Kaguya-sama: Love is War – Episode 7

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to Kayuga-sama: Love is War, where our beleaguered heroes remain suspended between pride and passion. Kaguya and Miyuki are head-over-heels for each other, but to reveal those feelings would be an expression of weakness, which their opponent would surely counter without mercy. Thus they must remain in this fraught stasis, each daring the other to reveal an emotion, each desperate to maintain their indifferent poise.

So far, so normal. But beyond their general adolescent insecurities, I am immensely intrigued by the class dimension that seems to be complicating their relationship. The fact that Kaguya and Miyuki come from different social backgrounds has been foregrounded from the start, with some portion of Miyuki’s insecurity likely stemming from him being “socially undeserving” of Kaguya’s love (for her part, Kaguya must contend with social expectations of feminine passivity). But recently, the active drama has started to play off this class divide, with sequences like the interschool ball or the flower debate emphasizing how Miyuki’s perspective is a direct consequence of his background. And with Kaguya’s maid Ai now acting as both Kaguya’s servant and emotional confidant, the discordant social standing of Kaguya-sama’s leads seems like it’ll take an even more prominent role in the narrative.

That’s pretty exciting to me! Anime high school romances frequently exist in a world divorced from the context of our lives, where romantic feelings are the only driving force. But the best character stories acknowledge that our identities do not exist apart from our environments, and are shaped by our life experiences in countless divergent ways. I’m hoping Kaguya-sama continues to tug at the awkward frictions of its characters’ experiences, as they struggle past artifice and into honest connection.

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Fall 2021 – Week 2 in Review

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. In keeping with the season, this week we tackled a variety of horror films, with decidedly mixed results. Look, my hand wasn’t really on the wheel this week – I was busy trying to clear out the upper heats of Slay the Spire, and thus many of our films were decided by whatever my housemates found on Hulu or Netflix. But we still checked out a couple quasi-classics, and there was plenty of fun to be had even in the less acclaimed selections. Even now, it feels immensely freeing to no longer be writing formal reviews; even deeply flawed films often have something interesting within them, something that couldn’t really be reflected in a “final score.” Let’s dive into the cinematic weeds then, as we commence one more Week in Review!

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Land of the Lustrous – Episode 5

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It is not some great moral conviction that drives Phos into the sea. If anything, it’s closer to the opposite – a total absence of feeling, and lack of concern for their own fate. Even after being reconstructed from the nautilus’ shell, Phos still possesses no value within gem society; the only one who seems to actually need them is this weird slug-creature. Like Cinnabar, Phos clings to this paltry source of value out of desperation – and also like Cinnabar, they do this in spite of having people who actually care about them, and want to see them happy. So often, we are our own cruelest judges.

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Adachi and Shimamura – Episode 11

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’d say we’re past due to check in on that most hapless of couples, the perpetually self-defeating Adachi and Shimamura. In spite of Adachi’s joy at the two of them once again sharing homeroom, the slight barrier of their desks’ distance proved to be almost insurmountable. And when a new group of students decided to make friends with Shimamura, it was all too easy for each of them to slip back into old habits.

Adachi and Shimamura has been refreshingly honest about the stop-and-start pacing of personal development. Its characters falter often, embracing the comfortable over the unknown, and frequently second-guessing their own emotional development. Nothing about Adachi and Shimamura’s relationship is “fated” – it would have been easy for the two to drift apart right here, and for Adachi to become another Tarumi-like figure of nostalgia and regret. The fragility of this relationship is nerve-wracking, but it’s also what makes the drama land; these characters feel imperfect in emphatically human ways, and my ability to relate to their frailty makes me want to see them happy all the more. With two episodes left, I’m guessing we’ve got time for maybe three-and-a-half more heart-stopping emotional revelations. Let’s see what’s next!

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Scum’s Wish – Episode 2

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be diving back into Scum’s Wish, the Masaomi Andou-directed adaptation of Mengo Yokoyari’s thorny adolescent drama. So far, the show has offered plenty of Andou and plenty of drama, as high schoolers Hana and Mugi pine after the crushes of their childhood, while consoling themselves with the bodies of each other. It’s a deeply unhealthy state of affairs, a fragile disaster waiting to happen, and I’m eager to see it all come tumbling down.

More immediately, though, I’m mostly looking for this episode to add some distinctive human texture to our four leads. So far they’ve largely been defined by their romantic feelings, which doesn’t really tell us much about them specifically; we know Hana and Kanai clung to each other as a result of their missing parents, but that’s about it as far as character motivation is concerned. What we might need is some general group activity or event, something for each character to react to in their own way, and thus establish their personalities outside of the context of their romantic feelings. That’s my main narrative hope, but either way, I’m looking forward to munching on more of Andou’s delicious compositions. Let’s get to it!

