Category Archives: Episode Writeup

The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 10

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Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re diving back into The Legend of Vox Machina, as our team nurses their wounds and plot their next course of action. The battle against Thordak nearly bested them, leaving earth rent and allies fallen, while offering little hope of truly ending this conflict. Kash and Percy are dead, Scanlan is unresponsive, and now Raishan possesses Thordak’s corpse, with which she is presumably getting up to even darker business than its original owner.

It’s all a gloomy, calamitous mess, which seems perfectly appropriate for this moment in the party’s journey. Traditional adventure narratives generally have their protagonists hit some “lowest point” just short of the climax, where all hope seems abandoned, darkest before the dawn, yada yada yada. However, this sort of dive in fortunes clashes with the mechanical inevitability of the party getting increasingly powerful as the journey proceeds, alongside the necessity of maintaining a degree of player agency as conflicts arise. Given all that, one way to square increasing party strength with the need for a narrative dive is to offer a false victory like this, where the achievement of the party’s goals only reveals a second, scale-shifting threat that they must rise to challenge, frequently without the aid of the companions that accompanied them in achieving their false victory. Properly seeded, such a twist respects both player agency and dramatic necessity, making it little surprise that “and now the true threat reveals itself” is such a staple of tabletop play and videogames alike.

As for my own DnD adventures, we just yesterday ran the first section of my frontier town module, and dear lord did that take a lot of out of me. My generally linear quest structure was indeed something of a crutch; with the party free to roam this town as they will, I had to spend the vast majority of the session “on” in terms of spontaneous invention and character acting, conducting emergent drama one hard-fought minute at a time. But nothing in DMing comes easy, and so far my actual players seem to be having a wonderful time lurking in saloons and fixing card games and generally making a nosy nuisance of themselves. I’ll let you know how that proceeds, but for now, we’re back to the action!

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Shoushimin Series – Episode 5

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Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re diving back into the ominous undertones of Shoushimin Series, wherein Jogoro and Osanai have just cracked their first major case, and through doing so embraced more than a little of their initial, antisocial identities. In order to avenge Osanai’s bike and bring the delinquent Sakagami to justice, Jogoro employed his sharp fox nose once more, while Osanai “tore out his throat” by letting him take the fall for his associates’ identity fraud racket. Yet in spite of their success, cracking the case was not a happy occasion for our leads – it was a relapse, an indulgence in self-defeating passions that they have pledged time and again to abandon.

I can certainly understand their positions. You see characters like Jogoro and Osanai all the time in fiction and real life alike, and they don’t generally seem to be happy, fulfilled, and productively integrated into their communities. The instincts that make one a top detective or ruthless bloodhound are isolating, frictious, and perpetually unfulfilling; you end up pushing others away in your unerring, pragmatic dedication to your cause, and even successfully resolving one mystery only leaves you hungry and empty, eager for the next puzzle to distract you from your sprawling list of regrets.

Of course, many are willing to make that bargain, or find some peaceful balance on its margins. The question is, can indulging your obsession actually make you happy? Though Shoushimin’s subtitle references “becoming normal,” the more pertinent question is likely “becoming happy” – and our leads’ conflation of the two could well be the source of their misery. Jogoro and Osanai believe their passions will always isolate them, and they have ample evidence to support that conclusion. But given the anxious identity-stressing tempests of adolescence, they’re not really in the best position to be so harshly evaluating their prior identities – and given the stacking counter-evidence presented by characters like Kengo, the solution may be less “I need to disavow my reason for living” and more “I need to get out of high school and find my people.” Nonetheless, it is high school in which they are trapped, so let’s return to the anxiety factory for one more episode of Shoushimin Series!

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Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End – Episode 14

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to the rambling journey of Frieren and her companions, who just recently recruited the wayward priest Sein into their adventuring party. In spite of his profound magical talents, Sein was initially unwilling to join the party, feeling both a sense of obligation to his brother and a lingering regret regarding his long-gone friend. Having declined ten years ago to leave his village and head off adventuring, he believed his chance at seeing the world had passed, and that to leave now would be to chase after embers that had long since gone cold.

