Chatty AF 231: 2025 Spring Season Wrap-Up (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

VRAI: You know what show definitely, definitely, definitely did not stick its landing?

PETER: [Chuckles] Oh, no.

VRAI: It’s Lazarus. Peter. Peter, tell me about what the fuck was going with Lazarus.

PETER: Wait, Tony, did you finish this, too?

TONY: Oh, hell no. [Chuckles]

PETER: Oh, no! I don’t fucking know, man. It just felt like they had to end it at the end and they wrote it so that it… ended.

[Introductory musical theme]

VRAI: Hello and welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. My name is Vrai, I’m the daily operations manager here at AniFem, and you can find me on Bluesky occasionally @writervrai. And with me today are two returning cohosts, Peter and Tony.

PETER: Hi, I’m Peter. I’m an editor here at Anime Feminist, and I am @peterfobian on Bluesky.

TONY: Hi, I’m Tony. I’m an editor at Anime Feminist, and you can find me at @kuu-hime (that’s K-U-U dash hime, H-I-M-E) on Bluesky.

VRAI: And welcome back to our wrap-up for the spring season. I did almost say summer just because this recording has been a little bit cursed! But we are going to do our best. If you are just joining us for the first time, please know that we also do a mid-season podcast. You can always hop over there and catch up on things. I especially advise it because since the season wrap-up covers sequels, there’s gonna be at least a couple shows where we’re like, “I don’t really have anything new to add since the mid-season. It’s pretty much progressed along that same line,” and we can send you back there. We start from the bottom of our Premiere Digest and work our way up to the top. This is because shows might move around, but it just makes for an easy reference point for y’all at home. Alright. And, saying all that, as always, there may be spoilers but we do try to keep them at least a little on the light side, just in case folks are using this as a recommendation guide. Alright!

So, today we are starting from A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof! Peter, you got all the way to the end of this. Tony, I know you were enjoying it but life happened. So, how’s the ending?

PETER: Fine. It just got a little aimless. I think it kind of— When we thought it might be doing something, it was just sort of setting up the formula by which it was going to go through the whole series by. For a while there I was concerned that they were gonna kill Koro as one half of the textual, actual lesbian relationship in there, but she made it through safely, which is good. And I think they kind of don’t really commit to Satoko and Konoha at the end. They kinda— I mean, I feel like if I do try to explain anything about the show, you just have to go whole horse, just because it’s levels of absurdity. 

There’s, like, a mama syndrome–type thing because Konoha is briefly turned into a baby, which precipitates them maybe having a relationship but instead it kinda ends on Konoha returning from a really dangerous mission and she tells Satoko the reason why she decided to become an assassin, which until that point has been kind of like her personal secret—which is nice, I guess. And it kinda left things off there. Didn’t do anything with any of the ghost girls, which it briefly looked like it might have a plan with all of those dead ninja to kind of have them come back from the dead. I think one of them was somehow livestreaming to the real world or something, and nothing really had come of that either. So, it just kinda felt like they just wrapped it up.

VRAI: Sounds like an alright, middle-of-the-road, wacky more-com-than-rom. But honestly, the thing for me is… What makes me anxious about those shows is always that they’re gonna yank the rug out from under you, so I feel like having background lesbians makes me more inclined to go like, “Okay, yeah. We haven’t gotten the main couple together because we could do 50 seasons of this ‘But they like each other!’ and that’s what this particular sub-sub of this genre does. Okay!”

TONY: It loves its shenanigans. It’s just all shenanigans all day.

PETER: It was willing to say lesbianism is real. [Chuckles] It just… It felt like it was trying to set up something for a subversion, but it was really just showing you what it was gonna do the whole time, I guess.

VRAI: Yeah.

TONY: Yeah. I also think that the comedy in the show, when it hits, hits really good. Like, I think the boob nonsense episode actually may be one of my favorite episodes of the show, partially because of the absolutely inspired animation of the bouncing boobs, which is totally… It’s so alien as to be unsexual.

PETER: Yeah, yeah, what do you call it… defamiliarized, something like that? Mm-hm.

TONY: If you are turned on by that…

PETER: [Chuckles]

TONY: Good for you, I guess, but… um… Maybe you should start a Tumblr just for that particular kink of yours. But, you know, I don’t think that that’s really the intention more than the comedy. I also think that when the show gets poignant, it’s a mixed bag because certain episodes really build on the poignance in powerful ways. Like, Robo-Satoko I thought was really thoughtfully done and really meaningful, just this idea of seeing what Satoko could become once she’s matured a little bit. But Konoha seeming to have some kind of moral quandary about her work—her assassin work—and then that’s not really ever, as far as I know, picked up on again. You know?

