Big Windup! – Episode 8

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Our boys have done it! After nine agonizing innings of tense gameplay and fraught psychological drama, Abe and his teammates have secured victory over Mihashi’s old team. Of course, a great part of that victory came from accepting that Abe is not the undisputed leader of his team. It took Tajima’s support to get Mihashi back in the dugout after failure, and it was actually Mihashi himself who made the crucial discovery regarding Oda’s batting strategy. As a fellow control freak, I can sympathize with Abe’s desire to micromanage every aspect of his victory – but ultimately, his perfect team can only flourish through him letting go, and trusting his players as much as his own instincts.

The results of that trust are already clear to see. When offered the opportunity to return to a repentant Mihoshi, Mihashi unambiguously declared his new allegiance, and then passed out for his first peaceful sleep in a week. Abe believing in his teammates means they will believe in him, too, and play far better for it. With our heroes having secured their first victory and consolidated into a true team in the process, I’m eager to see where their journey leads us next!

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Oregairu S3 – Episode 9

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What the fuck is wrong with you kids? Why can’t you let yourself embrace happiness for one goddamn second? Why you always gotta be martyring yourself for the sake of social conventions you don’t even fully understand? What is so wrong with having a good time with the people you love!?!?

Jesus cripes this show drives me crazy sometimes. The challenge to Yukino’s prom has been circumvented, yet our heroes are actually even more distraught than before, more certain they’re doomed to majestically drift apart. Kids, you’re only seventeen, you could fuck up for the next five years straight and still be ahead of the curve. And why would you take advice about relationships from a woman who’s destroyed all of her own personal bonds, anyway? Sometimes I feel like Ray dealing with Little Nephew when it comes to these anxious little devils, but it’s hard to fault the realism of teenagers thinking they don’t deserve love. I’m really hoping this is the low point of their journey, but I’ll be sticking by them regardless to the end. Let’s dive back into Oregairu!

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Winter 2022 – Week 4 in Review

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Boy oh boy do I have a collection of films for you today. With our house’s reliable contributor of genuinely bad suggestions on vacation (sorry Neil, but it’s true), we experienced a week of all-thriller-no-filler, storming through unimpeachable classics and a variety of great new features alike. We cleared out a couple of 2021’s top outstanding features, leaned back to snag Kaufman’s latest film, and also spent some time with that irrepressible showman, Orson Welles. It all made for a weighty, criticism-ready pile of cinema, and I feel like my thoughts are going to start tumbling out of my head if I don’t get to them immediately, so I’m just gonna quit with this labored introduction and get to the good stuff. Let’s run down the Week in Review!

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The Demon Girl Next Door – Episode 4

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Hello everyone, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Y’all ready for some Demon Girl Next Door? After two episodes of ineffectually stalking her magical girl prey, our last episode saw Yuko discovering that her family has never, ever won against a magical girl, at any point in history. Yuko isn’t just a scrappy weakling: she is the inheritor of a perpetual weakling legacy, with her weakling ancestors stretching back into prehistory. For untold centuries, Yuko’s people have been bravely sallying forth to fight magical girls, and have gotten their shit kicked in every single time.

Yuko’s ancestral uselessness is a fine joke in its own right, but also serves as a natural continuation of Demon Girl’s interrogation of the magic/demon girl binary. Purely because of the conditions of her birth, Yuko has been destined for poverty, devilry, and failure from the start. Though her ancestor urges her to succeed where others failed, it’s clear that this system is designed to produce specific winners and losers; self-determination is simply a lie that demons tell themselves, in order to cope with the underlying hopelessness of their situation. When given a chance to truly express her own wishes, Yuko’s feelings don’t seem particularly demonic at all: her main wish is “I hope we can all be friends.” But society demands heroes and villains, and so Yuko is forced to play a role she’s unsuited for, destined for a failure that’s been predetermined all along.

Meanwhile, the last episode also got terrific mileage out of brilliant concepts like Yuko is Short, or Momo is Bad at Cooking. With the show’s comedic and thematic layers each shining in their own way, let’s return to The Demon Girl Next Door!

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Eureka Seven – Episode 10

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. You all ready to dive back into Eureka Seven? Personally, I’m ready and then some; Bones’ early classic has lain dormant in my Current Projects for half a goddamn decade, but I never lost my interest in this unique and beautiful property. With one of my generous, lovely, intelligent readers having offered it the breath of life, I’m not planning on wasting this opportunity – I’m charging forward as far and fast as I can, buoyed by the wings of financial incentive to ride among the gallant Gekkostate crew.

