Category Archives: Episode Writeup

BanG Dream! Ave Mujica – Episode 8

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am happy to announce we’re returning to the oft-tormented drama of Ave Mujica, as Sakiko and her companions seek community and happiness through the ritual self-flagellation of teen rock bands. Having shattered CRYCHIC and been shown up by MyGO, Sakiko thought to find vindication through Ave Mujica, a melodramatic reimagining of her torment as performance and occult ritual. But casting herself as a doll trapped in a nightmare did little to alleviate her pain; ultimately, Ave Mujica only succeeded in isolating her friend Mutsumi, whose eagerness to please led her to reject even her own personality.

Fortunately, the girls of MyGO were there to bear witness to all this insanity, and eventually lend a helping hand. MyGO’s rescue operation over the last few episodes has served as a charming vindication of their efforts across the first season, as the kindness and urge to connect embodied by Anon and Tomori has been echoed through the growth of Soyo and Taki, each of whom now have the strength to not just forgive, but actively embrace Sakiko and Mutsumi. Thanks to the sanctuary they found in MyGO, they were able to pull CRYCHIC’s remaining members back from isolation and self-hatred, and give the band they all loved a tearful, cathartic sendoff.

Of course, all this growth for the former CRYCHIC members leaves Mujica’s remaining bandmates out in the cold, a situation that has at last pushed Umiri out of her imperious, seemingly indifferent poise. It seems interesting to me that it was not the dissolution of Mujica, but reunion of CRYCHIC that truly offended her; given her prior annoyance at being framed as unfeeling, I’m guessing we’re due for some revelations regarding just how Umiri expresses her carefully guarded emotions. Also Nyamu! CRYCHIC getting closure was great, but their adventures left distressingly little room for Nyamu shenanigans. Let’s see how the rest of Ave Mujica are faring as the next act begins!

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SANDA – Episode 1

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re checking out a brand-spanking-new property that just started airing in October, an adaptation of the shonen manga Sanda. I had not previously known about this title, and its synopsis feels almost incomprehensible to me. It’s apparently to some degree a commentary on Japan’s declining birthrates, projecting a future Japan where children are closely monitored and controlled to ensure fertile futures. That much makes sense to me, but then we hit “Santa Claus has been sealed away because of the curse,” and the introduction of a lead who can apparently transform into Santa Claus whenever he wears red clothes.

I know Christmas is more of a date night event than anything even tangentially religion-related in Japan, but I guess I’ll have to find out how Santa Claus and birthrate commentary more fully align from the show itself. And frankly, I have every reason to suspect the show will provide a genuine answer – after all, we’re adapting a fully complete work by Beastars creator Paru Itagaki, who’s already renowned for weaving incisive social commentary into her fantastical dramas. Meanwhile, our director Tomohiso Shimoyama is a mainstay at Science Saru, with a sturdy key animation background and direction credits working alongside both Masaaki Yuasa and Naoko Yamada. I am exceedingly curious to see how these ideas coalesce into a coherent shonen adventure, so let’s get right to the action with the first episode of Sanda!

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Big Windup! – Episode 19

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re diving back into the action of the summer tournament’s opening game, as first-seeded favorites Tosei find themselves on the backfoot against our scrappy boys from Nishiura. Though outgunned in terms of experience and pure athleticism, Nishiura have been exploiting every possible advantage to eke out a two-run lead, most recently acquiring a run via a smartly aimed bunt and a desperate squeeze play.

As has come to be expected from Big Windup!, every gambit and shift in fortunes has been expertly articulated by both the characters and the production itself. After spending its first act honing in on the physical and psychological constraints of Nishiura’s players, this story has proven itself an exemplar of mechanically grounded conflict, using the solidity of its baseline variables to make the tactical brilliance of its characters shine. There’s no deus ex machina or “I gotta dig deeper” power-ups here; only the satisfying interplay of smart players manipulating a complex board state, a rarified appeal that only a few mangaka can execute. Well, Asa Higuchi is clearly one such mangaka, and Tsutomu Mizushima is possibly the single best choice for bringing that style of conflict to life. Let’s get back to the game as Mihashi celebrates his first run!

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Andor – Episode 3

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re returning to the far flung planets of Andor, where our hero Cassian has found himself in a whole heap of trouble. Not that he’s actively trying to be a hero or anything; he’s only seeking his sister, lost in the fallout of whatever happened back on Kentari. But it is rarely an innate sense of heroic responsibility that leads us to enact great changes on our world; just like the unfortunate string of coincidences that led to Cassian’s downfall, heroism is mostly our retroactive designation for a combination of desperation, opportunity, and luck.

Andor has done an excellent job of grounding its drama in mundane realities, and of emphasizing how, when lodged under the heel of oppression, most people simply carve out a nook where they can be pressed down upon with greater comfort and security. That in turn increases its sense of urgency; with no hope of a messiah lifting these people out of their circumstances, the threats they face feel that much more implacable, and their small acts of solidarity and rebellion that much more essential. We don’t need to be heroes to fight what seems inevitable; we simply need to embrace solidarity over comfort. Rebellion is housing the hunted, hiding the knife, keeping the secret. Fascism’s greatest strength is its presumption of inevitability; in truth, defeat is only inevitable if we believe it so.

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Monogatari Off/Monster Season – Episode 7

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are returning to the supplementary trials of Monogatari’s mixed-up heroes, and likely getting into some sort of ornate Shinobu-related fiasco. It is little surprise that the show’s formal conclusion has resulted in all these dangling loose ends – after all, as Monogatari has always emphasized, becoming our best selves is the work of a lifetime. It was actually Sodachi’s first appearance that prompted Araragi to reflect on how “happiness isn’t a race,” and Sodachi returned to reiterate that truth last arc, offering Nadeko the world-weary assurance that nothing ever ends, we just keep working on ourselves and putting one foot in front of the other.

It is up to us whether we find that truth sobering or liberating – whether we lament the endless task of self-definition, or find hope in always having a second chance. But if Monogatari is anything to go by, we should take heart in how changeable our identities truly are, the miraculous fact that merely by dedicating ourselves to new daily practices, we can actually shift our fundamental nature. That we are works in progress will always be a source of anxiety, because it means we are never truly “perfect,” never done with our psychological odyssey. But that great adventure is both the trial and privilege of consciousness; the very fact that we can examine and even change ourselves is the great gift of human nature. Let’s revel in that gift once more, as we return to Monogatari!

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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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