Ganso Tensai Bakabon – Episode 2

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m excited to return to one of the most unusual reader request projects I’ve ever encountered, the ‘70s comedy Ganso Tensai Bakabon. So far, the show has mostly just rambled through a series of wacky adventures centered on Bakabon’s deeply stupid father, a trend I expect to continue for the foreseeable future. Rather than the continuing narratives that define the modern late-night anime paradigm, Ganso Tensai Bakabon is a classic sitcom, aimed at general Japanese audiences, and lacking the specific subcultural assumptions that further define/marginalize the shows we generally frame as “popular anime.”

As a result, Bakabon feels more akin to something like The Simpsons or Ren & Stimpy than Neon Genesis Evangelion. It exists within a lineage of television comedy that’s actually far more universal than what we generally recognize as anime, and it thus offers a more realistic portrait of general Japanese comedic and cultural sensibilities than our usual stories of giant robots and melodramatic boarding schools. At the same time, the show’s art design and animation embody the distinct excellence of Japan’s animation tradition, offering beautiful painted backgrounds and remarkably expressive flourishes of character movement. It’s altogether unlike basically anything else I’ve covered, and I’ve rambled more than enough at this point, so let’s get right back into Bakabon-papa’s nonsense!

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Summer 2022 – Week 10 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am in recovery mode, having just spent four and a half hours leading my players through their first major dungeon crawl. Well, actually a castle crawl in this case, but regardless, it took me like fifteen hours to build that whole thing, and my party crushed it in one session. A winding stretch of countryside and full castle infiltration, five separate encounters each with their own unique mechanical dynamics, half a dozen fleshed-out NPC characters… my players are content-hungry beasts, and I don’t know how I’m possibly going to stay ahead of them. Plotting out adventures for those monsters basically consumed all my usual film screening time, but I’ve fortunately still sitting on about fifteen pages of film review buffer, so don’t you worry about any disruptions in the Week in Review pipeline. I’m sure attempting to juggle all this will catch up with me soon enough, but for now let’s not think of such things, and instead wander our way through some fresh cinematic selections. Onward!

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Hugtto! Precure – Episode 33

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m happy to be returning to Hugtto! Precure, wherein we most recently witnessed Homare attempting to reconcile her romantic feelings for a goddamn hamster. I’m frankly not sure how any episode could hope to top that one’s lunacy, and to be honest am not entirely discounting the possibility that it was all a fever dream or gas leak hallucination, but we must nonetheless do our best to carry on. Sometimes high schoolers fall in love with hamsters, this is just a thing that happens, and we’re all going to have to deal with it in our own ways.

With Homare x Housepet safely defused, I imagine we’re nearing the climax of Bishin’s villain arc. Bishin has always seemed more desperate for familial validation than truly villainous, so I’m guessing it won’t take too much of a push from our heroes to rehabilitate Harry’s old crewmate. I frankly wouldn’t mind if Bishin joined the team formally, but given we’ve already had one enemy turn Precure, I imagine “goth hamster Precure” is too powerful a concept to exist in this world. Whatever happens, I’m sure we’re in for a delightful time as we return to the world of Hugtto. Let’s get to it!

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The Legend of Vox Machina – Episode 8

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am ridiculously impatient to get back to Vox Machina, and see what our ramshackle adventuring party is up to. I doubt it’s been all that long on your end since our last Vox installment, but for me, I’ve been waiting three damn months to check in with this crew. Vox Machina is just too interesting of a concept, and so I got a little over-enthusiastic with my initial rampage of writeups, meaning it’s taken me months to justify throwing more Vox pieces on my buffer pile.

As it turns out though, this interminable wait has led to my return lining up with a particularly auspicious real-world counterpoint. Today is the day I’ll be starting my own D&D campaign, and finally taking over the DM reigns for something longer than a one-off adventure. At last, I’ll be able to shift from the theoretical criticism of “I’m pretty sure this is something our DM messed up” to the clarity of “this is something I definitely messed up,” and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve spent the last few weeks pounding out thousands of words of backstory and worldbuilding, have developed roughly half a dozen quest lines for my players to enjoy, and have no doubt they will disregard all this work in favor of hanging out with a drunk gnoll named Sparky who I made up on the spot. That’s the fun of DMing, I am told, and I wouldn’t have it any other way – crafting a campaign for a group of unruly players is like trying to plot a novel while people throw dodgeballs at your head, and what activity isn’t improved by the threat of physical violence?