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Fall 2021 – Week 1 in Review

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. The fall season has officially started, meaning we’re gearing up for another bout of seasonal depression, or as I like to call it, depression. I’m not the most cheerful of souls at the best of the times, but the dreary winter weather certainly doesn’t help. Like many folks, I often write to intellectualize my feelings, and through defining them hope to resolve or at least come to peace with them. Like Dobu says, most people don’t think about themselves all that much; writing at times feels like an act of therapy, so I hope you all forgive me for taking advantage of my platform to mumble about my feelings.

Of course, one of my most sure-fire ways to get out of my own head is to get into someone else’s head, and explore their take on the world for a while. Thus this was a fairly productive week, as we knocked out a mixed bag of films, along with a couple of acclaimed streaming series. Let’s break ‘em all down in the Week in Review!

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Blue Flag – Volume 2

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Blue Flag’s second volume starts off with a reminder of the first thing that struck me about the first volume: the careful attention this story pays to the way clothes hang on the body, and project confidence, insecurity, or any manner of other emotions purely in the fit of the fabric. 

It’s fitting for a story about adolescence to be preoccupied as well with the awkward physicality of our outfits – how some of us seem to exude natural confidence at all times, while others seem perpetually uncomfortable in their own skin. It’s also fitting for a story by KAITO, who is so capable of conveying emotions through presentation, as with their masterful use of paneling. Gaining comfort with both our bodies and our feelings is a circuitous learning process, and though some of Blue Flag’s leads seem more confident in their clothes than others, they all struggle with the difficulty of presenting an authentic self.

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The Demon Girl Next Door – Episode 1

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! Today we’ll be embarking on a new journey, as we check out the first episode of 2019’s The Demon Girl Next Door. I’ve been told this show is “the most directly post-Madoka series” of recent years, but beyond that mostly know of it via cultural osmosis, as a generally well-regarded mix of slice of life and romance. It’s based on a 4koma strip, so I’m expecting things will be fairly gag-driven, which seems to suit its director Hiroaki Sakurai (Cromartie High School, among a variety of other acclaimed shows) quite well. I feel like it’s been too long since I checked out a solid slice of life show, so here’s hoping Demon Girl offers the good vibes we’re looking for. Let’s check it out!

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The Woman Called Fujiko Mine – Episode 9

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be returning to the beautiful, incendiary production that is The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, where we most recently learned the name of her childhood tormentor: Count Luis Yew Armeid. A figure of seemingly supernatural menace, Armeid has been manipulating characters like the fortune teller Shitoto from behind the scenes, as he attempts to guide Fujiko towards some unknown end.

This production has been refreshingly direct about Armeid’s crimes: it seems clear that he sexually abused Fujiko as a child, and that her resulting trauma manifests through the otherworldly flashbacks to her childhood abuse. An incidental detail like an owl motif on a wall can draw Fujiko right back to those strange chambers, where the specifics of her experience are abstracted into this ominous owl-headed count, the nightmare jailer who haunted her childhood.

In the present day, Armeid seems determined to embody more than just the lingering effects of trauma. Statements like his intent to “test the Third to see if he’s worthy of Fujiko” imply a sense of patriarchal ownership, as if Fujiko is Armeid’s possession, who can only be gifted to another man by her current owner. It’s a not-uncommon cultural assumption, drawn to its perverse extreme by the fact that Armeid was already her childhood abuser. 

Of course, all of this is precisely what Fujiko has spent her adulthood rallying against. She values freedom over all else, and makes it a point of pride to mock and discredit those who’d hope to cage her. She does not see her femininity or sexuality as a “precious gift” to be claimed by some male retainer; she has sex freely and for personal or mercenary reasons, disdaining the idea that woman are “supposed” to be meek and modest. That convention is just another sort of cage, after all.

Ultimately, Armeid seems like the ideal antagonist for a show so in tune with the complex realities of gender as a social construct. He represents basically all of the conservative, patriarchal social values that Fujiko disdains, coupled with the menace of the violent desires those values have worked to sanitize. He is the condescending pat on the head and the underlying threat of consequence in one, and though Fujiko has grown far beyond his influence, destroying him would nonetheless serve as a satisfying denouncement of his wretched perspective. Let’s get back to Fujiko at work!

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Summer 2021 – Week 13 in Review

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Buckle up, everyone. Once again, the absence of a steady One Piece supply led us to gorge ourselves on feature films, as we feasted on a diverse array of recent flicks, classics, and genre oddballs. Having already watched plenty of the acclaimed spaghetti and revisionist westerns, it’s been interesting to push backwards into westerns’ original golden age. Westerns dominated Hollywood for years, but these days, their most lasting cultural influence is tied to movies that dispel the myth of the heroic cowboy. As a result, diving deeper into westerns has provided fascinating context for the films I’ve already seen, helping to fill in the dialogue that Sergio Leone and others were in conversation with. So let’s start with some westerns then, as we barrel through another Week in Review!

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