PETER: No, I think you kind of learn that she’s just as shitty as… Yeah, they’re both kind of just bad people. [Chuckles]

TONY: Right. And it’s implied by the anime and I don’t think, necessarily, by the manga that she doesn’t actually go through with the big bad killing that she was hired out to do. But at the same time, she’s killing all these other people, so does it really matter in the end? She’s killing a bunch of people whose lives matter, right?

PETER: Wasn’t it part of her backstory that she textually killed her best friend’s parents previously, unbeknownst to her best friend, and then—?

TONY: Yes, yes. I mean, that, I think, happens in the first episode actually. We see her doing that, yeah.

PETER: And then the implication that she killed her best friend’s only other friend, who was a… what do you call it… a parentless girl trying to become a doctor while supporting her younger brother. [Chuckles]

TONY: Yeah, no, that was so fucked. Oh, my God, and I—

PETER: Yeah, yeah, it was so dark, and that was one of the situations where you’re just like, “They must be doing something with this.”

TONY: [crosstalk] And then they don’t.

PETER: But they just decided to do something horrific and then keep on doing comedy hijinks after that.

TONY: Yeah, and I think that— Again, it’s heavily implied by the anime that she doesn’t go through with it, but by the manga? Mm. From what I’ve heard. So, to me— It’s at least less ambiguous in the anime. Her assassin score goes down, but, like, whatever.

PETER: Yeah, I did not— I felt less than you that it was ambiguous, and I honestly felt concerned about watching the episode because I thought the story was gonna turn a corner after that. But, I guess, mixed responses, yeah.

TONY: Yeah, I mean, it’s from the Madoka director; who knows?

PETER: Oh, yeah.

[Chuckling]

PETER: Yeah, that’ll do it. [Chuckles]

TONY: But yeah, I think in general… I think that episode honestly kinda soured me on the show quite a bit, if I’m being really honest about it, and made it feel like—

PETER: [crosstalk] Mm-hm, I get that. Yeah, me— It definitely changed my entire perception of the show, yeah.

TONY: And made it feel like I couldn’t really trust the show to be just delightful hijinks, because it’s delightful hijinks starring people who are not only bad people in the Sunny in Philadelphia sense but bad people in the actually disgusting, “I hate these people” sense, you know, which is a very different vibe.

VRAI: Is there anything worth saying about the Witch Watch adaptation, Peter, besides just “It’s nice”?

PETER: I mean, I… I stopped watching it. The manga’s really good. I don’t think— Nothing really happens in the manga that I want to warn people off of, and it seems like a perfectly delightful adaptation, so I’d just say, based on the manga and the production I saw so far, it’s really great. So…

VRAI: Good!

PETER: Sorry, I’m not watching it, though.

VRAI: [Chuckles] I think the people will survive, with the 50 other animes you watch every season. [Adopts a self-mocking tone] “Animes.” Good Lord.

[Returns to normal speech] Anyway, I have some notes from Alex for mono. They finished all the way through, liked it but I don’t believe will be all the way up to recommending it. So, they wrote: “This is a chill hangout show through and through and much more about the general delights of travel and sightseeing and eating tasty local food than it is specifically about photography. It’s usually grounded in reality but occasionally veers into heightened comedy with things like skateboarding cats and occasionally dips into folklore and horror by implying that ghosts literally exist. Most importantly, I fear I must point out that it never addresses that overt crush from the first episode. Mark me down as disappointed but not necessarily surprised. I also want to flag that there are a few visual gags about characters getting cartoonishly round and fat after enjoying too much food, which aren’t necessarily meanspirited but do fit into the broader tropes about fatphobia,” which will be mentioned again when we get to Food for the Soul in like 30 seconds. Any last thoughts from you, Peter? I know you really enjoyed the production elements of this one.

PETER: Uh… Same. It was a good vibe. Absolutely crazy way of introducing the characters’ main relationship if you’re not gonna do anything with it. But I enjoyed watching the show through. I don’t… I’d recommend it as a slice-of-life, probably. That’s it. The end.