Anyway, my own collaborative adventures aside, I’m eager to see how Vox Machina are faring as well. I can’t imagine Percy is taking the apparent death of his sister gracefully, and presume we’re in for a fit of rage that even Grog might consider a little much. Let’s get to it!

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The Demon Girl Next Door – Episode 10

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today it seemed like just the right time to check back in on The Demon Girl Next Door, and see how our strange assortment of demons and magical girls are fairing. Last episode offered up some charming bonding moments between Shamiko, Mikan, and Ancestor, as the three of them checked out a zombie movie and worked on mitigating Mikan’s curse. We also got to see some delightful pettiness out of Momo, as she pouted in the most deadpan way possible upon learning that Mikan was hanging out with her friend without her.

Momo’s increasing sense of jealousy over Shamiko is delightful, a soothing tonic for my romance-hungry heart. It’s also nice to see both Ancestor and Shamiko establishing themselves in the overall group dynamic, which has in turn served to further underline the oppressive nature of this whole magical paradigm. Ancestor has clearly been traumatized by centuries of perpetual failure, while Mikan’s curse serves as a tidy metaphor for the demands put upon even the theoretically favored individuals in this system. An “ideal girl” is quiet, demure, and spotless, in contrast with the loud and agency-demanding women who are condemned as demons. For Mikan, even a hint of dramatic emotions is immediately punished with disaster, turning the patriarchal demand that women be quiet and well-behaved into a literal curse upon her. Demon Girl is clearly not finished articulating its grand magical girl metaphor, and I can’t wait to see what insights and goofiness are up next. Let’s get to it!

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Summer 2022 – Week 9 in Review

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Alas, we have reached that point in the summer season where it still being “summer” feels like a cruel joke, as leaves fall and the winter chill returns. Every year, I run a version of that me sowing/me reaping tweet regarding the summer season, delighting in the fact that “it’s still the spring season! There’s so much summer left!” through June, and raging at the reality of “it’s already fall! This summer season is a lie!” in September. Fortunately, I’ve got plenty of films here to keep my mind off things, which this week included Jordan Peele’s outstanding new feature. Peele’s films always impress me, but I think Nope might actually be my favorite of his films, and I’m eager to tell you why. Let’s get to it!

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Sherlock Hound – Episode 4

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am eager to return to Sherlock Hound, which most recently obliterated my expectations via its first Hayao Miyazaki-directed episode. Sherlock Hound has been a gripping and visually splendiferous experience from the start, but with Miyazaki and a great number of his future Ghibli associates attached, the show bloomed into film-tier aesthetic brilliance, offering countless sequences of vivid action and character acting.

Nearly all of the episode’s key positions were filled by long-time Miyazaki associates, from animation director Yoshifumi Kondo (Whisper of the Heart) to director of photography Hirokata Takahashi (Castle in the Sky). And of course, Miyazaki’s own storyboards served as an ideal venue for all these artists, bringing Sherlock’s world to life with more energy and cinematographic allure than ever before. In the escapades of Moriarty and his associates, we saw shades of classic Lupin III, as well as Miyazaki’s abiding love of great and clamorous machines. In the gestures of Sherlock’s tiny employer, we glimpsed the carefully observed body language of My Neighbor Totoro’s heroines. Miyazaki is globally renowned for his film work, but through Sherlock Hound we see that he and his team could spin gold even amidst the mercenary conditions of television animation.

Of course, a great work of anime is more than just a list of famous names. Collectively, this team feels perfectly at home in Sherlock Hound’s whimsical reality, elevating the often dry elaboration of Doyle’s stories into rip-roaring adventures. Doyle’s mysteries are here adorned in clackety-clacking machinery and feverish chase scenes, bedecked in all the passions of their adaptors, but still emanating the fundamental narrative pull of his own imagination. It’s a marvelous fusion of talents, and I’ve surely raved about it to the point of tedium by now, so let’s not waste another moment. Onward, into the continuing adventures of Sherlock Hound!

