Symphogear XV – Episode 10

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today the sun is shining, the birds are trilling, and we’re watching some goddamn Symphogear. When last we left off, Hibiki had just emerged from her doctor-prescribed Pit of Despair, the place she generally visits before rallying for a given season’s final battle. Having once again lost Miku to the allure of jet-propelled pants, she was forced to commiserate with her father, who for once actually had some reasonable advice for her.

Meanwhile, our sword lesbians were busy hashing out some disagreements in the only way sword lesbians can. Kazanari’s violently nationalist philosophy was frankly too distant from Tsubasa’s values to ever present a genuine allure, but where authentic philosophical conflict fails, brainwashing can serve in a pinch. I’m not particularly bothered by that admittedly clumsy turn; having Tsubasa be caught between familial legacy and personal feelings was a natural direction to take this story, and ending it with Kazanari literally killing his son in order to impart his values to his granddaughter felt like a perfect capstone for his role in the narrative. It’s the ultimate counterpoint to his claims of working to protect the family: in the end, nationalists will sacrifice anything for the sake of their own glorious self-image.

With XV’s political thread having pretty much resolved itself, it’s time to get personal, as Hibiki fights to save her wife from some new god-summoning ritual or whatever. However things turn, I’m sure the battles will be absolutely spectacular for Symphogear’s grandest of finales. Let’s get to it!

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Ranking of Kings – Episode 4

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Hello again, and welcome to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to the world of Rankings of Kings, wherein Bojji most recently set off on a grand adventure. All the pieces are now set for a classic work of heroic fantasy: a young boy with grand dreams but untested abilities, a nefarious half-brother claiming his birthright, and a vast world sprawling out before him. But of course, even by this point, it’s clear that Ranking of Kings intends to complicate our understanding of heroism, justice, and righteousness.

For two full episodes, and up through the first half of the third, Queen Hyling was presented as an unambiguous antagonist to Bojji. She scolded him for his fundamental nature, marveled at his weakness relative to her trueborn son, and even led the charge to prevent his ascension to the throne. We were given every reason to believe Hyling belonged to a long lineage of evil stepmothers, whose motives require no unpacking, and whose role in the narrative is entirely one-dimensional.

And then, we learned who Hyling truly was. How she’d initially possessed such enthusiasm for connecting with Bojji, and how she genuinely respected his gentle nature. How they’d grown together, and then how the birth of her son had slowly drawn them apart. Crucially, what we learned about Hyling did not reframe her prior actions as secretly noble – Hyling has done both kind things and selfish things, sometimes operating according to her most charitable instincts, and at other times reacting out of fear, impatience, or simple frustration. She is the first to embody Ranking of Kings’ most central and urgent theme: that people are not simply good or evil, people are people, with complex motives, concerns we’re not privy to, and the capacity to act in both kind and unkind ways. Hyling was not drawn away from Bojji by some equally noble cause; she simply let love slip into indifference, and from there to resentment. So it goes.

Ranking of Kings’ general refusal to engage in moral absolutism, its understanding that we all contain multitudes, is its most compelling thematic thread. But beyond that, the show is also charming and beautiful and a generous adventure in its own right, embodying the strengths of its genre predecessors while dancing around many of their pitfalls. With Bojji at last on his way, I’m eager to see where his adventure leads, so let’s get right back to the delightful Ranking of Kings!

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Simoun – Episode 24

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to the skies of Simoun, where Chor Tempest is currently on the verge of total abolition. In fact, it’s not just Chor Tempest, but the foundations of Simulacrum society that’s threatened by this new peace. At least during the war, Simulacrum could still cling to its identity as a chosen land, and the sole wielder of the Ri Majoon. But with the walls between these societies falling just as foreign engineering catches up with them, all of the things that defined Simulacrum as special are swiftly disintegrating.

Of course, as Onashia just revealed, the alternative promises its own form of disintegration. To maintain Simulacrum’s status as a pristine gem, and to fully embrace the power of the Ri Majoon, is to separate yourself from the natural cycles of life and death. Simulacrum’s overall society has been mirroring the nature of its sybillae: kept pristine through isolation, utterly preoccupied with the fear of “contamination,” and in many ways contained to a perpetual adolescence.