VRAI: That’s fair. Alright, well then, let us move on to the aforementioned notes Food for the Soul. These are also from Alex. And they said: “I still wish they’d done something a bit more with the university setting since it really feels like this fulfills the high school hobby formula except that they have slightly more freedom of movement and don’t have to wear uniforms. I’m not exactly sure what that would look like, but it just seems like a missed opportunity. Anyway, overall, show continued to be cute and fun. 

“One thing I want to flag for people is an arc where number one food lover Mako becomes concerned she’s gained weight and pivots hard to dieting and exercise. The end message is kind of nice in that Mako learns that she should enjoy things in moderation rather than just forbidding herself from eating snacks, but it’s still got all the awkward hallmarks of an anime diet episode. In the grand scheme of things, pretty harmless, I think, but I can imagine it being grating for viewers who are sick of those clichés and social norms they tap into. It reminded me that the girls in these foodie shows are allowed to enjoy eating but only if they’re skinny enough to meet the conventions of a pretty character design. Any suggestion of a body type or body state outside that is treated as a punchline or as something terrible. It’s not an issue unique to Food Soul, but it’s a sour note in an otherwise fine and cute series, you know?”

PETER: Mm.

VRAI: The eternal danger with food shows, I suppose.

PETER: Yep.

TONY: Yeah.

VRAI: Alright. So, I think that that makes for a fine time to talk about, I think, our Cygames show of the season, which is Apocalypse Hotel, which, Peter, both you and Tony have finished.

PETER: Yes.

TONY: Cygames really is the studio right now to watch. Like, Jesus Christ! Summer Hikaru Died… I mean, I went over this in my review of Summer Hikaru Died. They’re just killing it lately. And Apocalypse Hotel—

VRAI: Though they gotta stop it with that subtitle shit.

TONY: Yeah, well, in any case, let’s talk about Apocalypse Hotel.

VRAI: Yes.

TONY: So, Apocalypse Hotel is, I think, probably my favorite show of the season. I was just blown away by it. It’s hard to say anything about Apocalypse Hotel that hasn’t been said already by Steve Jones in her original reviews for Anime News Network, which I thought were pretty incredible. In general, what makes Apocalypse Hotel so special is… oh, it’s hard to encapsulate because it’s just everything!

PETER: Yeah, I’ve been actually dreading talking about it since I don’t even know what to say about this frickin’ anime. It’s doing so much and…

TONY: [Chuckles] Yes, it is!

PETER: … yeah, has kept things so simple and easy at the same time. It’s really remarkable.

TONY: I think part of what’s hard about it is that it’s an episodic anime, right? And every single episode feels like a completely different genre. Like, there’s an episode towards the middle that feels like kind of a… just… Oh, what’s the genre where, you know, you’re kind of wandering through an apo— There’s a couple episodes that feel like you’re just kinda wandering through an apocalyptic wasteland but, like, you know, noticing the beauty of it.

PETER: Yeah, it kinda had, like, a Mushishi-type vibe.

TONY: Yes, Mushishi, very Mushishi-ish.

PETER: Almost no dialogue.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou… is the big one in that genre.

PETER: [crosstalk] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a good one, too. Except kind of ludicrous, too. Like, she finds some seals and sets off a firework in her head to entertain them and stuff, so you’re just like… [Chuckles] It’s got this really good sense of comedy that does not break the kind of meditative feel of that episode at all, either.

TONY: Yeah, no, it’s amazing. And it’s also got interesting things to say politically because it’s about, kind of, the way that societies wall themselves off—or not. [Chuckles] You know? Like, the decision to try to wall off the Gingarou and make it this hypermilitarized thing leads to really disastrous consequences for the characters. And there’s an episode that really touches on disability and how it feels to be disabled when you’re not being accommodated by your workplace and when you’re just kind of—

PETER: [crosstalk] Absolutely insane expressions, too, when they’re turning into, like, a tank sukeban.

TONY: It’s incredible! I love that episode. And it’s also an anime that centers the relationship between two, obviously, nonhuman women who are trying to understand each other across lines of culture.

PETER: As a robot and a tanuki alien.

TONY: Yes. As a robot deeply invested in human cultural values and a tanuki alien, right? Across lines of experience when it comes to disability in that one episode and across just values around, like, work and to what extent you should take breaks and things like that.

PETER: Mm-hm. Pro-labor.

