Category Archives: Episode Writeup

Pokemon Sun and Moon – Episode 47

Posted on by

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am delighted to announce that we’re returning to Sun and Moon, after more than a month away. It’s not Sun and Moon’s fault we didn’t visit sooner; the show is outrageously charming, and I’m always happy to check out another episode. But I’ve been making an effort to balance my output of the various reader-funded projects lately, and that’s put Sun and Moon on the backburner as I build up the stock of Oregairus and Toradoras and whatnot.

Well, I’ve been building that stock for a month straight, and I think I’ve earned a day in the sun. When last we left off, some major narrative gears seemed to be creaking into motion, with the awakening of the Ultra Beasts and the machinations of Lusamine’s lab associate both promising future trials. I’m eager to see all that play out, but also would be perfectly happy with a lazy beach episode, and maybe some Team Rocket shenanigans. There are really no wrong answers with Sun and Moon, so let’s not waste any more time, and get back to Alola!

Continue reading →

ODDTAXI – Episode 10

Posted on by

Through the miracles of science, it has become easier than ever to measure our success in the world, and compare it to the wealth of others. Where once we might have fretted blindly over the potential riches and happiness of our peers, now their successes are easy to tabulate – just a click away, listed and formatted through a whole ecosystem of social media platforms. Never again must you be tormented by the fear that unknown others are beating you at life; now you can know they are, through their carefully pruned instagrams and twitter feeds and facebook pages.

Via the advent of social media, our every statement has become a performance, declaring our wit and wealth and social worth. Thousands of also-rans clamor for the spotlight, hoping to one day know the pleasure of waking up in fear every morning, terrified that your audience will figure you out. Everyone is a showman, and everyone is a fraud. We construct ideals out of quips and personal victories, sweeping all that might irritate the beast behind the show curtain. Even our admissions of weakness or exhaustion carry a hint of salesmanship – after all, vulnerability is relatable.

Odokawa never intended to serve as a weird human antidote to modern malaise; in fact, basically all of his life choices seem to reflect a man with little sense of self-worth, who’d rather drop out of society than contend with its trials. Nonetheless, his taxi cab has become a sanctuary of authentic performance, and over time, a source of meaningful personal bonds. In the back of Odokawa’s taxi, no one is performing for society – his seat is the place between performances, where characters like Taichi or Shun can catch their breath between fabrications. It is not to our followers, but our service workers who we present our most authentic self; and through this shelter of identity, Odokawa has cultivated friends who might just see him through the trials ahead. Let’s return to the remarkable ODDTAXI.

Continue reading →

Kaiba – Episode 5

Posted on by

Kaiba’s last episode was a tragic story of grief and abandonment, ending with the deaths of all parties involved. The episode before that was another story of grief and abandonment, ending with a mother sobbing over her sold-off daughter. In the world of Kaiba, the tensions of our daily lives are drawn to an unbearable tautness by the encroaching influence of biotechnological capitalism. These characters live in squalor and poverty, but many people throughout history have lived such. What sets Kaiba apart is the fullness of capitalism’s reach, and the uniquely terrible bargains it is sanctioned to make. Here, even our bodies are commodities – in fact, for the poor, they are one of the few commodities they possess with any real value. For the rich, this enables a dazzling new world of personal experience; for the poor, their bodies are just one more thing to be sold, one more thing that can be possessed to account for their debts.

Continue reading →

Hugtto! Precure – Episode 25

Posted on by

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It has been far too long since we last stopped in with Hana and the rest of the Hugtto crew, so today we’ll be remedying that post-haste, as we return to the charming world of Pretty Cure. The show’s last episode felt something like a post-act breather, as all the characters we’ve come to know joined together for a combined pool party and concert. It was a charming and low-stakes episode that nonetheless served as a key rite of passage for our team.

In keeping with Hugtto’s themes, that episode saw our leads taking tangible steps towards their futures, embracing adult responsibilities and taking charge within their community. The value of honest work, and the pride that comes from executing your craft, stand as core tenets of Hugtto’s philosophy. Having each struggled with doubts about their passions, our leads have learned to embrace their desires, whether those feelings lead them to figure skating or rock music or what have you.

Among all her friends, Hana remains the one without a clear professional trajectory. The very qualities that make her great at supporting others leave her personally unmoored; her talent is “supporting others in achieving their dreams,” and she’s at times wondered whether that’s really a talent at all. Her personality is a jumble of contradictions that make her perfectly suited to lead this narrative, and I’m eager to see how her journey continues. Let’s get right back to Hugtto Precure!

Continue reading →

The Big O – Episode 16

Posted on by

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am eager to return to the streets of Paradigm, where Roger and Dorothy have recently been making incredible strides in illuminating their shadowed histories. After a first season largely defined by external, episodic mysteries, The Big O’s second half opened with dual investigations of our heroes’ own stories. Roger confronted his fabricated identity directly, casting away any doubts about his personhood by reasserting his current self. And Dorothy returned to the place of her birth, confronting her “siblings” and finding validation in Rosco’s unambiguously human existence.

The two have each cleared some key psychological hurdles, but for all that, the forces surrounding them are still shrouded in mystery. We know Roger was indoctrinated as a child, but not why, or what happened to the other children. We know that our Dorothy is one of many siblings, but almost nothing about her father’s ultimate intentions. Both Roger and Dorothy feel like the castaway orphans of a grand conspiracy, each tethered by their nature to Rosewater’s plan, but without a clue as to its nature or objective. Each of them fiercely value their independence, but exist within a world so artificial and tightly managed that true agency feels like a fantasy, forcing them to suffer continuous reminders that they are guided by forces outside their control. Can our fledglings crack the shell that is Paradigm, and reveal the truth of the world? Let’s find out!

Continue reading →

Oregairu S3 – Episode 7

Posted on by

Alright Hachiman, how are we doing this? With Yukino and Iroha’s prom under assault by Yukimom, Hachiman has decided the best course of action is to make a second prom, thereby shifting the active question from “should a prom exist” to “which prom should we choose.” Then, by ensuring his own prom is an inferior possibility, he can surreptitiously ensure Yukino’s prom goes forward as planned.

It’s an extremely Hachiman plan, in a variety of ways. Hachiman is accustomed to circumventing the arguments presented by his opponents, or even his allies. Where they see problems with one clear trajectory of resolution, he looks more broadly, and spies ways that a problem can be resolved without even confronting its central variable. So it went with the resolution of Tobe’s crush, as well as Rumi’s social problems – but of course, both of those solutions were stop-gaps, rather than lasting resolutions. And beyond this familiar vein of tactics, Hachiman is also banking on his most reliable solution: making himself (or his prom, in this case) the monster, thereby drawing all the fire from whoever he’s attempting to save.

Basically all of Hachiman’s friends have expressed their frustration with this approach, whether it’s Hayato’s “why is this the only way you know how to do things,” Yukino’s “I hate your methods,” or Yui’s tearful “you can’t keep hurting yourself for others.” It’s an approach reflective of his self-hatred, his inability to value himself even for the sake of those who love him. But Hachiman has grown a great deal since the last time he employed these methods, and this time, there’s a key distinction: it is not Hachiman himself, but this prom-avatar he’s creating, that will become the target of derision. If Hachiman can maintain the effectiveness of his methods while removing the martyrdom element, he’ll have taken a huge step forward into adulthood, maturing while retaining his fundamental self. Let’s see what he’s up to!

Continue reading →

86 – Episode 5

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Kaguya-sama: Love is War – Episode 7

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Land of the Lustrous – Episode 5

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Adachi and Shimamura – Episode 11

Posted on by

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!

Continue reading →