Hello all, and welcome back for another Week in Review! The year’s winding down at this point, meaning I’m grappling with a variety of year-end summaries and lists and whatnot, and am happy to report it’s been a pretty solid year in anime. I believe Mob Psycho 100, Carole & Tuesday, and Stars Align are currently wrestling for the top of my annual listings, but there’s a fair number of other fine contenders as well, and I still need to find the time to finish off overlooked shows like O Maidens. Meanwhile, this season’s own airing anime continued in its reliable fashion, as My Hero Academia at last entered the punchy part of its new arc, as Vinland Saga put the breaks on its own relative punchiness. There’s plenty to discuss and never enough time to do it, so let’s dive into another Week in Anime!
Stars Align continued to elaborate the finer points of its main team’s various family situations this week, with the bulk of the episode focusing on the extended consequences of Nao being psychologically abused by his horrible mother. You wouldn’t think simply rushing around a school looking for a lost girl could serve as a dramatic highlight, but Stars Align’s beautifully constructed layouts, as well as the carefully executed nervousness clear in its character acting, made this sequence into yet another unexpected aesthetic reward.
On the narrative side, this episode left me with a few reservations. Stars Align always treats its characters’ personal problems with a great deal of sympathy, but it can at times verge into monologuing directly at the audience, and I felt the aftermath of Nao’s deceptions here leaned a little too far into that. Additionally, there’s simply only so much tragedy you can fit into a one-season shell before you start to get diminishing emotional returns, or even a sense that this world is simply designed to provoke tragedy. While every individual moment of Tsubasa’s conflict with his father was executed well, I’m a little worried about the overall density of abusive parents we’re dealing with here – Stars Align being themed around the tennis club as a found family makes conflicts like this almost inevitable, but I’d hate to see any of these individual stories diminished by their collective similarity.
Things began to come together in this week’s Vinland Saga, as we moved into the meat of Canute’s surreptitious battle with his ailing father. It was lovely to see Askeladd so fully in his element as he maneuvered pieces in service of a battle he actually believed in, and also just nice to see a setting other than endless fields of snow. York might still be pretty snowy, but it still allowed for a far richer diversity of color palettes and compositions than recent episodes; additionally, this episode’s largely dialogue-driven action meant it wasn’t particularly impacted by the production’s increasingly shaky animation.
All that was well and good, but as you might have guessed, my own highlight this week was easily the last stand of Bjorn the Warrior. Bjorn is similar to Thorkell, in that he’s a relatively straightforward man destined for a life of war, who nonetheless possesses the intelligence and inquisitiveness necessary to seek a greater explanation for his lot in life. For Thorkell, the pursuit of a “true warrior” is enough; he naturally enjoys battle and is very good at it, and only wishes to understand the look in the eyes of those who’ve truly seen beyond this life. But Bjorn lacks Thorkell’s impossible strength and contentment with this life; in a different world, he might have been a very different man.
All throughout Vinland Saga, we’ve watched people struggle to come up with the words to describe a common instinct, a belief in or desire for a life that rises above the endless violence and cycles of control that dictate their own. In his own way, Bjorn fits perfectly in among those dreamers – in spite of knowing Askeladd hated him for who he was, he still respected him utterly, and wished to be his true friend. Even more than that, he actually pitied Askeladd – not in a demeaning way, but as anyone would wish for their close friend’s happiness. And yet, he can only express those feelings at the end of his life, as a coda to one more instance of the violence that is all he has known. Bjorn’s death felt simultaneously tragic and uplifting; a senseless loss, but also a resounding declaration that even a man who has known nothing but a warrior’s life, can still dream of emotional intimacy and peace.
Finally, this week’s My Hero Academia served as perhaps the first true test for how this arc will play out in animation. In manga form, Suneater’s one-on-three battle with the yakuza minions is a stunning spectacle, offering some of Horikoshi’s most impressive two-page spreads of the manga so far. In anime form, this fight was… okay?
There were certainly some neat cuts of Suneater’s tentacles doing their thing, and to be fair, this manga sequence had its own issues in terms of readability. Additionally, the actual character story here was quite convincing, and the transforming hallways sequence was handled pretty gracefully as well. But on the whole, I’ve found myself continually readjusting my expectations downwards all through this season, and am disappointed to see such a thrilling manga arc receive such a resoundingly Okay adaptation. If the show’s planning anything on the scale of last season’s Muscular and All Might battles, now would be a pretty good time.