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Star Driver – Episode 7

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to the scene on the ground at Southern Cross Isle, where just moments ago, Sugata unleashed the power of the King’s Pillar. That’s right, it’s time for more Star Driver, and all the glorious action animation/confounding thematic investigation that implies. After five episodes of tentative worldbuilding hints and regular episodic battles, episode six offered a mid-season board flip of tremendous intensity, explaining Sugata’s true nature just before potentially killing him. Just like Wako, Sugata is tethered to this island by the nature of his inheritance – but unlike Wako, he is trapped not by his connection to the shrine gates, but due to the fundamental danger his power represents.

All of these mechanical revelations slot neatly into Star Driver’s ongoing thematic conflict. The shrine maiden conceit embodies a fundamentally conservative perspective on female sexuality and agency, framing women as caged birds whose “purity” must be protected at all costs. The male counterpart to this framing is men defined as insatiable sexual predators, creatures who simply cannot control their urges (thus necessitating the imprisonment of women and downplaying of feminine sexuality). Sugata being framed as “too dangerous to leave the island” completes the circuit of Southern Cross’ gender paradigm, with the threat he poses summed up by the phallic symbol of the King’s Pillar.

So yes, Sugata has waggled his metaphorical penis around and potentially destroyed the island, himself, or both. But it was for a good cause! Let’s see how he and our other thematically imprisoned heroes are faring as we return to Star Driver.

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Eureka Seven – Episode 16

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Hello, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I thought we’d step back in on Eureka Seven, wherein Renton most recently drove a strange rift between himself and Eureka. After a trip to his uncle’s farm raised old feelings of inadequacy to the surface, Renton rallied back through his declaration that “I am who I am,” asserting his proud separation from his family’s expectations. Having thus embraced his true desires, Renton was able to pilot the Nirvash like never before, deftly dispatching his enemies and rescuing Eureka in one swoop.

Unfortunately, Eureka doesn’t seem to appreciate Renton’s transformation. Her response to his piloting was simply “that’s not like the Nirvash at all,” and since that flight, she has forbidden Renton from even approaching the mech. Fresh off a key emotional revelation, Renton must now figure out why his actions hurt Eureka so, and what exactly he can do about it.

And honestly, I feel for the guy. These last couple episodes have hammered heavily on the “difficulty of true mutual understanding” theme, a concept Eureka Seven has carried on from Evangelion – but crucially, Shinji’s quest for understanding generally centered on his relationship with other recognizably human characters. Misato, Asuka, and even Gendo possessed full and coherent human personalities – in contrast, Rei Ayanami was always more of a ghost, and was never fully understood by her companions. With her blue hair, minimal emotional responses, and supernatural origins, Eureka is clearly modeled on Rei, meaning Renton is being asked to achieve a connection not just between human beings, but likely between different species. Eureka’s actions aren’t just mysterious to insecure teenage boys, they’re mysterious to everyone – and if Eureka Seven plans on pursuing this thread of sincere connection, it will likely have to abandon some of Eureka’s impenetrable mystique.

In the meantime though, I’m guessing Renton will attempt a whole bunch of attention-grabbing antics that only serve to weird Eureka out. That sounds plenty fun to me, so let’s get right to it!

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Summer 2022 – Week 8 in Review

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Though this article title claims there’s somehow still a third of the summer season to go, it certainly doesn’t feel like summer’s still in full, or even partial swing. Overcast skies and underwhelming temperatures seem determined to get a head start on seasonal affective disorder, but I’m rallying the best I can with a healthy diet of media properties. My housemate has continued his marathon of Naruto without pause, bringing us all the way to the end of the Pain arc, which is basically where I stopped reading the manga as a kid. This process has only reaffirmed that Naruto’s writing is kinda terrible, but it’s also introduced me to the remarkable talents of animator/director Toshiyuki Tsuru, so on balance I can’t really complain. And of course, there was also a fine array of film viewings, with the usual servings of horror and suspense complimented by some martial arts and musical selections. Let’s see what the week had to offer!

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