Spy x Family – Episode 8

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Hello everyone, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to get back to Spy x Family, which most recently offered some clear strides in precisely the direction I was hoping for. My persistent complaint from the start of this production has been a relative lack of Yor interiority or agency, and episode seven provided exactly that, as Yor’s experiences with her brother informed her current advice on Loid’s parenting. Unlike Loid, Yor actually has some personal experience dealing with a young family member, and her words helped Loid realize he’d been treating Anya more as a faulty machine than a living daughter. That in turn led to Loid affirming Yor’s place in the family, as he told her to stop considering herself an outsider relative to him and Anya.

I’m very much hoping Yor follows that advice, and continues to loudly assert her own perspective. But either way, I imagine we’re in for some delightful chaos at Eden Academy, with Damien’s infatuation likely to cause even more problems than his prior anger. Spy x Family is continuing to find seemingly limitless lodes of comedy within its conceptual framework, and I’m eager to see whatever nonsense comes next. Let’s get to it!

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Fall 2022 – Week 6 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It seems we’ve reached the halfway point of the fall season, though to be honest, most of the anime I’ve watched this season has just been more Boruto. What can I say, the Naruto world is actually pretty compelling when Kishimoto isn’t writing it, and Boruto hits with a special combination of slice of life shenanigans, grounded family drama, and occasional action flourishes that make it easy to munch through ten or twenty episodes. Of course, I’m also keeping up with One Piece and The Witch From Mercury, so I’m not entirely out of the airing anime loop, but seriously: if you liked Naruto conceptually but were disappointed by its actual storytelling, I would urge you to try out his son’s adventures. That aside, this has also been a fertile week in non-anime media, so let’s break down some fresh stories in the Week in Review!

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Narrative and Consequence

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Imagine, for a moment, the tale of Johnny Protagonist. Johnny is the son of a great martial artist, and is determined to uphold his father’s legacy. With a grand tournament approaching, Johnny sees his chance for glory at last, and trains hard to perfect the skills his father once instilled in him. In round after round, Johnny demonstrates cunning and courage, deftly defeating his opponents with one after another of his father’s legendary techniques. At last, Johnny reaches the final round, and faces off with the student of his father’s old rival. At this point, Johnny pulls a pointy hat out of his gi, says “I was actually a wizard this whole time,” and turns his opponent into a newt.

In your mind, does Johnny’s tale qualify as a satisfying story? If expanded to the length of a novel or television series, would you feel like Johnny’s wizard reveal was a meaningful payoff for the time you’ve invested in this character, and the challenges you’ve seen them overcome? Do you feel satisfied by that relationship between exertion and result, and are you sufficiently hooked on Johnny’s world to wish to follow his continuing adventures?

Buckle up, folks. Today we’re talking narrative and consequence.

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Bodacious Space Pirates – Episode 23

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re steering our ship towards Bodacious Space Pirates, which most recently introduced the threat of genuine pirate hunters to harass our intrepid heroes. This was all quite surprising, considering pirates don’t actually engage in any sort of illegal business; they’re basically a combination of traveling entertainers and high-stakes couriers, with all of their missions approved by a central authority.

As such, it’s hard to say who would have a vendetta against any pirates, much less the concept of modern-day piracy in general. And on top of that, we’ve now got some weirdo warping in while standing on top of his spaceship, in full cross-armed Gunbuster array. Bodacious Space Pirates has generally taken care to partition the tone of its various core elements; the lighthearted high school drama doesn’t undercut the grounded scifi worldbuilding, and vice versa. But a dude standing on top of a ship doing sentai poses feels like a traveler from a more super robot-informed universe, and so I’m eager to see how he slots into our existing configuration. Let’s see how this confrontation plays out in a fresh Bodacious Space Pirates!

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The Demon Girl Next Door – Episode 12

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today it seemed like the right time to check back in on The Demon Girl Next Door, and see how our luckless shadow mistress is faring. Last episode offered an unexpected deluge of backstory revelations, raining bombshell after bombshell on Shamiko’s tiny, horn-laden head. As it turns out, it was actually Momo’s sister who helped save Shamiko from the family curse, during the course of her attempts to protect all of this city’s luckless demons. Unfortunately, whatever threats she faced ultimately ended up sealing away Shamiko’s father, reducing him to an orange box the family uses as a makeshift table.

That’s a lot to take in at once! Frankly, it’s also a lot for us in the audience to take in at once, more than doubling our data points regarding this larger magical/demon girl paradigm. It seems that Momo is far from the first magical girl to doubt her mission; in fact, we appear to be living in an overall era of lost faith, with demon-slaying magical girls now more the exception than the rule. Instead, magical girls seem to have collectively acknowledged the inherent injustice of this whole Calvinist paradigm, and more recently have been working to offer the equivalent of social services and reparations to their arbitrarily condemned counterpoints.