TONY: Yes, yes. It’s a very… [Chuckles] Many people have made jokes that the Gingarou follows more labor laws than actual hotels do in real life.

PETER: That is a dark but true observation, yes.

TONY: And meanwhile, it is hilarious and poignant and has a amazing funeral/wedding episode that made me cry while also just giving us some of the most bizarre gags I’ve ever seen in an anime. Animated by, character-designed by, and directed, as far as I know, by female creators! So, yeah.

VRAI: Hell, yeah.

PETER: Yeah, where the hell did this come from, man? It’s crazy! Yeah, there’s a lot of meditating on life and death in this, which is… unexpected given the beginning, a lot of great callbacks to… I guess maybe it would be less appreciated from the general audience, but stuff like Gunbuster, Anno’s work, too. And I really kind of loved where it landed, you know, where she’s waiting for humanity this whole time, and the thesis statement is like, the Earth doesn’t belong to humans anymore. They can’t even live there when they do return.

TONY: Spoiler!

PETER: So, they just have to go on without it. I mean, it’s all spoilers, right?

TONY: [Chuckles]

PETER: [Chuckles] And humanity has to accept that, too, and also move on and find out how to evolve in this new world. And that’s super poignant and thoughtful. And the series just kept regularly touching on those kinds of ideas while doing all of these ludicrous jokes and references to other anime and creators and stuff. It was really great.

TONY: I would say that the predominant theme of Apocalypse Hotel, if there’s any theme, is “mono no aware,” right? This deep sense of poignant impermanence and how impermanence gives life meaning and deepens our appreciation for the world as it is and the natural world as it is, right? And it really shows up in all of the show’s best moments and, I think, does a lot to explain the show’s perspective on death, which is a very prominent theme in the show. [Chuckles] You know? Which is so strange because the show is so uplifting and so comedic and so hilarious, while also ultimately being in many ways about death.

PETER: I think that’s maybe one of the things I respect most from the show, is that it’s able to accomplish all this, which is a lot of stuff that other arthouse anime really tackles, but I find it so much more approachable than something like Sonny Boy.

TONY: Oh, my God. [Laughs]

PETER: I feel like it would be hard to recommend Sonny Boy. I think if you recommend it to the right people—

VRAI: [crosstalk] Sonny Boy is many wonderful things, but approachable is not one of them.

PETER: Yeah, yeah, just as an example, of course. But I could recommend Apocalypse Hotel, I feel, to so many people. Just casual viewers could vibe with it and then maybe also appreciate all the things that it’s trying to say, as well.

TONY: Yeah, no, definitely. Seconding everything you just said.

VRAI: Any last thoughts on it besides, obviously, people should watch it?

PETER: Yeah, number one this season for me.

TONY: It’s fantastic, yeah. 10 out of 10, recommend.

VRAI: I will get to it.

PETER: Please.

VRAI: [crosstalk] It’s on the list. Everything’s on the list. No, I have, like, a 0% chance that I will not very much enjoy the show. There’s just so much anime, Peter!

PETER: [Sighs] That’s true. Yeah, I feel you.

VRAI: Speaking of, to… to switch gears to some, uh, temporary, to some… less glowing discussion…

TONY: Oh, dear.

VRAI: … [falters briefly] we have To Be Hero X, which both Lizzie and Cy are watching in addition to you, Peter. So, how did it turn around from the mid-season?

PETER: Well, you know, they’ve been switching heroes, all the time. They’ve hit a streak of female heroes, starting with Cyan, Queen, and the unfortunately named Loli. I feel like Cyan’s is kind of fine. There’s a lot of plot revolving about her being the focus of a religious cult that leads into her becoming a hero.

I feel like the most discussion could probably be had about Queen, who kind of declares at a very young age that she plans to become the number one hero and kind of makes, like, a political statement about it, which draws a lot of criticism for her being out of step and also the fact that she is the beneficiary of quite a bit of privilege, I think, being related to some people in the existent hero society. I don’t know quite how to feel about where it lands, though. There’s a tournament to see who’s gonna be the number one hero, Queen’s kind of the favorite to win, but then X, Mamoru Miyano’s character, shows up, snaps his finger, and she just wakes up having lost the fight. And then another hero, a female hero who had to work up from a place of no privilege, becomes a villain out of anger at Queen for being the beneficiary of so much privilege, even though they both lost to X and X is the number one hero now, and ends up turning into a villain and then attacking Queen. 

