Category Archives: Episode Writeup

86 – Episode 5

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Well Lena, you’ve done it. You’ve learned the actual names of the 86 serving under you, and have taken one more step towards recognizing them as fully human. As nearly everyone has pointed out, this is mostly a symbolic gesture, and hasn’t really changed the fundamental nature of your relationship – but even symbolic gestures can be meaningful, and by starting with the things she can change, Lena is still pushing back against the forces that determined these class relations.

To 86’s immense credit, no one except for Lena thinks her efforts are either smart or meaningful. Both Lena’s own family and the 86 are clear in their belief that Lena is not cut out for this work – she is too sensitive and too idealistic, and will eventually either be run into the ground by disappointment, or officially sanctioned by her superiors. Fiction has a tendency to simplify structural conflicts and amplify the power of individual agency; after all, stories cannot compress the vastness of society’s functions into a clean narrative, and individual heroes are easy and satisfying to follow. But in truth, the ability of any one person like Lena to alter the course of her entire nation is limited, and if she starts to gain any actual traction, she might end up drawing more attention than she was ready for. In her heart of hearts, Lena still seems to believe that her nation’s crimes are unintentional oversights, not conscious choices. Before she can fight alongside the 86, she must recognize her country’s true face.

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Kaguya-sama: Love is War – Episode 7

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to Kayuga-sama: Love is War, where our beleaguered heroes remain suspended between pride and passion. Kaguya and Miyuki are head-over-heels for each other, but to reveal those feelings would be an expression of weakness, which their opponent would surely counter without mercy. Thus they must remain in this fraught stasis, each daring the other to reveal an emotion, each desperate to maintain their indifferent poise.

So far, so normal. But beyond their general adolescent insecurities, I am immensely intrigued by the class dimension that seems to be complicating their relationship. The fact that Kaguya and Miyuki come from different social backgrounds has been foregrounded from the start, with some portion of Miyuki’s insecurity likely stemming from him being “socially undeserving” of Kaguya’s love (for her part, Kaguya must contend with social expectations of feminine passivity). But recently, the active drama has started to play off this class divide, with sequences like the interschool ball or the flower debate emphasizing how Miyuki’s perspective is a direct consequence of his background. And with Kaguya’s maid Ai now acting as both Kaguya’s servant and emotional confidant, the discordant social standing of Kaguya-sama’s leads seems like it’ll take an even more prominent role in the narrative.

That’s pretty exciting to me! Anime high school romances frequently exist in a world divorced from the context of our lives, where romantic feelings are the only driving force. But the best character stories acknowledge that our identities do not exist apart from our environments, and are shaped by our life experiences in countless divergent ways. I’m hoping Kaguya-sama continues to tug at the awkward frictions of its characters’ experiences, as they struggle past artifice and into honest connection.

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Land of the Lustrous – Episode 5

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It is not some great moral conviction that drives Phos into the sea. If anything, it’s closer to the opposite – a total absence of feeling, and lack of concern for their own fate. Even after being reconstructed from the nautilus’ shell, Phos still possesses no value within gem society; the only one who seems to actually need them is this weird slug-creature. Like Cinnabar, Phos clings to this paltry source of value out of desperation – and also like Cinnabar, they do this in spite of having people who actually care about them, and want to see them happy. So often, we are our own cruelest judges.

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Adachi and Shimamura – Episode 11

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’d say we’re past due to check in on that most hapless of couples, the perpetually self-defeating Adachi and Shimamura. In spite of Adachi’s joy at the two of them once again sharing homeroom, the slight barrier of their desks’ distance proved to be almost insurmountable. And when a new group of students decided to make friends with Shimamura, it was all too easy for each of them to slip back into old habits.