Frieren didn’t much like hearing all of this, mainly because it so clearly paralleled her own situation preceding the arrival of Himmel and his companions. Frieren isn’t particularly emotionally intelligent, but she can at least tell when she’s being used as a thematic punching bag, and thus resolved to ensure Sein made the same brave choice she once did. Thus, through the contrast of Frieren and Sein’s relative periods of hibernation, a comforting message emerged: that it is never too late to live the life you want, and that your grand adventure is not a train you can miss or catch, but an active project you can choose to embark on at any time.

As a viewer who’s lived well beyond conventional anime character senility, it’s nice to be assured there might still be life in these old bones. Let’s see what these old fogeys get up to as we return to Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End!

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Please Put Them On, Takamine-san – Episode 2

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are apparently continuing our journey through a production of obvious goals and limited means, as we explore the second episode of Please Put Them On, Takamine-san. The show’s premiere laid out its priorities pretty clearly: we’re in for a moderately lewd ecchi with a side of master-slave dynamics, as our protagonist Shirota is forced to become the “closet” of school idol Takamine, supplying her with plentiful panties as ammunition for her stripping-powered time reversal ability.

Honestly, that premise is strained and strange enough to potentially fuel something pretty funny, but the show has so far demonstrated no interest in leaning into the preposterousness of its central device, nor in reflecting on how perpetually reversing any potential “mistakes” in life might actually be a self-defeating philosophy. Nonetheless, optimism is free, so I’m hoping episode two will offer something more than “look at this half-naked girl.” Onward!

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The Summer Hikaru Died – Episode 3

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are returning to the sun-speckled foothills of a rural Japanese village, whose community seems to be suffering under a sprawling yet largely undetectable curse, a malaise that announces itself first as suspicion and then paranoia, before its victims are consumed by their fear entirely. Do not look at the creatures in the woods, do not think of the flesh beneath the surface, for these are all avenues to complicity, understanding, and eventual destruction. “Mix with that too much and you won’t be human anymore,” Yoshiki’s neighbor warns him. But is being human such a laudable thing?

Yes, it is time for The Summer Hikaru Died, offering a rich stew of folk horror, rural surveillance, and queer awakening. The food is delicious, but do not ask how it’s made; that metallic tinge in the pallet, that sweetness that feels a little too familiar, these are all questions with no comforting answer. The production is situated at a classic, fertile intersection of horror and character drama, presenting occult ritual as just another manifestation of conservative cultural hegemony, and “monstrousness” as the vital rebellion of youth against such forces. And beyond this sturdy metaphor, it’s also simply an aesthetically rewarding experience, with Ryōhei Takeshita’s adaptation cleverly capturing the paranoia of Yoshiki’s town and ambiguity of the hills beyond. Let’s get back to the woods!

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Kemonozume – Episode 1

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m thrilled to announce we’re embarking on a new adventure, as we explore the first episode of the ‘06 production Kemonozume. This series was actually the first TV production written and directed by Masaaki Yuasa, who has at this point proven himself not just anime royalty in his own right, but also one of the most important figures in the medium’s development across the 21st century.

Yuasa’s freewheeling visual style and piercing narratives have brought him international acclaim and legions of devotees, and his cofounding of Science SARU with Eunyong Choi resulted in a near-decade of legendary features, including series like Ping Pong the Animation and films like The Night is Short, Walk On Girl. From his directorial debut Mind Game through his Golden Globe-nominated Inu-Oh, Yuasa has built a canon that would be the envy of any director, and undoubtedly inspired a generation of similarly restless artists, people who wish to bring something genuinely new into the world.

I know little about Kemonozume specifically beyond the broad strokes of its premise: a violent love story in a world with shape-shifting carnivorous monsters. The fact that Yuasa both wrote and directed this one is pitch enough for me, particularly when he’s collaborating with regular character artist/animation director Nobutake Ito (Kaiba, The Tatami Galaxy, etc). After spending so much time appreciating Yuasa’s later work, I’m eager to see the distinct quirks of his first TV production, the apparent link between the ecstatic creativity of Mind Game and the honed thrust of Kaiba. Let’s get to it!