The parallels between simoun sibyllae, Simulacrum itself, and the Class S narratives this story is drawing on are abundantly clear, and at this point, the show’s proposed solution seems clear as well. To seek perfection is to seek non-existence; only through embracing the world will Simulacrum survive, just as how only through embracing their imperfect humanity will the sibyllae grow into adulthood. Perfection is beautiful, but it is also static; Simulacrum was a wonder, but it was built to fall. Let’s return to this mirage’s final days, as we explore one more episode of Simoun!

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Spring 2022 – Week 6 in Review

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Hey folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It seems like spring has finally arrived in my neighborhood, so I hope you’re all enjoying the blissfully temperate weather as much as I am. I’ve also been feeling pretty upbeat about my article progress; I finished an essay I’d been poking at for weeks, knocked out a couple ambitious notes projects, and have got a sizable Why It Works column arriving next Monday. My bounty board is looking more manageable than it has in some time, and in the meantime, I’m still sneaking in as many films as I can to power-level my cinema stats. I started off this whole review business with full points in literature and not much else, so I’ve been doing my best to rush the cinema study endgame, and feeling just a tad more attuned to the breadth and history of film with each new article. Seeing connections and influences emerge in real time is an immensely satisfying process, and I’m doing my best to feed all that study back into my critical work. But for now, let’s just poke at some interesting films, as we run down one more Week in Review!

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Hakujaden

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be exploring the oldest work of anime I’ve ever covered on the blog, and in fact, the first full-length film Toei Douga ever produced. Known as Hakujaden, “The White Serpent,” or “Panda and the Magic Serpent,” it’s an adaptation of a classic work of Chinese folklore, and is essentially the anime equivalent to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

In this film, we will be witnessing the process of a new art form coming into being, as the scattered shorts of prior years gave way to a new era of anime production, led in large part by the luminaries of Toei Douga. Eventually the studio’s film productions would jumpstart the careers of modern legends like Takahata and Miyazaki, but for Hakujaden, the key animation would be composed by just two animators: Akira Daikubara handling the humans, and Yasuji Mori taking care of the animals. Hakujaden is a staggeringly significant work by any metric, and I’m frankly well outside my depth in attempting to “critique” it in anything but the most wildly ahistorical of styles, but I hope at the very least we can simply sit and appreciate it together. Let’s explore the birth of Toei Douga’s film catalog!

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Scum’s Wish – Episode 4

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to the torturous drama of Scum’s Wish, wherein basically everyone is having a lousy time not being with the one they want. Our misguided leads started unhappy and have only gotten worse, with their preposterous hopes for a “relationship of surrogates” predictably falling apart the moment it began.

Though they are united under the vague umbrella of each wanting someone they can’t have, it’s already clear that what Hana and Mugi want from each other is quite different. It seems Hana is beginning to realize the impossibility of getting together with Kanai; having observed Ecchan’s own hopeless crush, she now sees the emotional burden her desires are placing on others. If not for Akane’s presumed infidelity driving her forward, she’d likely be happy to honestly date Mugi in a totally healthy, non-displaced-affection sort of way.

On the other hand, Mugi probably shouldn’t be dating anyone right now. It’s clear that his relationship with Mei messed him up pretty badly, with her push for sexual contact leaving him uncomfortable with any sort of physical relationship. What Mugi actually needs is a therapist, but this is anime, and so presumably those feelings will be synthesized into chaos by the trauma-to-drama pipeline. That’s the shit we’re here for, so let’s batten down the hatches and get ready for a storm as we return to the world of Scum’s Wish!