Adachi and Shimamura has been refreshingly honest about the stop-and-start pacing of personal development. Its characters falter often, embracing the comfortable over the unknown, and frequently second-guessing their own emotional development. Nothing about Adachi and Shimamura’s relationship is “fated” – it would have been easy for the two to drift apart right here, and for Adachi to become another Tarumi-like figure of nostalgia and regret. The fragility of this relationship is nerve-wracking, but it’s also what makes the drama land; these characters feel imperfect in emphatically human ways, and my ability to relate to their frailty makes me want to see them happy all the more. With two episodes left, I’m guessing we’ve got time for maybe three-and-a-half more heart-stopping emotional revelations. Let’s see what’s next!

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Scum’s Wish – Episode 2

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be diving back into Scum’s Wish, the Masaomi Andou-directed adaptation of Mengo Yokoyari’s thorny adolescent drama. So far, the show has offered plenty of Andou and plenty of drama, as high schoolers Hana and Mugi pine after the crushes of their childhood, while consoling themselves with the bodies of each other. It’s a deeply unhealthy state of affairs, a fragile disaster waiting to happen, and I’m eager to see it all come tumbling down.

More immediately, though, I’m mostly looking for this episode to add some distinctive human texture to our four leads. So far they’ve largely been defined by their romantic feelings, which doesn’t really tell us much about them specifically; we know Hana and Kanai clung to each other as a result of their missing parents, but that’s about it as far as character motivation is concerned. What we might need is some general group activity or event, something for each character to react to in their own way, and thus establish their personalities outside of the context of their romantic feelings. That’s my main narrative hope, but either way, I’m looking forward to munching on more of Andou’s delicious compositions. Let’s get to it!

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The Demon Girl Next Door – Episode 1

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! Today we’ll be embarking on a new journey, as we check out the first episode of 2019’s The Demon Girl Next Door. I’ve been told this show is “the most directly post-Madoka series” of recent years, but beyond that mostly know of it via cultural osmosis, as a generally well-regarded mix of slice of life and romance. It’s based on a 4koma strip, so I’m expecting things will be fairly gag-driven, which seems to suit its director Hiroaki Sakurai (Cromartie High School, among a variety of other acclaimed shows) quite well. I feel like it’s been too long since I checked out a solid slice of life show, so here’s hoping Demon Girl offers the good vibes we’re looking for. Let’s check it out!

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The Woman Called Fujiko Mine – Episode 9

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to the beautiful, incendiary production that is The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, where we most recently learned the name of her childhood tormentor: Count Luis Yew Armeid. A figure of seemingly supernatural menace, Armeid has been manipulating characters like the fortune teller Shitoto from behind the scenes, as he attempts to guide Fujiko towards some unknown end.

This production has been refreshingly direct about Armeid’s crimes: it seems clear that he sexually abused Fujiko as a child, and that her resulting trauma manifests through the otherworldly flashbacks to her childhood abuse. An incidental detail like an owl motif on a wall can draw Fujiko right back to those strange chambers, where the specifics of her experience are abstracted into this ominous owl-headed count, the nightmare jailer who haunted her childhood.

In the present day, Armeid seems determined to embody more than just the lingering effects of trauma. Statements like his intent to “test the Third to see if he’s worthy of Fujiko” imply a sense of patriarchal ownership, as if Fujiko is Armeid’s possession, who can only be gifted to another man by her current owner. It’s a not-uncommon cultural assumption, drawn to its perverse extreme by the fact that Armeid was already her childhood abuser. 

Of course, all of this is precisely what Fujiko has spent her adulthood rallying against. She values freedom over all else, and makes it a point of pride to mock and discredit those who’d hope to cage her. She does not see her femininity or sexuality as a “precious gift” to be claimed by some male retainer; she has sex freely and for personal or mercenary reasons, disdaining the idea that woman are “supposed” to be meek and modest. That convention is just another sort of cage, after all.

Ultimately, Armeid seems like the ideal antagonist for a show so in tune with the complex realities of gender as a social construct. He represents basically all of the conservative, patriarchal social values that Fujiko disdains, coupled with the menace of the violent desires those values have worked to sanitize. He is the condescending pat on the head and the underlying threat of consequence in one, and though Fujiko has grown far beyond his influence, destroying him would nonetheless serve as a satisfying denouncement of his wretched perspective. Let’s get back to Fujiko at work!

