Hello everyone, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’d like to dive back into Star Driver, that intriguing combination of Igarashi and Enokido’s sensibilities. Between FLCL, Utena, Evangelion, Doremi, and Diebuster, the two of them were collectively involved in like a quarter of my most favorite anime, so it’s no surprise that I’m having a great time with Star Driver.

Last episode saw us finally spending some quiet time with Takuto and Wako, as the island fell under a Cybody-empowered spell. We learned that Wako once dreamed of leaving this island, but is bound here by her duty as a shrine maiden. Only breaking a maiden’s seal will allow them to leave – but with all the other seals broken, if Wako’s does as well, the Cybodies will be released.

Of course, given this is an Igarashi/Enokido joint, all this shrine maiden business mostly seems like a metaphor for the course of adolescence, and the demands for “purity” that so often restrict young women. Wako’s admission that “my grandma was supposed to teach me when I joined junior high. But when I was still in grammar school, I apprivoised on my own” maps perfectly to the awkward progress of puberty, implying the Cybodies are linked to our sexual maturation. Enokido has exploited similar metaphors throughout his career, from FLCL’s robot boners to their spiritual successors in Diebuster, not to mention Utena and Captain Earth. He is perhaps the greatest writer of one of anime’s most persistent narratives: “adolescence projected as apocalyptic external drama.” Let’s see how this metaphor develops from here!

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to get back to Star Driver, where we most recently watched Kanako attempt to defeat Takuto with the power of horny, and then send her servant Takashi into battle with him. That battle’s outcome will likely damage Kanako’s standing within the Order, but interestingly, Takashi himself didn’t seem bothered. In fact, judging by his final conversation with the Order’s president, Takashi doesn’t even need a bier to activate his robot – he has an emblem of his own, and can graduate to his “second phase” with the same ease as Takuto.

All that plot and mystery stuff is well and good, but you know me; I’m more interested in Star Driver’s thematic and psychological content, and much of that remains obscure. Kanako’s entire personality seems to undermine any possibility of the Order being defined by its conservatism; in fact, between her and Benio’s behavior, the Order seems more willing to embrace thoughtless or transactional sexual agency than their opponents. And yet, their rituals are steeped in the language of traditional gender roles, speaking often of “caged birds” and shrine maidens as symbols of purity. I’d love to dig into their philosophy further, but in the immediate sense, I’m mostly hoping for more texture and history from our hero Takuto. Either way, I’m sure Star Driver will find new ways to delight and impress, so let’s dive right into the fourth episode!

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Alright Star Driver, what’s your plan here? It seems clear that we’re setting up our thematic conflicts along lines of sexual agency, but the details are a little less certain. Southern Cross Isle’s fated shrine maidens feel like a very near reincarnation of Utena’s Rose Bride: icons of the feminine, passive figures that are acted upon in the fulfillment of some ancient, patriarchal ritual. By “breaking the shrine maiden’s seal” (ie taking her virginity through the imposition of masculine power), Star Driver’s equivalents of Utena’s student council hope to extend the theoretical power of the Cybodies into the physical world.

All of that is well and good, and pretty much maps to a neo-Utena interpretation of the action so far. But calling out this show’s parallels with Utena is easy; at the moment, I’m more interested in pinning down the ways Star Driver differs from Utena, and thus might be proposing a different argument. I’d initially figured the two sides of this conflict mapped cleanly to traditional versus progressive gender presentation and sexual agency, but if anything, the nefarious student council seem more uninhibited than our fairly chaste lead pair. Of course, everyone involved here is a teenager, and thus none of them really know what they’re doing; the stark contrast of their self-presentation and stated goals might itself be part of the point, reflecting their attempts to aesthetically embody a sexual maturity that they can’t emotionally reach yet. And of course, this complex stew of thematic variables is pure candy for me, so I’ll be happy as long as the show stays weird, layered, and ambitious. Let’s get right to it!

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to dive right back into Star Driver, having been thoroughly impressed by its first episode. The show has offered beautiful character acting and storyboarding so far, while also demonstrating the thematic complexity and clarity that you’d expect from an Enokido production. That first episode threw a lot of fantastical variables at us, but they all seemed to fit within a thematic paradigm centering on adolescence, sexuality, and sexual agency in particular.

Both the language of the masked actors and the prominent cage imagery seemed to frame the shrine maidens as passive figures, objects to be “acted upon” by their male controllers. The correlation of that patriarchal perspective with the traditional figure of the shrine maiden surely isn’t a coincidence; moving forward, we can probably assume that Takuto and his companions will be providing a more progressive counterpoint, where female agency and desire is respected just as much as male power. I’m also interested in seeing if the last act’s aesthetic debt to Utena signifies more of a structural parallel to that series, but all of this is likely getting a dozen or so episodes ahead of ourselves. For now, let’s see what Star Driver’s second episode has in store!

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be embarking on a new journey, as I at last dig into one of the few modern anime remaining on my must-watch list. It’s time at last for Star Driver, that variably beloved collaboration between writer Yoji Enokido and director Takuya Igarashi.

This pair have spent the last decade mostly slumming it on the mediocre action/comedy Bungo Stray Dogs, but there was a time when they were each key contributors to some of the greatest anime of all time. Yoji Enokido wrote scripts for Revolutionary Girl Utena and Evangelion, along with spearheading the writing of stunning GAINAX projects like FLCL and Diebuster. And Igarashi has been a legend since the ‘90s, shifting from Sailor Moon to Ojamajo Doremi and Ashita no Nadja, while more recently finding time to direct cult favorites like Ouran High School Host Club.

Enokido and Igarashi’s talents are beyond question, but I have almost no experience with Star Driver – I basically just know “it’s a giant robot show where teen hormones power the robots,” and also “it’s far less acclaimed than you’d expect given its key creators.” Conjecture is cheap, so let’s waste no more time pondering what Star Driver might be, and get right into the business of what it actually is. Onward!

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