But over the course of all that, Queen kind of learns how to be a better mentor to other heroes like Cyan, so I’m feeling a lot of things about this arc. Like, I don’t know why Bowa ended up attacking her specifically. Just kind of felt like she was the woman who was above her more than she was the obstacle that was stopping her from being the number one hero. I kind of like where it landed, where Queen had to get over her own sense of defeat and ends up finding more purpose in mentoring other female heroes. That’s great. But then of course, it just switched right to Loli after that.

So, I feel like all of these stories kind of are… what do you call it… bookended by saying, like, “But we don’t really know what’s gonna happen once all this stuff really hits the fans.” I will give it that they stopped killing people as a character motivation, which is great, although some of that stuff is unexplained since we saw one of the murders was… ah, God, I can’t remember the electric hero, who we then see his backstory but don’t know what his involvement in the other murder of what’s-her-face was, in the first story arc. So, there’s a lot of going on.

Loli’s got some interesting stuff, too, with her— I feel like one of the things that the series is doing that’s really interesting is the fact that the public perception of you defines your powers, which I talked about a little bit before. In her case, she feels the need to hide herself physically since if people perceive her as a beautiful woman then they don’t think of her as strong and it makes her weaker, so she ends up wearing a robot suit to not be perceived.

But yeah, none of these story arcs really complete, and also, I’m not sure if this is intentional but it seems like there’s a general lack of villains in the series, period. It’s just a lot of heroes be fightin’. So, I don’t know if all of this is just kind of like a hierarchy where all of these celebrities are just competing against one another for fame without really having a criminal force that necessitates their existence at all. So, where am I going with all this? It’s complicated. Definitely, things are happening, there are themes, but it kind of seems like it’s impossible to know if they’re gonna be handled well or not until we actually have all these stories collide near the end.

VRAI: Right. And it’s one of those series that’s setting itself up so it could run forever, if I understand? It’s part of a franchise, right?

PETER: It seems like the plan is to introduce the top ten heroes, because I think so far basically every hero has landed in the top ten. There’s like a tower, the Justice League type of deal, and it’s like a competitive ranking system. So, I feel like once all the heroes are in place and have been properly introduced, it’s gonna get around to whatever the hell it’s actually doing. Lot of potential, though. Definitely lots of interesting stuff it’s doing. It just kinda… ah… you know. It’s very perilous, yeah. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Uh-huh. Yeah, for sure. Alright. Well, you know what show definitely, definitely, definitely did not stick its landing?

PETER: [Chuckles] Oh, no.

VRAI: It’s Lazarus. Peter. Peter, tell me about what the fuck was going with Lazarus.

PETER: Wait, Tony, did you finish this, too?

TONY: Oh, hell no. [Chuckles]

PETER: Oh, no! I don’t fucking know, man. It just felt like they had to end it at the end and they wrote it so that it… ended. I kinda, like— Most of my notes about it were just like, “Wait. How the fuck does this work?” Like, literally, I don’t think that the writing led from one thing to the other properly. [Obscured by crosstalk] plot holes.

TONY: [crosstalk] It was written by committee, is the problem! Like, literally, when you look at the writers’ list, there is no throughline! It’s all these random people! And frickin’ Dai Sato allegedly was the series composer, but I don’t see his name attached to any episodes but like two random episodes in the middle of the series, one of which happened to be the only good one! And the other is just random.

PETER: I guess I got a couple notes I can go through, mostly just stuff I don’t like.

TONY: [Chuckles]

VRAI: I think this is another one where we can also shout-out Steve’s… Steve— Was it Steve who did the reviews for this one?

TONY: [crosstalk] No, it was James Beckett. It was James Beckett.

VRAI: Oh! My apologies, James.

TONY: Which are fantastic… fantastic.

PETER: [crosstalk] James losing his shit, every week, yeah.

[Chuckling]

TONY: James making the brave sacrifice for all of us. Thank you, James.

PETER: I feel you, James. Yeah.

VRAI: Hell yeah. But your notes, Peter.

PETER: Christine, the femme fatale, there’s an episode where it’s revealed that she used to be a Russian spy and was lesbians with her handler, who appears in the episode and then gets murdered, right in front of her.

TONY: [sarcastic] Oh, delightful.

PETER: And that was literally something just to set off a different event in the episode. So—

TONY: So we can’t even say that Watanabe’s work is good with representation anymore. [Chuckles]

PETER: Well, they did— You’ll like this. They brought back the hacker girl, who actually had a full backstory. She actually spoke lines that weren’t just like “Radical” or whatever the hell she was saying before.

