Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today, for the first time in over a full season, I’ll actually be offering some commentary on the latest episodes of several airing anime! I know, it’s been a while, and frankly, even this return slate is pretty limited – I’m currently just watching Oregairu, Deca-Dence, and God of High School, and fully expect my enthusiasm for God of High School to fall below the watchability line in the next couple episodes. Pure action spectacle married to bluntly atrocious storytelling just isn’t really my scene; fortunately, both Deca-Dence and Oregairu seem like unimpeachably solid contenders, meaning I might actually end this year with just enough shows for a top ten list. Let’s see what the season is offering so far, over the course of one more old-fashioned Week in Review!

God of High School’s third episode continued to present a war of extremes, by which I mean the show’s animation is spectacular and its writing is total garbage. In terms of both individual lines of dialogue and larger storytelling beats, God of High School’s writing basically feels like a game of shonen cliche mad libs.

The comedy is the worst of it, as the author seems deeply enamored with that early-00s style of comedy that has mercifully faded from most modern shows, a style centered on aggressive slapstick, loud noises, and hideously distorted reaction faces. But even setting aside the show’s obnoxious stabs at humor, every idea in this show is just a reheated, flavorless version of an action cliche. Characters communicate in lines like “why did you give him the sacred fruit?” “to test if he’s the Real Deal,” everyone is a basic archetype, there’s no sense of cohesion or momentum to the larger narrative beats, and many concepts are just lifted wholesale from better stories, like this episode’s Gum-Gum Fruit, Stands, and power level scanners.

Fortunately, there are the fights. This episode actually featured three separate fights, though only the middle one felt like a full battle. God of High School’s camerawork, choreography, and animation manage to lend a rewarding sense of impact to clashes between characters who are basically superheroes, making the show at times feel like a moving supercut of modern action animation stars. That said, without any real sense of characterization, tactics, or a larger conflict, it’s likely my remaining interest in God of High School will evaporate soon enough.

Meanwhile, Oregairu is as compelling as ever, and its rich characterization and subtly revealing conversations have once again become a source of comfort for me in these dark days. The funny thing about Oregairu is that in spite of taking place across three seasons, it really is just one continuous narrative – its “problem of the week” first season developed the lead cast, its second season put them through the emotional ringer, and here in the third season, we’re actually opening with the sequence of group dissolution, personal transformation, and reunion that tends to come around the three-quarters point of a narrative. In light of this, returning now feels a bit like jumping into Toradora! at episode twenty after years away; our protagonists have finally acknowledged the shapes of their problems, and Yukino is preparing to take that crucial step, and challenge her mother regarding her future.

All this is to say I should probably rewatch Oregairu as soon as possible in order to feel on-pace with the ongoing drama, but in any case, each scene of this show is still brimming with character-reflective flourishes and thorny subtext. I particularly liked Haruno’s private conversation with Hachiman, which revealed a great deal about how Haruno reached her current level of cynical indifference. Feeling alternately used or discarded by her mother, Haruno has become so guarded that she’s come to see herself as incapable of free emotional expression, and unable to get “drunk on emotion” the way those around her frequently do.

Of course, Haruno is a perpetual liar, lying both to herself and to others – she wouldn’t be so preoccupied with Yukino’s actions if she weren’t deeply invested in her sister’s fate, and her laments regarding her stony nature feel just as true to aimless young adulthood as Hachiman’s initial feelings were true to aimless adolescence. Her claims that Hachiman is just like her definitely got to him somewhat, but they really shouldn’t; as season two has already demonstrated, Hachiman has passionate feelings of his own, and is finally gaining the strength to express them.

Finally, Deca-Dence‘s second episode pulled the rug out from under us entirely, revealing that the entire world experienced by Natsume is actually something like a game preserve, and a venue for seemingly digital or robotic beings to compete with each other for high scores. I’m very impressed that the team managed to keep this entire paradigm shift under wraps all the way through pre-production, but even more impressed with just how much this shift adds to the overall narrative.

In terms of visual design, Deca-Dence is now marrying a gritty, beautiful, and massively scaled fantasy world to a fanciful, super-deformed, consistently surprising internal universe highly reminiscent of Masaaki Yuasa’s Kaiba designs, which themselves call back to classic Tezuka designs. And in narrative as well, this new layer seems to offer Kaiba’s distinctive combination of the horrors of scifi-empowered capitalism contrasted against friendly, childlike designs. Along with the prison of wage slavery, Deca-Dence’s new layer also seems fascinated with mortality in many of the same ways Tachikawa’s earlier Death Parade explored, leaving me tremendously excited to see where all of this goes.