Tag Archives: Anime

Kemonozume – Episode 2

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m happy to report our return to Kemonozume, Masaaki Yuasa’s bloody and enthralling full-series debut. The series has wasted no time in introducing us to a series of generational, political, and emotional conflicts, as we were introduced to the proud warriors of the “Kifuuken,” a clan dedicated to destroying Flesh Eaters that hide in human skins. While our protagonist Toshihiko seeks to overcome his fears and carry on the family traditions, his half-brother Kazuma sees this battle as an opportunity, a chance to introduce his mechanical warriors to the world at large.

The clan’s drama is already providing us a hearty stew of thematic variables, from questions of inheritance and familial duty to the relationship between war and technological progress. And that’s before we add in this narrative’s actual thrust – the burgeoning relationship between Toshihiko and one of the Flesh Eaters, a woman who seems determined to constrain her violent nature. Then of course, there’s the contrast of the opening sequence’s conflation of flesh eating and misogyny with the reversed power structure of this new bond. Yuasa’s works generally delight on both a visual and thematic level, and between Kemonozume’s wild aesthetic flourishes and layered conflicts, I’m eager to see how this story unfolds. Let’s get to it!

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Toradora! – Episode 13

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Can human beings truly come to understand each other? Can we untangle ourselves from the bitter biases of our own hearts, applying only what insight might be considered “universal” to our judgment of another’s feelings? And what is truly “universal,” what core of humanity might be extracted from the threshers and autoclaves of lived experience, might be applied without error in our assessment of another’s feelings? Is there any way of analyzing human psychology while removing the human element, or are we all just applying personal frameworks of purpose, passion, and morality to stories built on wholly incompatible fundamental assumptions?

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Rock is a Lady’s Modesty – Episode 8

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re touching down at Oushin Academy during a moment of crisis, as Lilisa’s fledgling rock band faces its first major clash of personalities. Lilisa invited Tina into the band somewhat by accident, initially unimpressed by her piano skills, but ultimately inspired by her unflagging dedication to the cause, a passion that reminded her of her own efforts to impress her father. However, Shiro has no patience for imperfect performers, and has at last demanded Lilisa fire Tina from the group outright.

This disagreement speaks to a more fundamental issue the group hasn’t resolved: articulating what specifically they want out of this band. Lilisa set their initial goal as appearing at a specific festival venue, but that alone doesn’t dictate what sort of dynamic they’re seeking to cultivate as a group. Is this just a place where adversarial individual musicians spar and rage at each other, as Otoha seems to desire? Lilisa might have initially accepted that, but Tina’s continued presence would likely require a softer touch, and that in turn would challenge the show’s unconsidered assumption that “social niceties are false, aggressive confrontation is authentic.” I’m frankly ready for the text to move beyond that adolescent “fuck normies” ethos, but I’ve at this point learned to temper my expectations regarding this production’s insights into the philosophy of music. And hey, violent clashes of big personalities are basically their own reward, so let’s settle in for the fireworks as we return to Rock is a Lady’s Modesty!

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Dear Brother – Episode 14

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I thought we might take a stroll down to Seiren Academy, and see what fresh hell our students are enduring this week. After the revelation that Miya-sama is actually Saint Juste’s older sister, our last episode seemed to revel in the callous contrast between them, framing every luxury or cruelty of Miya-sama against the deprivation and agony of her sister’s experience. Living alone in a shadowed hall of mirrors, Saint Juste is surrounded by ghosts, from the lingering memories of her porcelain doll to the hated reflections of her own face.

All of this misery served to raise a further question of what it means to be close to one another, and what responsibilities arise from love or affection. Kaoru sees her “friendship” with Saint Juste as a vow of trust, a pledge to be at her side until these storms eventually pass. Though their bonds seem destructive, Shinobu at least sees something vital in that, believing that there could be nothing more romantic than a pledge of mutual self-destruction. Is it possible to commit yourself so fully to love without losing yourself, or is it that act of surrender that defines love in the first place? Let us hope Nanako at least draws something more life-affirming from her bonds, as we return to the tragedy of Dear Brother!

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Yuki Yuna is a Hero: Hero Chapter – Episode 4

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are once more leveling our swords towards the uncaring heavens, as we charge through a fresh episode of Yuki Yuna is a Hero’s appropriately titled Hero Chapter. With our club members having successfully extracted Togo from the Black Hole of Perpetual Suffering, it would appear things have returned to normal for the moment. Of course, nothing good comes without a price, and this time that cost falls upon Yuna herself, who is now cursed to suffer the flames of creation in Togo’s place.

And frankly, that’s not even the worst part of this new curse. Having apparently learned from the acts of selfless solidarity that liberated prior heroes, the Divine Tree has appended this fresh hell with a non-disclosure clause, preventing Yuna from even confessing her suffering to her closest friends. As always, the powers that be have taken something inherently precious and honorable – Yuna’s willingness to shoulder her friends’ burdens – and warped it into a new tool of entrapment and abuse. I can only hope that Yuna’s increasingly obvious suffering draws her friends into action as we return to the hero club!

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Monogatari Off/Monster Season – Episode 10

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re continuing our journey through Monogatari’s Monster Season, as Araragi maintains his investigation of a series of vampiric near-murders around town. Having been conscripted by Gaen into one more oddity adventure, he has since discovered that five members of the girls’ basketball team have been targeted, and that the club itself has lost the sense of positive camaraderie that defined its glory days.

