Category Archives: Essay

Yuri is My Job! – Volume 6

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Yuri is My Job!’s fifth volume concluded with a long-awaited emotional revelation. Having found herself distanced and disoriented by Mitsuki’s seemingly contradictory behavior, Hime vented her feelings to Sumika, and thus learned the messy truth: for Mitsuki, the cafe performances are not an assumed, alternate self, but an aspirational one. Mitsuki isn’t just acting nice because that’s what the patrons demand; she is performing kindness and grace and social acumen because she wishes to genuinely embody those qualities, whether on or off the stage. The Mitsuki who exists backstage is actually her private shame; in truth, Mitsuki Ayanokouji is the person she wants to be.

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Toradora! – Episode 14

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Toradora!’s thirteenth episode brought us the terrible culmination of Taiga’s attempted reconciliation with her father, leaving Ryuji and Minori to help her pick up the pieces. And yet, for all this ultimate fallout was both calamitous and predictable, and for how deeply Ryuji misunderstood both Taiga and her father’s intentions, their ultimate reconciliation came swiftly, the two rekindling their friendship alongside the festival’s roaring bonfire. That’s kinda the thing about youth; we bruise easily, but we also bounce back, so long as we are given the room and support necessary to regain our footing.

The episode’s last sequence in particular, as the fire dimmed and the festival drew to a close, felt like it was drawing on something fundamental and ineffable – that sense of vital, floating ephemerality that attends monumental adolescent thresholds. It is a strange thing to be observing your own life like a bystander as it passes by, but in moments of such clear temporal passage as that, it comes naturally to see your life through an outsider’s eyes.

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Witch Hat Atelier and the Balance of Power

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After eight volumes of covers depicting the bright-eyed students and considerate teachers that have defined Coco’s journey so far, it feels grimly appropriate that Witch Hat Atelier’s ninth volume spotlights one of the wardens of magic, the enforcers dedicated to preventing its dangerous misuse. Through their collective efforts to create a magical accessory that might aid their friend Custas, Coco and Tartah arrived at a sort of wing suit that let him soar through the air, granting him a mobility greater than he’d ever possessed before. Their gift was kindly intended and thoughtfully designed, but the realization of these wings may well have inspired Tartah to fly too close to the sun, driven by his sympathetic desire to grant magical aid to those who need it most, and thereby climbing like Icarus to a disastrous height.

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A Home For No One: Vive L’Amour

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We open with a shot of an apartment door, its key hanging expectantly in profile, forgotten by an inattentive real estate agent. An unintended invitation, a false offer of cohabitation – but in such a world as this, we take whatever intimacy we can get. A man briefly cradles, inspects the keychain, before loping down the hall at the call of another speaker. Neither are in focus; only the key is truly present. The man returns, his eye wandering back to the key, tempted time and again. He claims it, and the title drops: Vive L’Amour. Is the implication that this act, this thievery in service of curiosity or hoped-for connection, is the essence of love itself? Where does love reside?

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Yuri is My Job! – Volume 5

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to the adventures of Hime and her compatriots at Cafe Liebe, as we bound beyond the confines of Yuri is My Job!’s anime adaptation, and onward to the trials of the Miman-penned ongoing manga.

It’s certainly a pleasure to be back – after all, the original premise of this work is inherently fascinating to me, digging directly into the complex relationship between the genres we love, the characters we idolize, and the ways we formulate our own identities. From the parasocial complications of performing selves for an assumed audience, to the inherent commonalities between stage performance, adolescent identity-forming, and the nuances of crafting a public façade that feels both amenable to others and authentic to one’s own feelings, this story has been digging into core questions of both authentic self-expression and finding yourself through art, topics that could not be any closer to my own heart.

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The Complete Crepax – Volume 1

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It is always a pleasure to be introduced to a vibrant, fully realized artistic voice, to learn of a wholly distinct perspective on storytelling and human psychology. I consider it something akin to a moral duty to continuously check out new artists, for the simple reason that it is only through such far-flung trawling that I can hope to better understand our capacity for self-expression, and to better express whatever humanity I might possess through the works I create. As such, I’m happy to today be sharing my own experience of the works of Guido Crepax, as contained in the first volume of his collected works.

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Misadventures in Dungeons & Dragons: Part Four

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am once again beyond up to date on my outstanding reader bounties, meaning it’s a fine time to reward myself (and you all? I hope???) with a fresh reflection on my fledgling dungeon mastering career. When last we left off, the party was approaching Castle Blackmire, and my DMing prep work was already on sounder footing relative to the initial Festival of Saint Agatha. There is simply no way to avoid the gauntlet of data and experience provided by actually running sessions; even among DMs, what amounts to “sufficient preparation” can vary wildly, depending entirely on your own comfort, knack for memorization, ability to improvise, and conception of what exactly you and your players want from your campaign.

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Witch Hat Atelier and the Cruelty of Prudence

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As we return to Witch Hat Atelier, our first title page sees our young mage bedecked in flowers, with even our adorable squirrel-caterpillar creature in attendance to celebrate the fun of an approaching festival. The intent seems clear – after the heavy, portentous drama of the last few chapters, both Qifrey and his students have clearly earned a moment of rest. Witch Hat Atelier is perfectly comfortable stretching towards fantasy action or large-scale drama, but its heart resides in the day-to-day interplay of these young witches, as both their collaborations and the manga’s distinctive realization of those actions demonstrate the inherent thrill of bettering yourself, of marching determinedly towards your next skill horizon, and of making sure to be kind to yourself and stopping to smell the roses along the way.

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Direction and Atmosphere

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I was recently asked to write a piece on direction and atmosphere in anime, in line with my previous piece regarding the priorities of Laid-Back Camp and similar shows. I initially struggled with the concept, as that older piece is largely self-contained, and focused mainly on evangelizing for shows that don’t prioritize narrative action. A lot of my pieces at Crunchyroll were basically predicated on the question of “how do I get someone who’s only watched Naruto or Demon Slayer to enjoy Hyouka,” meaning they were content to end on the suggestion of branching out and letting their readers arrive at their own conclusions. But you folks are a very different audience; anyone who is interested in my thoughts on Wong Kar-wai probably doesn’t need to be convinced dramatic minimalism can be compelling, so I won’t waste your time with an entreaty on slow cinema’s behalf.

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Blue Flag – Volume 4

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Seiya storms the barricades as we open Blue Flag’s fourth volume, first challenging his brother Touma on his reckless actions, then turning his barrels towards our other leads. As in his first appearance, Seiya cuts through all this adolescent anxiety like a hot knife through butter, casually dragging Taichi aside and challenging Futaba on her relationship with the pair of them in one easy gesture. When high school dramas only feature high schoolers, their perspective can get a bit myopic, naturally embracing the sense of consequence and finality that attends untested adolescent emotions. Emerging from childhood into anxious self-awareness, adolescents can naturally feel overwhelmed or paralyzed by the choices before them, seeing in each choice made an endless hall of potential doors that have all slammed painfully, permanently shut.

This is understandable; not only are they thinking about how their presentation and actions affect others’ impressions of them for basically the first time, they’re combining that understanding with the natural anxiety of high school, the first time in most of their lives where the stage after this one isn’t known or guaranteed. So they really do have the chance to screw up their lives in lasting, consequential ways, making it all the harder to make any key decisions.

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