This week on Why It Works, I finally start on a big craft breakdown for Megalo Box, exploring the many smart decisions that made its recent Aragaki fight so spectacular. Megalo Box has always been a stylish and entertaining show, but the storytelling here felt the most sturdily constructed and rewarding so far. I hope you enjoy the piece!
Junk Dog Vs. Soldier: MEGALOBOX’s Finest Fight
In trying to collect my thoughts on Annihilation, my mind kept returning to that earlier scifi/horror “humans are overrun by a new order” classic Jurassic Park, and that film’s own relative optimism. Putting aside one-liners like “must go faster” and “clever girl,” I feel like that film’s soul was captured in the line “life finds a way.” It’s unsurprising that a heart-on-sleeve director like Spielberg would make a movie about dinosaurs eating people into something life-affirming, and I can’t help but shiver at the contrast between that and Alex Garland’s comparatively soul-destroying Annihilation. Life might find a way in Annihilation, but it’s highly doubtful that we’ll be finding a way along with it.
For this week’s Crunchyroll article, I used Hinamatsuri as a platform to celebrate another of my favorite topics in fiction: found families. As I say in the piece, I think this world could use far more validation of the families we choose for ourselves, and it’s always nice to find more reasons to recommend shows like Sekai Seifuku or March comes in like a lion. There are only so many ways as an anime critic to strike my “I did a good deed today” itch, but I think leading more people to Rei Kiriyama’s story hopefully qualifies.
Family is What You Make of It in HINAMATSURI!
Sometimes this job is so damn great. I had a lot of fun with this week’s Why It Works, as I looked back to catalog pretty much everything My Hero Academia’s second-most-heroic class roster have accomplished. As it turns out, the answer is Not Much, and a pretty hilarious Not Much at that. I hope you enjoy the piece!
Oh Right, You Guys Are Here Too
Togashi, what the hell are you doing.
I had assumed, upon reading and critiquing Hunter x Hunter’s thirty-fourth volume, that I’d essentially covered the gist of Togashi’s schtique – his tendency towards creating impossibly convoluted tactical setups, and his skill for resolving them as a series of dramatically coherent action beats. The fight between Chrollo and Hisoka was essentially that instinct in isolation, split between half a volume of expository notes on Chrollo’s powers and half a volume of evaluation time “I hope you got all that” payoff. Surely the complexity would let up just a tad for the next volume?
For this week’s Crunchyroll article, I dove into the very different worldviews of Yang and Reinhard, discussing how their respective upbringings very clearly influence their views of not just their countries, but their own potential, and the way humans and history interact. It’s really fun to see such an ostensibly “great men make history”-aligned narrative freely admit that we’re all products of our environment, but that’s basically the perspective that makes Galactic Heroes so good in general. The show’s a treat, I’m having a great time with it, and I hope you enjoy the piece!
The Tactical Titans of Legend of the Galactic Heroes
It unsurprisingly didn’t take long for Hinamatsuri to pop up in my Why It Works columns. The show’s pretty much a comedy marvel in all respects, and also very endearing as a found-family drama besides, making it basically the ideal show for a huge mark like me. The fact that its jokes generally aren’t that surprising only really underlines the strength of their delivery; pacing really can work wonders, and it’s certainly working wonders here. I hope you enjoy the piece!
Hinamatsuri’s Comedic Timing is So Snappy It’ll Break Your Neck
Today on Crunchyroll, I focused on precisely the kind of nitty-gritty craft stuff that makes me so happy to have this column, exploring how the added content for My Hero Academia’s new season reflected the overall authorial voice of the show versus the manga. Obviously they didn’t include any overbearing new foreshadowing or anything, but the way My Hero Academia The Show sees its own cast is interesting to me, and material that diverges from the manga is one of the clearest avenues for exploring that perspective. This was a fun one to write, and I hope you enjoy it!
The Anime-Original Secrets of My Hero Academia
As usual, I wrapped up this season’s extended preview week with one last look back for Crunchyroll, offering some quick recommendations from across the genre spectrum. With Wotakoi arriving at the last moment, I no longer have much real cause to complain about this season – there’s no big ambitious art statement by one of my favorite directors, but there’s at least one or two solid shows in basically all my other genres. It’s a pretty fine time to like anime!
Today on Crunchyroll, I’m hyping up the new season of My Hero Academia by once again diving into the fragile self-image of its principle leads. I’m mid-preview week at the moment and have no time to chat, so you can check out the article below and I guess that’s it. I’m off!
Where Must the Members of Class 1-A Go From Here?
