Yuki Yuna is a Hero: Hero Chapter – Episode 4

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are once more leveling our swords towards the uncaring heavens, as we charge through a fresh episode of Yuki Yuna is a Hero’s appropriately titled Hero Chapter. With our club members having successfully extracted Togo from the Black Hole of Perpetual Suffering, it would appear things have returned to normal for the moment. Of course, nothing good comes without a price, and this time that cost falls upon Yuna herself, who is now cursed to suffer the flames of creation in Togo’s place.

And frankly, that’s not even the worst part of this new curse. Having apparently learned from the acts of selfless solidarity that liberated prior heroes, the Divine Tree has appended this fresh hell with a non-disclosure clause, preventing Yuna from even confessing her suffering to her closest friends. As always, the powers that be have taken something inherently precious and honorable – Yuna’s willingness to shoulder her friends’ burdens – and warped it into a new tool of entrapment and abuse. I can only hope that Yuna’s increasingly obvious suffering draws her friends into action as we return to the hero club!

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Bigtop Burger: Season One

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re exploring something a little outside our usual fare, as we munch through the first season of the Bigtop Burger animated series. From what I understand, this series is a frantic, irreverent comedy created by Ian Worthington, produced in Blender and featuring the voices of a variety of Youtube talents. The series follows the adventures of the titular burger truck and its clown-painted employees, though I imagine not much actual burger-vending will take place.

The series appears to fall into the same post-Invader Zim space as Vivziepop’s productions, with an emphasis on frenetic action and verbal sparring. I’ll admit, I was too old for this particular wave of online media; I was watching Invader Zim when it first came out, while my formative online video consumption was decidedly pre-Youtube, centered more on the stick figures and Salad Fingers of the old Newgrounds era. Nonetheless, I’m always curious to check out more of the internet’s diverse artistic microcultures, and imagine there’ll be much to poke at in this season’s blistering eleven minute runtime. Let’s get to it!

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Monogatari Off/Monster Season – Episode 10

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re continuing our journey through Monogatari’s Monster Season, as Araragi maintains his investigation of a series of vampiric near-murders around town. Having been conscripted by Gaen into one more oddity adventure, he has since discovered that five members of the girls’ basketball team have been targeted, and that the club itself has lost the sense of positive camaraderie that defined its glory days.

That’s our narrative on the surface, at least. Cracking open the carapace, it’s clear this arc is intended as a mirror of Kizumonogatari, with its parallels serving to illustrate just how much Araragi and Shinobu have changed since their first encounter. For Araragi’s part, it’s apparent already that he has come to value his present life and his intended future, having escaped both the clouded sense of self and self-destructive impulses of his earlier adventures. As for Shinobu, we have watched her become a mutually trusting partner to Koyomi, and also come to enjoy her role as both family member and stalwart protector in the Araragi house. The key question remains Deathtopia’s perspective – will she accept this version of Acerola who has found peace in domesticity, or will she demand a revival of the guarded Heart-under-blade, preferring the eternally questing maiden to one who has actually achieved her dream? Let’s find out!

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Winter 2026 – Week 6 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I am officially a year older, a fact I am attempting to accept with whatever grace an old fogie like me can muster. It’s an odd thing to have moved so fully beyond mass culture’s sphere of interest, but it turns out life does continue after the halcyon days generally featured in anime, and thus we all gotta make the most of it. A nice meal, hanging out with friends, watching a fucked-up movie; in my experience, the greatest joys in life are not far out of reach, just so long as we keep recommitting to seeking them. And personally, sharing my errant thoughts on art is absolutely one of the things that keeps me putting one foot in front of the other, certain that tomorrow will be a new day with its own unexpected joys. So thank you all for reading my ramblings, and I promise to keep digging at the wonders of anime, cinema, and whatever else crosses my path. Now let’s check out some films!

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Wicked

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re embarking on a somewhat unusual journey, as we dawdle our way through the 2024 film Wicked, adapted from the 2003 stage musical of the same name, which was itself adapted from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel. I’ve never seen the play or read the novel, but from what I understand, it catalogues the younger days of The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, extrapolating an era spent at some sort of magical academy alongside Glinda the Good Witch.

Directed by John M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians), the film stars Cynthia Erivo as our wicked witch Elphaba, and musical star Ariana Grande as the good witch Glinda. And that’s… basically everything I know about this film, beyond some general critical consternation regarding its staging and color design. I am a fan of musical theater, but I often find actual musicals to be a bit broad in their writing, rather than the incisive narrative song-cycles you can find on a good concept album. Either way, I’m eager to patch up this clear gap in my cultural knowledge, so let’s get on with the show!

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Star Wars Visions, Volume 3 – Episode 9

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I once again find myself in the unexpected position of screening a universally acclaimed Star Wars production, the much-heralded ninth episode of Star Wars Visions’ third season. Each of these “Visions” seasons features a sprawling collection of animators and production studios, with each individual episode offering a different team’s take on some aspect of the Star Wars universe.

While I’m generally a big fan of animated anthology projects, that overarching “Star Wars” label has kept me from checking out Visions in particular, as I’m just plain tired of the franchise’s wildly oversaturated tropes and tones. However, just as Andor successfully harnessed Star Wars’ mythology in service of an original, astonishing work of political theater, so have I heard that Visions’ most recent season offers a work of singular talent and vision, in the form of its Shinya Ohira-helmed ninth episode. 

