wjs018

I try to keep the clips I choose to under two minutes. Sometimes I go a little over (like this), and other times I am way under. The real limit I try to stick to is <100MB to make it not too unreasonable for people on less than stellar connections. I usually just skipped over the clips people posted to the anime subreddit that are 5+ minutes long.

I had similar criticisms of AoT season 1 and dropped it. I might have to find time to pick it back up again sometime in the future.

Hearing a lot of good things about Orb

Give it three episodes and see what you think. The first three episodes provide a nice little arc and set things up for the future. Next to Dan Da Dan, Orb has been my favorite of the season.

Things make so much more sense now. It all kind of lines up with where the shifts happened. Thanks for the explanation! Those old days where anime would blaze ahead of the source material were sure interesting sometimes.

I think the most surprising thing to me was Ruby managing to forge ahead. A couple chapters back, I was sure it was headed towards a Romeo/Juliet style complete tragedy. Her character changed a lot over the course of the series. In the early days of re-forming B Komachi, she was so insistent on never lying to where now she has adopted a similar view to Ai, that constantly lying is what she needs to do.

Yeah, I wish we got more of this series post-Aqua (as much as I criticize other manga for dragging things out). We have spent so long with these characters that ending things with just a panel or two after a traumatic event like that feels dismissive. It's already been announced that he has a new series starting next year, so I guess creative passions can come and go.

Long post ahead. tl;dr - This ending is very effective at framing the whole series as a criticism of the Japanese entertainment industry, as well as the futility of the criticism itself.

After letting this ending stew in my brain for a little bit, I have actually developed an appreciation for it. Let me explain...

From the beginning, OnK has been praised for its frank portrayal of the Japanese entertainment industry including all the backroom dealings, the power of connections, and the profit motives behind stoking the fires of drama. If we zoom out on this story as a whole, we have basically ended the story in an almost identical place to where we started; a young star idol without any family members has become an object of fascination for the public. To keep this up, the idol lies, both to the public and to herself, viewing that as the way to live up to the expectations of others.

Almost the whole story that happens between those two points happens within the bounds of the industry itself; a movie here, a play there, a music video, a concert, etc. All the drama that Ruby and Aqua (and everybody else) dealt with in their lives ultimately ended up being monetized by the industry machinery: that dating show got really popular after Akane's trauma, Aqua redeemed Sweet Today by channeling the stalker that killed Ai, the life and death of Ai depicted in the movie (the director even won an award!), etc. It's telling that after all of that apparent success within the industry, everybody left standing seems incredibly sad this chapter.

So, I think an interesting way to view this series is that it depicts the wheels of the entertainment industry slowly turning, grinding people underneath it, to provide the dramatic fuel for the industry itself. It is some kind of perpetual machine that takes in human tragedy and leaves further tragedy in its wake in the pursuit of profit.

The ultimate irony from this interpretation is, of course, that Oshi no Ko itself is being used in the same way. It can criticize the entertainment industry all it wants, but it isn't going to bring about any lasting changes because it is an incredibly popular (and profitable) franchise. It reminds me of the famous quote by Audre Lord, recontextualized in this instance for the entertainment industry:

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

In addition to the manga, there is anime, merch, novels, stage plays, live action adaptation, etc. All of these ventures are making money for the people involved. At the same time, it has dredged up tragic victims of the past as well as created new ones. All of this makes the industry criticisms in Oshi no Ko ring just a bit hollow.

I do think the animation for the Anaak/Ran fight was a step up from some earlier low points, but that is a pretty low bar to clear. I wholeheartedly agree about the rules of these games though. I have stopped trying to keep track of the rules for these things since that team-building game earlier in the season. The rules always end up getting changed, people exploit some loophole, or they are just ignored entirely.

The second half of the episode (post fight) felt like three episodes in one it moved so fast. They literally only showed one panning shot of Endorsi before she was sneaking around again. Like, what is the point of even showing that party if nothing happened there. Then we conveniently have a group of major characters literally run into each other. For elite warriors, they seem to be pretty clumsy.

As for Lero Ro, I was waiting for him to show back up at some point. At the end of last season, he had quit his role of administrator because he knew something wasn't right with how that last test went down. He took Quant with him and decided to climb the tower to try to find answers. As an aside, what does climbing the tower mean to somebody that is already a ranker? Anyway, after this season got underway and we learned more about FUG, I figured he was going to be investigating them behind the scenes since they are the ones that organized Bam's apparent death in season 1. So, I am pretty excited to see him return.

Glad you find all my (and others) writing about random series useful! I agree with you that a review (positive or negative) is way more useful when some reasoning is provided. I think it is some kind of universal law that the to-watch/to-read backlog only ever grows.

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Secret Love Story

I had no idea that there was a spin-off light novel for this series. A spin-off like this actually getting an official translation is pretty rare as well. I feel obligated to ping @[email protected].

For research into this subject, Anime Herald was fortunate enough to interview...prolific anime writer and critic Borealis Capps

Haha, I feel like you posting this article is a bit of a humblebrag.

Thanks for sharing though. I think that Dumbbells was a really fun show and I would love to see newer, better takes on a series like it, since I feel some of the things discussed in this article are totally fair. The one in particular that you brought up is how much the girls don't want to be too muscular, but rather just slim. This is something that is a recurring joke with Darkness in Konosuba as well. I mean, her role is to absorb damage for the party, muscles are kind of a prerequisite. That hangup of Darkness's never really made much sense to me.

I think it is interesting to compare Dumbbells to a series like Plus-Sized Elf. They both are ecchi as well as try to be educational, but they take things in very different directions (and not just the body-types). I eventually dropped the manga, but as it went, Plus-Sized Elf seemed to lean more into ecchi and less into education, probably because none of the characters hardly even tried to put those lessons into practice. Also, when the anime adaptation released, it was even more ecchi than the manga was.

Alright, birthday week over, back to a normal week of manga...

Here are a couple series I wanted to mention from what I read this past week:

• Even a Cat's Paw Can Be Useful / Nekotete

This series is kind of like Mary-san in that it is single-page chapters and they are released quite frequently. I saw that this series is coming to an end later this month. So, I just thought I would plug it here. I don't think I have posted about this series before, but I have enjoyed my time with it. Mitsuki, the female lead, is incredibly cute, and really embodies the hot and cold nature of cats in that they will crave your attention until they absolutely don't want it...no middle ground.

• Don't Underestimate Bread-Making! / Pan wo Nameru na!

Alright, I am sure some of you just rolled your eyes at me from the title. "Not another one of wjs018's bakery-themed series..." I hear you, but...well, that is exactly what this is. I am only a handful of chapters in so far and it is kind of like Bocchi the Baker. The MC is a shut-in that has helped her family's bakery over the years through things like graphic design for the menus and mascots. However, she suddenly has the manager role thrust upon her and she has to figure out how to interact both with the customers, but also the employees. It has been a lot of fun so far.

• The Yandere with Fading Memory

This is a single-page oneshot that I came across in the recent updates page. The premise is basically what it says on the tin, but I was just impressed at how much story this one was able to tell in a single page.

• Mirumo watches over us / Mirumo-sama ga Miteru

Only two chapters out for this one so far, but I am not sure I am going to continue it. Basic premise is that a couple of neighbors/childhood friends see each other alot and hang out. The girl gets a cat that begins to try to set the two friends up and take the step into a romantic relationship. The main thing I had a hard time looking past in this one is that the guy that the cat is talking with kept saying things like how he doesn't want to be more than friends with his neighbor. However, the cat basically just ignores this and still tries to orchestrate romcom moments between the two. It's just, if the characters both only want to be friends, then why try to force them together?