Episode nine served as a clear turning point in the narrative, as Renton at last learned the true history of Gekkostate, and was formally inducted into the team as a full crewmate. Learning that the team were former military agents actually explains a great deal; their hardware all seemed oddly advanced for a group of beach bums, and odd details like Eureka’s children now make perfect sense. But while the path behind is now clear, the road ahead remains a mystery. I’m hoping Renton’s new position means we’ll at last be learning something of Gekkostate’s true objectives, as we return to the exhilarating Eureka Seven!

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The Hakkenden – Episode 1

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Alright, now we’re getting into some shit. Based on the legendary epic novel, the OVA series The Hakkenden is known as one of the great classics of anime history, an “animator’s masterpiece” that is as revered among Japanese animators as it is unknown to international audiences. It is widely regarded as one of the great works of anime’s OVA era, that period of the late eighties/early nineties where the medium’s most daring works were embracing the potential of direct-to-video, broadcast guideline-circumventing media, and Japan was still enjoying an impressive economic bubble

 Even just a brief scan down the show’s credits reveal that this first episode possesses key animation by legendary figures like Norio Matsumoto and Mitsuo Iso, all working in service of a bold revision of a literary classic. The Hakkenden is an essential screening for any self-respecting animation nerd, and I’m eager to find myself utterly out of my depth in assessing its greatness. Let’s get to work!

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Winter 2022 – Week 3 in Review

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Whew, it has been a week. I finally got my COVID booster, which had me basically incapacitated for forty-eight hours. That, of course, invoked a rolling cascade of delayed responsibilities, meaning I’ve been rushing to catch up on projects while handling a variety of other outstanding responsibilities. It turns out as an adult, when you have a sick day, that day’s responsibilities don’t just float away into the ether; they get compacted into all your other days, punishing you for the audacity of possessing a feeble, mortal frame. Fortunately, I’ve mostly caught up at this point (or will have once I finish this article, then write up the first half of the next Week in Review, then watch the last four episodes of Sonny Boy, then write it up for my Year in Review), and believe I have managed to keep my external pandemonium from tarnishing the sanctity of my weekly film reflections. With all that bellyaching off my chest, let’s dive into the Week in Review!

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Top Anime of 2021 (and Year in Review)

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I was going to open this article with “it’s been a year, huh,” but then looked back and saw that’s exactly how I opened my last Year in Review, which pretty much tells you how things are going. You’d think we might have a handle on this whole global pandemic thing by now, but with my country currently enjoying its greatest surge so far, it looks like we’ll be living with the plague for some time to come. With the external world having compressed itself into a perpetual “now” of shelter-in-place routine, it becomes all the more important for us to handle our own marking of time, through celebrations like the summing up of the year in retrospect. So in that regard, I suppose you should all be thanking me for adding some unique dynamics to your weekly routine. You’re welcome, don’t mention it.

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Symphogear XV – Episode 7

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are storming right back into Symphogear, as it has been far too long since I watched a girl punch a tank, assault the moon, or sing a laser barrage into existence. Regardless of the specifics, you can be certain any given episode of Symphogear will contain at least one preposterous impossibility, frequently complimented by a commentator grimly explaining that Ah yes, when the Shroud of Turin is draped over the Nimblypimbly of Gertrude, of course a giant laser explosion will result. Guided by excess and grounded by its charming idiots, Symphogear is one of anime’s greatest works of pure, gleeful indulgence.

Last episode was certainly no slouch in that regard, as we witnessed the introduction of Ogawa’s glorious Car Clone Jutsu. It’s a rare show that can introduce boob missiles only to immediately eclipse them with something sillier, but Symphogear is a rare show indeed. With an ominous light now piercing the horizon, let’s return to the battlefield of SYMPHOGEAAAARRRRR!

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A Dream of Justice: Knives Out

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As we continue our perilous journey through the twenty-first century, it seems clear that the idea of satire as it was previously understood is essentially dead. Effective satire requires not just a coherent target, but also some common framework of experience; a lens of viewing society we all recognize, through which the effective satirist can lampoon that which is both outrageous and mundane. Satire presents the world as we assume it to be, but twisted so as to reveal the perversity of our assumptions. Satire, ultimately, is a tool through which one person can turn to another and say, “look, now do you understand my point of view?”

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