I doubt there’s an animator in the industry who would refer to Ohira as anything less than a living legend. His fluid, ever-morphing forms possess a vitality unlike anything in the medium, and his contributions to productions ranging from Akira to The Boy and the Heron are some of the most captivating, unbelievable feats in animation history. His style of relentlessly shifting full animation is an outlier in an industry defined by compromise, and having assembled a preposterous team of similarly talented animators (Kou Yoshinari! Bahi JD! Daniel Kim! Masaaki Endo! Takeshi Honda! Weilin Zhang! Vincent Chansard! Toshiyuki Inoue!) for this project, I imagine we will here see him working without compromise, demonstrating a fluidity of form, scale of visual drama, and ambition of concept that will surely boggle the mind. Let’s get to it!

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Uzumaki – Episode 4

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are at last concluding our journey through Hiroshi Nagahama’s ill-fated adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, a project which opened with great promise and then swiftly shifted to embodying the frustrating perils of anime’s new global funding paradigm. We all know the story at this point: after funding a perfectly paranoid first episode carrying on in the style of Nagahama’s brilliant Aku no Hana adaptation, this production’s American overseers apparently got cold feet, forcing the production team to hastily employ whatever limited animation tricks they could manage in order to fill out the ensuing episodes. What began as a labor of love became a testament to capitalism’s incapacity for it, a cold reminder that foreign investment in anime is not the same thing as genuine foreign interest in anime, beyond its thrifty capacity to furnish a streamer’s production slate.

So yeah, that’s all bad news. Nonetheless, it’s still an interesting release in its own right, both as a marvel of collapsing production trickery and a compromised yet still-compelling rendition of Junji Ito’s stories. And since I can’t track down precisely whoever decided Uzumaki was an acceptable casualty of corporate malfeasance, the least I can do is honor the wreckage, and celebrate the embers of Nagahama’s ambitions. Let’s get to it!

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Winter 2026 – Week 5 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has seen us brave winter’s fury and emerge victorious, after having shoveled roughly eight tons of snow from my apartment’s driveway. I’m still sniffling, coughing, and generally enduring the personal indignities of nature’s most hateful season, but it appears there may well be a light at the end of the tunnel.

That aside, this has mostly been a week of tidying up outstanding projects. My house at last finished Ranking of Kings after initially losing momentum early in its second season, and also munched through Fantasy High’s Junior Year, leaving us with just one season of Intrepid Heroes adventures to watch through. Fortunately, the great drought of Critical Role’s end-of-year vacation has ended, leading us into the distinct pleasure of Mercer versus Mulligan as we join up with the second of Campaign Four’s three separate tables. We’ve also just cracked the seal on Fallout’s second season, which has in turn prompted fresh stabs at Fallout 4’s inconsistent pleasures. It frankly boggles the mind that Bethesda has spent a straight-up decade making games nobody wanted when the next Elder Scrolls is sitting right there, but I’m doing my best to find joy in blasting mudcrabs while we wait. Oh, and movies! Yes, let’s talk about some movies.

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Legendary Creator Yasuhiko Yoshikazu

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re checking out something a little different from our usual fare, as we watch an NHK special program centered on Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, the character designer and animation director for the original Mobile Suit Gundam. As the designer behind the most formative and iconic real robot mecha series, Yoshikazu essentially defined the style of ‘80s scifi anime protagonists, casting an enormous shadow over one of the most prolific and acclaimed eras in anime history. He’d go on to make further contributions to this wild era, creating the scifi manga Arion and Venus Wars, both of which he’d eventually adapt into film. He’d later return to Gundam as well, penning the much-loved Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin manga, which he would also personally adapt into animation.

Yoshikazu belongs to a prior generation of anime luminaries, back when the medium was almost inextricable from the pro-labor, anti-war sentiments of its young, politically conscious creators. Anime has quite frankly gotten more insular and reactionary in the years since, and Yoshikazu himself has expressed frustration with shifts like Gundam’s turn towards the more fantastical, individualist focus on Newtypes, a clear drift from the solidarity and martial antipathy of its origins. Of course, such a narrative of artistic evolution is far too simplistic to account for the ways anime has shifted over the years, and also paints a picture of Yoshikazu himself that I’m sure this program will complicate. So let’s get to it then, and see what he has to say for himself!

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Ojamajo Doremi Sharp – Episode 17

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I thought we’d check back in on our ojamajos, and see how Doremi and the gang are handling the trials of raising their witch baby Hana-chan. Having recently learned how to crawl, Hana-chan spent the last episode raising all manner of hell at both the Majo-dou and Doremi’s house, screaming through the night and crawling on ceilings and generally running wild over her beleaguered caretakers.

So yes, a nightmare of an episode for our witches, but definitely a treat for us in the audience. Doremi at its most whimsical is basically prestige comedy, demonstrating ambitious, dynamic storyboarding, marvelously silly expression work, and persistent creativity of storytelling. The show is a master class in limited animation fundamentals, demonstrating that animation economy need not limit your production’s brilliance. I’d be perfectly happy with another silly one, but whether we’re due for farce or heartbreak, I’m sure we’re in good hands!

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