever metaphor than a genuine human struggle, leaving me grasping for something to hold onto emotionally.
And of course, there were the robots. Though Akane’s passion made sense, all of the tokusatsu stuff in this show always felt pretty removed from its actual drama, and basically just a love letter to fans of the genre. As someone who isn’t really a fan of the genre, that stuff wasn’t its own reward for me, and so a lot of this show felt like a paean to someone else’s childhood. This show didn’t teach me why tokusatsu is cool, it just reminded tokusatsu fans of a lot of other things they found cool.
In light of all that, while I’d say Gridman is a very worthwhile show, it’s not really one I can say I truly love. Definitely worth watching, and almost certainly Trigger’s best full length production, but a little too in love with its influences at the expense of its own storytelling.
Last up, Thunderbolt Fantasy closed out its second season in the most bombastic way it possibly could, centering on a desperate battle to destroy the killer monk and his beloved blood-drinking sword. I’ve had complaints throughout this season that this episode didn’t really resolve, with my principle issue being that this season never really felt as focused as the first – there was a whole lot of betraying and wandering in the woods, but not that much sense of consequence or forward momentum. But while this episode couldn’t really retroactively grant the overall season focus, it was still a marvelous spectacle and perfectly executed conclusion in its own right. Using the Night of Mourning to overcome the Seven Blasphemous Deaths’ power was a clever trick that went a long ways towards granting this season’s “these two particular swords are fucking shit up” narrative a sense of dramatic cohesion, and watching Shang and the Enigmatic Gale combine their powers is always a thrill. If this season’s goal was to shift Thunderbolt Fantasy from one absurd adventure to a genuine franchise, it certainly succeeded – our heroes’ victory here managed to be simultaneously thrilling, hard-fought, and ultimately hollow, and I’m eager to see Shang and his motley crew take on the entirety of our tragic poisoner’s organization.
Looking back at this season of Thuderbolt Fantasy as a whole, it felt really weird when compared to the last one. Like… I love the show, the characters are great, the puppets are gorgeous, the action is awesome, it’s a blast to watch. My only real gripe with the first season was that it seemed like it was trying to end things on a moral of “magic swords and sword skills aren’t really as important as everyone thinks” without actually doing much to… earn… that moral.
What I mean is, despite the claims the show throws around, if you look at what actually happens in the show, everything really does basically come down to magic swords and sword skills, with little in the way of showing us why they’re (supposedly) not so great. In fact, you eventually realize that things could actually have ended a whole lot better with a lot less people getting killed if the good guys had just stopped screwing around, and just sworded the bad guys in the face with all the crazy swords and invincible sword skills they were hiding until the finale, when you find out that the Enigmatic Gale is so good at swording that he can lolpwn the supposedly-intimidating Big Bad with basically zero effort, after the Big Bad’s got the super-sword, and that Shang is apparently even more badass than that.
But where it starts to get downright weird is when you get to this season, because the new musician guy feels almost like a direct response to that gripe of “everything would have gone so much better if they’d just sworded the bad guy right away”, because that’s exactly what he keeps trying to do all season. Except they crank it up past eleven and into strawman territory, where he’s trying to murder people who haven’t actually done anything (yet) but spout vague nihilistic philosophy, based on bad vibes he’s getting from them.
Which is crazy, of course. Murdering people on the basis of bad vibes like that without any evidence in the real world would be nothing sort of monstrous. And yet the show still doesn’t actually succeed in showing it to be wrong; every time he tries to kill someone based on a bad vibe, they either become (or are) a villain, and the season really would have ended with a vastly lower innocent body count if he’d succeeded at them.
So it’s kinda funny. The writers gave me a character in the second season who is basically the living embodiment of the objections I had about the first season, a character that I in principle wanted to agree with… but then cranked that very factor up so far past eleven that I just couldn’t agree with him even despite wanting to… and yet at the same time still completely failed to actually show him as being wrong, even though I know (from outside reasoning) that his approach is fundamentally awful in situations where the plot doesn’t have your back.
Like I said, I love most things about the show, and it’s an amazing ride. But when you get past the immediate stuff and into its attempts at larger themes, that’s where the writing starts to feel a bit… incoherent.
Your complaints seem completely on point to me! While the first season of Thunderbolt Fantasy had a tightly written narrative and a pretty clear thematic endpoint, season two felt a lot more like a bunch of exciting but ultimately incoherent stuff happening. If the season had a point, it seemed to basically just be “nihilists/solipsists are the worst” – even though the Princess of Cruelty started this season as the most obviously villainous character, the fact that she possessed pride, values, and personal ambitions gave her a road to redemption, whereas both Di Kong and the Hunting Fox were ultimately doomed by their failure to value anything (leading Di Kong to cultish worship and the Hunting Fox to a meaningless end scrabbling in the dirt). But that’s not really a point the show ever hung much dramatic weight on, it’s just sort of the natural takeaway of the contrast in their fates. And as you say, the first season’s insistence on the emptiness of coveting swords feels kinda undercut by the fact that all of this season’s drama and deaths would have been prevented if people were a little more careful with their swords of mass destruction.
Thunderbolt Fantasy S2 honestly felt like a bridge series. I was expecting “more” from the final episode, some kind of game-changing or thematic-revealing reversal much like the S1 finale. But the episode was just a big ol’fight scene, even if it was a really joyful fight-scene. I did enjoy it though, even if I missed the hammier villains like Screaming Phoenix Killer, I liked the new villians that this series offered and their explorations. The reason I feel like this series is a bridge is because the main thing I took away from it is that Vapewiz’s method of dealing with villains is not really ideal. It fails both times he does it. The end result of the first season is the world almost ending, the end result of the second season is a lot more people dying unnecessarily. I feel like at some point Shang and Lin are going to come to odds over this. Admittedly there’s not enough evidence so far that show is going to go there, but it’s where I’m hoping it’ll go in the third season.
For the Gridman finale, well I liked the series overall more than you did. It’s an incredibly introspective look at being a self-hating nerd much like Evangelion, but chooses not to wallow in that self-hatred viewing that conflict from the outside (I guess that’s the main value of having Yuta being the POV-character rather than Akane). It’s a show by nerds who grew past their old toxic-selves, and choose to show themselves self-compassion without minimizing the harm that they’ve done.
For the tokusatsu stuff, well as a non-tokusatsu fan, the biggest thing I needed to know was the origins of the Kaiju girl and the computer world, other than that I mostly followed along with it fine? I liked how the Kaiju’s were a metaphor for self-hatred, I liked how Anti’s arc tied in with Akane’s. The show while being a tokusatsu love-letter, was also pretty critical over obsessing over it. Sho’s love of the tokusatsu genre didn’t make him special, it actually led him in a lot of wrong directions (I loved the scene where he did the superhero secret identity thing to the villain of the series). But despite that as a not-at-all-special human being he still has value. Alexis Kerib’s backstory was pretty simple, but incredibly cutting. He’s an tokusatsu series that has gone on for too long and become an meaningless corporate IP pretending to be friends with obsessive lonely nerds to perpetuate itself. SSSS Gridman may have been a wonderful series, but it ultimately needs to end.
As for Rikka, eh I found it moving. Akane may not think she deserved Rikka’s forgiveness (hell you can make the argument she doesn’t), but she got it anyways. But I liked the message that even if you think you don’t deserve it there are going to be people who care about you. And it’s okay to rely on them at least a little bit to move forward. Even if you hate yourself, you have to be better for their sake.
So yeah, Gridman isn’t a perfect series by any means. But it’s thoughtful, it cares and even if the show kind of hampers itself sometimes. I really liked it.