All that serves as a humorous continuation of this show’s general themes, as well as an expression of its overall optimism regarding human nature. Rather than letting themselves be controlled by a process that seeks to dehumanize them, the magical girls of this world essentially unionized and rebelled, realizing they had far more in common with their alleged enemies than their overseers. A solution like this is what I’d expect this show to imagine as its potential endgame, so I’m quite interested to see how the drama develops now that we know a post-demon hunting paradigm has already been established. Let’s get to it!

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Fall 2022 – Week 5 in Review

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Hey folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I come to you equipped with ghouls, goblins, and tales of rapturous fantasy, as is only fitting for this most Halloweeny of weeks. Yes, I know Halloween was on Monday, but that’s still closer to this Week in Review than the previous one, so that’s what I’m conceptually going with here. Regardless, this has been a relatively fruitful week of film screenings, including classics of both horror and romance, as well our continuing adventures through the Naruto film canon. Back on the home front, I’ve also been gearing up for the climax to act one of my house’s D&D campaign, where I’m thinking their last opponent might turn out to be an In The Hills, The Cities-style colossus of melded human flesh. Too much? Maybe too much. Still tinkering with that one, I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, let’s break down some films!

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Zoku Owarimonogatari – Episode 6

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Alright Araragi, it’s time to figure this shit out. As I’ve suspected and Hanekawa seemed to confirm, this world we’ve been exploring is less of an alternate reality than an internal one; a product of Araragi’s mind, as he desperately seeks an answer to that fundamental question of “who am I, now that my childhood and pre-scripted path are behind me?” In search of that truth, he has held discussions with disparate versions of many of his companions, but avoided the one person who might truly know him well enough to answer: Oshino Ougi, his own Other Self.

As with all of this world’s Oddities, Ougi has served as a container for all the feelings Araragi refuses to acknowledge, a shadow that is as authentically him as his surface personality. His self-hatred and obsession with his own destruction, his lingering regrets regarding the possibilities of his vampiric nature, even his inability to visualize himself as an authentic and consistent person are all realized through Ougi’s mercurial presence. Araragi has come to accept Ougi’s authenticity as a part of him, but has nonetheless avoided their input in this crucial moment. As Sodachi said, what we see in the mirror is only a partial reproduction – Araragi is incomplete without Ougi, so it’s no wonder he’s only been able to produce incomplete answers. With his two sides united at last, let’s see how this strange mirror tale ends!

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Anne of Green Gables – Episode 12

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Hello friends, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I figured we might sneak our way back to Green Gables, and check in on the continuing saga of Marilla’s amethyst brooch. Marilla claims Anne lost it and Anne claims she did not; with two such stubborn characters as these, that’s basically all it takes to erect an insurmountable impasse between them. Truthfully, it seems most likely that Anne forgot to remove the brooch before heading off to the Idlewild, and thus it’s nestled safely somewhere along their woodland passageways. But while this conflict’s resolution will likely be simple enough, the course of its drama is serving as an enlightening referendum regarding Marilla and Anne’s feelings towards each other.

On the production front there is much cause for rejoicing, as this episode features the return of Yoshiyuki Tomino on storyboards, as well as Takahata himself on scripts. Tomino’s storyboards for Anne’s first day at Sunday school greatly elevated one of this show’s first emotional climaxes, offering a mixture of evocative symmetrical layouts and scenes where character blocking skillfully amplified emotional intent. That episode’s final reconciliation between Anne and Marika might be my favorite moment of the show so far, and so I expect great things from his execution of Anne and Marika’s latest dust-up. Let’s see how our friends are faring as we return to Green Gables!

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Spy x Family – Episode 7

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’d like to check back in on the Forger family’s continuing theatrics, as we return to Spy x Family. Last episode saw Anya doing her best to prove herself in her first day at school, only to be assigned the black mark of a Tonitrus Bolt for her efforts. In your average school, Anya’s righteous smackdown of the despised Damian would gain her a slap on the wrist and a lofty position in the social pecking order; here, it brings her one step closer to dissolving this family altogether.

That episode also demonstrated that there’s no need to fear this show will lose its spark when the Loid family is separated. In fact, Anya’s attempts to manipulate her schoolmates was one of the show’s funniest sequences so far; whereas her family interactions have largely settled into routine punctuated by occasional shock at Loid’s secret thoughts, offering a whole class worth of new characters provided all sorts of opportunities to riff on both her psychic powers and generally goofy personality. With her parents now aware of the fault lines in her social group, I imagine she’ll return to school equipped with a fresh set of well-intentioned but self-defeating tactics, and make some implausible new mess of things. Let’s find out how!

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Fall 2022 – Week 4 in Review

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Hey folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’ve got a somewhat lopsided collection of thoughts for you all, with plenty of the requisite horror findings, but also an impressively terrible fantasy film, as well as the final must-watch production of this exceedingly generous fall season. That’s right, I did indeed check out Bocchi the Rock, and must admit you were all correct in saying I really ought to do so. Turns out when you team up a dynamite production team with some genuinely witty source material, great things are likely to happen. We’ll get to Bocchi soon enough, but let’s first start off with some gleefully sleazy horror sequels, before we wind our way back to animation. It’s time to burn down the latest Week in Review!

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