Category Archives: Episode Writeup

The Big O – Episode 16

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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!

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Oregairu S3 – Episode 7

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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!

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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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