That’s our narrative on the surface, at least. Cracking open the carapace, it’s clear this arc is intended as a mirror of Kizumonogatari, with its parallels serving to illustrate just how much Araragi and Shinobu have changed since their first encounter. For Araragi’s part, it’s apparent already that he has come to value his present life and his intended future, having escaped both the clouded sense of self and self-destructive impulses of his earlier adventures. As for Shinobu, we have watched her become a mutually trusting partner to Koyomi, and also come to enjoy her role as both family member and stalwart protector in the Araragi house. The key question remains Deathtopia’s perspective – will she accept this version of Acerola who has found peace in domesticity, or will she demand a revival of the guarded Heart-under-blade, preferring the eternally questing maiden to one who has actually achieved her dream? Let’s find out!

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Winter 2026 – Week 6 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I am officially a year older, a fact I am attempting to accept with whatever grace an old fogie like me can muster. It’s an odd thing to have moved so fully beyond mass culture’s sphere of interest, but it turns out life does continue after the halcyon days generally featured in anime, and thus we all gotta make the most of it. A nice meal, hanging out with friends, watching a fucked-up movie; in my experience, the greatest joys in life are not far out of reach, just so long as we keep recommitting to seeking them. And personally, sharing my errant thoughts on art is absolutely one of the things that keeps me putting one foot in front of the other, certain that tomorrow will be a new day with its own unexpected joys. So thank you all for reading my ramblings, and I promise to keep digging at the wonders of anime, cinema, and whatever else crosses my path. Now let’s check out some films!

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Star Wars Visions, Volume 3 – Episode 9

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I once again find myself in the unexpected position of screening a universally acclaimed Star Wars production, the much-heralded ninth episode of Star Wars Visions’ third season. Each of these “Visions” seasons features a sprawling collection of animators and production studios, with each individual episode offering a different team’s take on some aspect of the Star Wars universe.

While I’m generally a big fan of animated anthology projects, that overarching “Star Wars” label has kept me from checking out Visions in particular, as I’m just plain tired of the franchise’s wildly oversaturated tropes and tones. However, just as Andor successfully harnessed Star Wars’ mythology in service of an original, astonishing work of political theater, so have I heard that Visions’ most recent season offers a work of singular talent and vision, in the form of its Shinya Ohira-helmed ninth episode. 

I doubt there’s an animator in the industry who would refer to Ohira as anything less than a living legend. His fluid, ever-morphing forms possess a vitality unlike anything in the medium, and his contributions to productions ranging from Akira to The Boy and the Heron are some of the most captivating, unbelievable feats in animation history. His style of relentlessly shifting full animation is an outlier in an industry defined by compromise, and having assembled a preposterous team of similarly talented animators (Kou Yoshinari! Bahi JD! Daniel Kim! Masaaki Endo! Takeshi Honda! Weilin Zhang! Vincent Chansard! Toshiyuki Inoue!) for this project, I imagine we will here see him working without compromise, demonstrating a fluidity of form, scale of visual drama, and ambition of concept that will surely boggle the mind. Let’s get to it!

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Uzumaki – Episode 4

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are at last concluding our journey through Hiroshi Nagahama’s ill-fated adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, a project which opened with great promise and then swiftly shifted to embodying the frustrating perils of anime’s new global funding paradigm. We all know the story at this point: after funding a perfectly paranoid first episode carrying on in the style of Nagahama’s brilliant Aku no Hana adaptation, this production’s American overseers apparently got cold feet, forcing the production team to hastily employ whatever limited animation tricks they could manage in order to fill out the ensuing episodes. What began as a labor of love became a testament to capitalism’s incapacity for it, a cold reminder that foreign investment in anime is not the same thing as genuine foreign interest in anime, beyond its thrifty capacity to furnish a streamer’s production slate.

So yeah, that’s all bad news. Nonetheless, it’s still an interesting release in its own right, both as a marvel of collapsing production trickery and a compromised yet still-compelling rendition of Junji Ito’s stories. And since I can’t track down precisely whoever decided Uzumaki was an acceptable casualty of corporate malfeasance, the least I can do is honor the wreckage, and celebrate the embers of Nagahama’s ambitions. Let’s get to it!

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Winter 2026 – Week 5 in Review

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has seen us brave winter’s fury and emerge victorious, after having shoveled roughly eight tons of snow from my apartment’s driveway. I’m still sniffling, coughing, and generally enduring the personal indignities of nature’s most hateful season, but it appears there may well be a light at the end of the tunnel.

That aside, this has mostly been a week of tidying up outstanding projects. My house at last finished Ranking of Kings after initially losing momentum early in its second season, and also munched through Fantasy High’s Junior Year, leaving us with just one season of Intrepid Heroes adventures to watch through. Fortunately, the great drought of Critical Role’s end-of-year vacation has ended, leading us into the distinct pleasure of Mercer versus Mulligan as we join up with the second of Campaign Four’s three separate tables. We’ve also just cracked the seal on Fallout’s second season, which has in turn prompted fresh stabs at Fallout 4’s inconsistent pleasures. It frankly boggles the mind that Bethesda has spent a straight-up decade making games nobody wanted when the next Elder Scrolls is sitting right there, but I’m doing my best to find joy in blasting mudcrabs while we wait. Oh, and movies! Yes, let’s talk about some movies.

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