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Seeking the Ineffable in Otherside Picnic

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When I set out to write up Otherside Picnic’s first volume, I figured it’d be best to first investigate the story’s formal predecessors: the original novel Roadside Picnic by brothers Arkadis and Boris Strugatsky, as well as its acclaimed film adaptation, Stalker. The context seemed vital for really digging into Otherside Picnic’s approach, but more importantly, both Roadside Picnic and Stalker are beloved works of fiction, and fit squarely within my own preferred genres. I’ve read countless works of weird and speculative fiction, forever captivated by stories of humanity at the fraying edge of reality, meaning it was only a matter of time before I dug into the Strugatskys’ vision on my own time.

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Spring 2022 – Week 5 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’ve currently got a post-Covid spring in my step, as well as a quiet sense of embarrassment about how much work I got done while I was trapped in quarantine. It turns out when you’re not allowed to socialize or even really leave your room, it’s not hard to keep working from the moment you wake up to the moment you lie back down. As a result, my article buffer has never looked healthier, I’ve finished my latest ambitious weekend project, and I even made some progress on cleaning my room. Well, a little progress. Look, if you’d seen it before, you’d appreciate it looks better now.

Dubious lifestyle habits aside, I’ve also got a fine stack of film reviews for you all, freshly plucked from my massive bag of takes. Let’s see what we’ve got in the latest Week in Review!

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Zoku Owarimonogatari – Episode 1

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to one of the series that actually started my anime writing career, way back when I was just making rambling reddit posts. That’s right, it’s time to check out Zoku Owarimonogatari, the as-of-now final piece in the vast Monogatari tapestry.

Monogatari has been one of my favorite series ever since 2013’s Second Season blew my mind, offering a richness of characterization and purposefulness of visual storytelling that basically no other series can match. In fact, as far as character writing goes, I consider it and Evangelion to be the peak works of the medium, exploring the nuances of identity formation and interpersonal relations with a subtlety, sharpness, and compassion that puts them in the running with the great works of film and literature. Frankly, if Monogatari weren’t so good, I’m not sure I’d be writing about anime right now – it was the brilliance of this show’s characters that provoked in me a need to write about these stories, and it was the positive response to that writing that gave me the encouragement to keep going.

This franchise embodies that particular alchemy that is most resonant to me in anime, that combination of deep-dive character studies, doggedly humanist themes, and visual synthesis of both that first electrified me as a teenager, back when Evangelion became my favorite work of art. It is a rare and beautiful thing, a harnessing of animation’s infinite aesthetic potential, as well as anime’s often deeply personal priorities, in order to make the raw clay of human nature viscerally felt and transcendently visualized. Though I can certainly appreciate visual splendor, I will always be a writer at heart, and Isin is one of the greatest authors to lend his pen to animation. His work has had a profound impact on my aesthetic sensibilities and life more generally, and it all started with Bakemonogatari.

All that said, in my view, the greater arc of the Monogatari franchise was essentially concluded by Owarimonogatari Second Season. As such, I’m expecting this to be more of a victory lap than an essential addition to the canon, and have preemptively forgiven it for its presumably extraneous nature. Of course, “extraneous Monogatari” is still one of the best writers to touch anime riffing on his masterpiece, so I’m sure there’ll be plenty to savor in this encore performance. For perhaps the very last time, let’s dive into the world of Monogatari!

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Anne of Green Gables – Episode 7

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to report that the ferry ride has concluded, a carriage has been arranged, and we are on our way to Green Gables. When last we’d visited, Marilla had finally confirmed that Anne can stay, on condition that she be a good girl and learn how to say her prayers properly. Anne broke the first of these conditions pretty much immediately, rushing out the door to tell all the flowers and trees about her victory, and I can’t imagine she’ll have better luck with the second one. But the truth of it is, I doubt Marilla could imagine parting with Anne regardless, and these stern proclamations are simply the last, futile gasps at reasserting some pre-Anne order.

But Anne is not just Anne anymore, she is now Anne of Green Gables. Flush with confidence and standing on ground that is truly hers, Anne’s expansive personality is sure to reshape this family’s lives in all sorts of ways. It’s been a pleasure to spend time with Anne even in the pits of despair, so I can’t wait to see how she tackles this world with a renewed spring in her step. Let’s get right back to Green Gables!

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