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ODDTAXI – Episode 9

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How did it all come to this? Somehow, the spiraling conflicts of ODDTAXI feel both implausible and inevitable, a thousand quirks of fate culminating in an unstoppable tragedy. Odokawa has never done more than drive his taxi and try to protect his friends, but he has nonetheless found himself at the core of a deadly conspiracy, suspended between crooked cops and violent criminals. He is now possibly the only person who can save Taichi – and yet Odokawa himself is the biggest mystery of all, with his tragic history, strange skill set, and ominous closet all presenting their own questions. In another show, this lack of explanation might feel frustrating. In ODDTAXI, Odokawa’s personality has been presented with such nuance and clarity that he still feels like a close friend, even for all his secrets.

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that. Odokawa might conceal information, but he does not lie about his feelings. He is always earnestly himself, regardless of the circumstances. This might sometimes get him in trouble, as during his engagements with Dobu and Yamamoto – but it also attracts fast and loyal friends, who appreciate the company of someone who says what they feel. While characters like Kakihana or Taichi seek validation through the assumption of an online persona, they are ultimately promising more than they can provide, and eventually find themselves consumed by a culture whose hunger can never be satisfied. With his gruff yet undeniably earnest nature, Odokawa has won the trust of the people he cares about, and cultivated bonds that just might carry him through the waiting crucible. Let’s see if he can rescue Taichi from himself!

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Symphogear XV – Episode 5

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Hello everyone, and welcome the fuck back to Wrong Every Time. You all ready for some SYMPHOGEAR??? It’s been altogether too long since Hibiki last punched somebody, and I think we could all use a little righteous fury right now. Plus, we’ve at last reached one of my favorite supergroup staples: that part where your financial/political backers betray you, and you find yourself a bunch of wanted outlaws.

It’s a pretty handy dramatic conceit, for a variety of reasons. A betrayal like this introduces a great deal of uncertainty into the narrative, making the cast seem far more vulnerable than before, and thus creating a greater sense of challenge for the tasks ahead. Additionally, robbing the cast of their institutional backing forces them to reckon with their own values, as they are forced to choose between personal justice and society’s preferred justice for the first time. That personal struggle will in turn inform this season’s thematic trajectory, as the wielders challenge the nationalist rhetoric of Kazanari. And of course, it’s also just fun watching a team like this cope with less-than-optimal conditions; seeing the wielders deployed as a scrappy guerilla group is a payoff in its own right, demonstrating how their strength has nothing to do with their institutional power.

So yeah, I’m pretty pumped for this turn in the story, and excited to see just how badly Kazanari fucks this up. Symphogear villains have overreached in the past, but with the architects themselves in play, I’m guessing Kazanari’s reenactment of this meme will be the show’s most satisfying to date. Let’s get to it!

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Anne of Green Gables – Episode 2

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am eager to return to the animated classic that is Anne of Green Gables, as Anne and Matthew finally arrive at the gables in question. I say “finally,” but I should clarify that I am actually delighted by this show’s pacing. Modern slice of life anime frequently present life as a sort of shimmering snow globe, a place outside of time or context, presumably to help the audience feel distanced from their mundane concerns. In contrast, Green Gables simply presents the world as a whole at a meditative pace, allowing for the moments of rest, reflection, and even boredom that define life as it’s truly lived. It is delightful to me that we are following an episode named “Matthew Cuthbert is Surprised” with an episode called “Marilla Cuthbert is Surprised” – after all, it clearly takes at least forty to fifty minutes to properly convey two people processing a slight shock.

Of course, the actual reason this show’s pacing works so well is because the world it portrays is so lovely. Simply spending time in Takahata’s imagination is a gift, and given he both scripted and storyboarded Anne’s first four episodes, I imagine this episode will be just as charming as the last. With World Masterpiece Theater mainstay Ken’ichi Ishibashii subbing in on background art, it seems we’re in great hands as we return to Green Gables. Let’s start the show!

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