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Yaiba: Samurai Legend – Episode 4

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re checking back in on the adventures of a feral swordsman and his reluctant chaperone, as we explore a fresh episode of Gosho Aoyama’s Yaiba: Samurai Legend. When last we left off, Yaiba and Sayaka had taken to the hills, in pursuit of a sword worthy of matching Onimaru’s demonic Fujin. Swiftly encountering its counterpart Raijin’s beetle-shaped protector, Yaiba attempted to tame the demon blade, only to prove incapable of containing its power.

Given that embarrassing defeat, I imagine we’re due for an honest-to-goodness training arc, at least if this fresh adaptation’s breakneck pace will allow for it. That’s fine by me, as frankly, one thing I’m particularly curious about here is how anyone demonstrates they’re stronger, smarter, or better-prepared than their opponent. Yaiba’s battles have so far been kinetic spectacles heavy on flash and trickery, making me assume Aoyama isn’t really a “power systems” kind of guy, but a shonen without some sense of personal martial progression tends to have difficulty sustaining itself. The alternative is basically “perpetual episodic invention” (as demonstrated by early One Piece and Dragon Ball), but as far as that goes, Aoyama also seems focused on a singular, continuing narrative rather than a procession of rambling adventures. Thus we find ourselves at a crossroads, with the fundamental nature of Yaiba’s narrative progression an open question. Let’s find our answer!

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CITY the Animation – Episode 2

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to announce we’re checking back in on CITY the Animation, and finding out what preposterous nonsense our locals are getting up to this week. The first episode introduced our presumed main trio of Midori, Niikura, and Wako, but as with its predecessor Nichijou, CITY is a proudly ensemble production, boasting dozens of characters who might jump in for a quick pratfall or surreal non-sequitur. The title does not lie; it is the city itself that is the protagonist of this production, a living organism whose many inhabitants all enrich each other’s lives in countless tiny ways.

So far the production has proudly, painstakingly emphasized that active coexistence, opening with an absurd flex of the entire city in motion, and continuing to link its various skits via their spatial proximity and shared cast of characters. CITY’s impressive loyalty to Keiichi Arawi’s original designs not only creates a uniquely charming, almost cut-paper-reminiscent world, it actually facilitates a union of traditional and CG animation that in turn enables the production’s frequent, ambitious junction of narratives, as stories ramble beyond their own sets to coexist with the ongoing stories of others. And this in turn underlines that core theme: that we are all in this together, and that every city is a collective promise, an investment in the love and support we owe to each other. Let’s get to it!

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Dear Brother – Episode 12

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I hope you’re all on your best behavior, as today I’ve booked us a visit to the hallowed halls of Seiren Academy, where the young Nanako continues to navigate the larger-than-life hurdles of her high school education. Strung between three dazzling upperclassmen and bound to the will of the Sorority, Nanako is navigating a labyrinth with no certain exit, her scholastic hurdles paling in comparison to the social spiderweb entangling her.

Lording over all these affairs stands the cruel, imperious Miya-sama, a tyrant whose chief pastime is inflicting random acts of cruelty on the obsessive Saint Juste. Granted, it seems the only person harder on Saint Juste than Miya-sama is Saint Juste herself, who made no less than three suicide attempts as Nanako dragged her home. Whatever Miya-sama represents to Saint Juste is clearly something she values more than her own life, but with her delirium now conflating Nanako with whatever “little doll” haunts her past, we might at last get a chance to illuminate her nightmares. Regardless, I am sure Ikeda and Dezaki have more bombastic, lushly illustrated horrors to share with us, so let’s get back to the campus!

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Galaxy Express 999 – Episode 13

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to announce we are returning to the endless cosmos, as we rejoin our companions aboard the Galaxy Express 999. Across a fantastical sprawl of distinctive planets, we will see love and toil in all their forms, the endless striving of all living beings to survive, prosper, and scratch their mark on the world. And like a terrible wave falling upon them, we will witness the indifference of fate and amorality of capitalism scatter their labors into dreams and driftwood, the cruelty of the world we have constructed forever limiting the scope of our ambitions.

Most recently, that terrible wave has come in the form of a celestial cloud of fossilizing gas, which turned the guardian of our latest planet’s beloved home into a statue garden of lost friends. With that guardian captured by pirates and a fresh cloud of lethal gas en route, Tetsuro and Maetel face a harsh clock as they attempt to retrieve Tetsuro’s boarding pass. Oblivion draws near as we return to Galaxy Express 999!

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