We had two hits and a miss for this week in anime, and boy do I ever have a lot to talk about. While Granbelm continued to flounder in its attempts to make sense of its own wibbly-wobbly worldbuilding, both Given and Carole & Tuesday turned in truly astonishing performances, with Given in particular offering the episode we’ve been awaiting all season. I’m pretty sure both of those shows are going to end up in my top five anime of the year, and I’m loving the fireworks as each of them move towards their hopefully satisfying conclusions. Apparently Given is actually based on a still-ongoing manga, but I could easily see at least this arc resolving itself somewhat cleanly; meanwhile, Carole & Tuesday only seems to exude more and more confidence as it strides towards its end. Let’s get to it and break down some shows!

After nine long weeks of coiling its drama into an ever-tighter spring, Given at last unleashed all that captured energy, as Mafuyu expressed his anger, grief, and general paralysis of feeling through the band’s thunderous live performance. This episode of Given was one of the most searing episodes of any anime this year; the entire show so far has essentially been constructed as a buildup to this moment, and it absolutely did not disappoint.

In pure aesthetic terms, there were certainly a couple hiccups; fluidly animating an entire rock performance is something few studios can manage, and so this sequence had to rely on CG models a little more than I’d like. But in terms of storytelling and general dramatic structure, holy shit. That initial roar of sound from Mafuyu felt as stunning for me in the audience as it must have felt for his own bandmates, and the progression of the song was perfectly paced against flashbacks giving us a full and final catalog of Mafuyu’s past relationship. Interwoven with Mafuyu’s lyrics, that montage beautifully conveyed the living texture of Mafuyu’s feelings, meaning that by the time the final chorus hit, I felt like I was right there beside him, equally torn up by feelings too sharp and ambiguous to express.

Even aside from that thunderous performance, this episode consistently demonstrated Given’s remarkable acuity of experience and specificity of dialogue all through its many dramatic exchanges. Both Ritsuka and Mafuyu are bad at expressing their feelings in ways that feel uniquely true to life, but while Ritsuka is a somewhat familiar character type, I continue to be impressed by how well Given is able to characterize Mafuyu. As I’ve said before, “anime loners” or characters with social anxiety tend to defined as conversationally limited, but privately very expressive. In contrast, Mafuyu has trouble expressing or even understanding his feelings at all times, and is acutely aware of that fact. His characterization feels genuinely unique, and his conversation on the beachside offered plentiful examples of this show’s knack for convincingly unique, character-rich dialogue. And there was a genuine on-screen gay kiss, and an immediate followup acknowledgment of romantic feelings! Holy shit Given, how do you make this look so easy!?!

Granbelm is a show that is good at some things and very bad at others, and unfortunately, this week felt like a demonstration of all its worst qualities. When it comes to layouts and colors, fight animation, and endearing characters, Granbelm shines – but when it comes to worldbuilding and larger narrative strokes, things start to fall apart. In this week’s episode, pretty much everything that occurred felt ungrounded and nonsensical to the point of meaninglessness.

Kuon’s brief victory over Suishou at least seemed to resolve her conflict with her sister, even if I had no idea exactly how her sister was helping her – but then Suishou got up and won instead, also for reasons I couldn’t understand at all. And then the show decided that Mangetsu is a living doll instead of a human, because apparently this world’s magical energy can just decide to create living doll, for unspecified reasons? And then there’s the matter of which characters disappear and which get to keep living after their defeat, which never made any sense to me, and thus never carried any dramatic weight. One scene after another, this episode just felt like a procession of vaguely conveyed and entirely left-field Stuff Happening, all of it designed to ramp tension and raise stakes, but none of it possessing the grounding or sense of consequence to feel like anything but mean-spirited dramatic noise.

I’m normally not particularly invested in worldbuilding, but I’m a firm believer in grounded drama – the problems your characters face should emerge naturally from the base mechanics of their conflicts. When your system of magic is as nebulously defined as Granbelm’s, and you attempt to base a fair amount of your episode’s drama on the nitty-gritty mechanics of that magic, you end up with an episode that carries basically no emotional impact or sense of tension whatsoever.

Finally, Carole & Tuesday continued to move confidently towards its increasingly inevitable-feeling climax, as some key characters faced major consequences in the lead-up to the Mars Grammys. Though Carole & Tuesday’s storytelling is broad in some respects, I’ve been loving how the show continues to draw nuance out of its main thematic dichotomy, centered on the similarities between music and politics. As Tao articulates early in this episode, even for him, music has been a source of positive human connection in his life. Though he’s often accused of being emotionless, studying the effect of music on the brain was a way for him to understand the people around him, meaning that even though it took a very different form, his research was essentially equivalent (at least for him) to the communal satisfaction others found in simply listening to great songs.

But as Carole & Tuesday fully understands, “human connection” and the feeling of being validated or understood aren’t always positive things. Skilled political operators can turn the feeling of being validated into fuel for virtually any cause, and people are just as happy to rally around “those immigrants are ruining our society” as any catchy song. And in the end, commerce and politics will ultimately protect each other, leaving people like Tao as fall men to continue their own societal control. Carole & Tuesday is thus far from a work of unquestioned optimism, and is actually deeply suspicious of how easily people can inspired by either rhetoric or song – something this episode put in the most ferocious and inescapably real-world terms, as Carole’s childhood friend was forced to reinvent himself to survive, arrived at a new and searing truth, and was ultimately punished for that truth by Mars’ equivalent of the United States’ ICE.

Though Carole & Tuesday’s thematic perspective is nuanced, its societal commentary is very direct, and frankly, I’m happy for it – Trump is one of the greatest evils on the planet (though I appreciate that Valarie is essentially ‘Hillary’s marketing, Trump’s platform’), our art should be condemning his cruelty in terms as direct as this, and the people who follow him are a symptom of how easy it is to turn divisive yet popular rhetoric into inhumanity on a global scale. Carole & Tuesday has turned out to be angrier and smarter and simply more than I ever expected, and yet it still pulls off charming and uplifting vignettes on a near-episodic basis. What a great dang show.