TONY: Oh, thank God. That was so insufferable.

PETER: Mm-hm. So, she makes best friends with the hacker girl from their group. And they do bring back the trans homeless leader in the last episode, as well. They’re kind of like— Both characters are important to the ending, as it turns out. So, I can at least say those characters still exist and are [Chuckles] plot relevant rather than just being like “Here’s a cool character that you would probably like to follow more than a lot of the main characters.”

TONY: [Chuckles]

VRAI: What happened with the New World Order unfortunate subtext?

PETER: You mean just, like, the metaplot about the drug thing or…?

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah, the increasingly antisemitic dog whistles, yeah!

PETER: I… God. It’s so… [Sighs] It’s like the dude, you know, the guy who made the evil drug, was working, and of course the government was using his stuff to make weapons of mass destruction. He had tried to take some samples out to bring it to the press, but then he brought it to an airport and there was a shootout between the airport police and the army, who was trying to arrest him for trying to escape with state secrets essentially. Turns out everybody on the Lazarus team was there during the shootout and got thoroughly exposed to the drug, which I think gave them some level of immunity, which is insane. I don’t know if they were selected for that. It’s not clear. I don’t know how they would even know that all of them were there. Just kind of like this pure coincidence that apparently the whole plot rotated around. And the whole reason that the guy did everything was to bring to light the fact that the government was creating weapons of mass destruction, and also I think he had just lost faith in humanity and wanted to be proved wrong or something like that. I…

VRAI: I’m just gonna save people some time and say that they should watch Pluto. Y’all can go watch Pluto. It’s a very good show.

PETER: That’s a good anime, yeah.

VRAI: Yeah!

PETER: The global warming stuff’s just all, like, set dressing. It turns out Alex [sic] was part of a psychological program to turn kids into assassins.

TONY: [crosstalk] Axel? Axel?

PETER: Was Axel Alex? Axel? Oh, maybe I— I’ll correct it. Yeah, Axel. And of course he has some visions that he has to have a final fight with another kid from the same program. I’m pretty sure everybody on the team got a perspective episode except for Doug, which sucks. We just kind of get some pointed directions toward what his backstory might be. But—

TONY: He just gets exposition dump.

PETER: Yeah. And… yeah. That’s kind of it.

TONY: [crosstalk] For context, y’all, Doug is the one black character among the named characters.

PETER: Mm-hm.

VRAI: [Sucks teeth in annoyance] [Inhales] Cool.

PETER: And then they all decide to be a special forces that works together after they save the world from the bad drug.

TONY: Like cops?

PETER: Yeah, kinda like cops, yeah.

TONY: [Hums with disappointment] Well…

VRAI: Peter, I have lost brain cells from listening to this, and I didn’t even watch the show. Thank you.

PETER: Emmy-nominated, Lazarus.

TONY: [Chuckles]

VRAI: That—

TONY: For the OP.

PETER: Yeah, for the OP song.

VRAI: The way that shortened titles gifted me a free punchline that day was beautiful.

Anyway, you know, let’s go from that to a show that’s really, really, really good and might be my show of the season, which is Kowloon Generic Romance, which I mispronounced consistently last episode because I got used to the Japanese dialogue and that’s their pronunciation of it.

TONY: I love Kowloon Generic Romance. It’s so good.

VRAI: Mm-hm.

PETER: It’s good!

VRAI: Yeah, did you want to go talk about it first? The floor is yours! It’s good.

TONY: [crosstalk] Sure. I mean, it’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous. The men in it are beautiful and gorgeous and I love them.

PETER: [Chuckles]

VRAI: It’s true.

TONY: And all probably some variety of queer, which I appreciate even more. Except for Kudo, of course, and Kudo’s a dumbass.

VRAI: I was about to say, Kudo’s the only heterosexual in that show and that’s why he’s having such a hard time. Heterosexuality is bad for you.

TONY: [Laughs] Yes, heterosexuality will lead you to create an entire alternate reality where your dead fiancée did not die?

PETER: It’s true.

VRAI: Spoi—

TONY: That’s what it does!

VRAI: No, it does! It does. I was just… I’m never sure how deep of spoilers we wanna do on this. You know what? It’s whatever.

PETER: I’m in Kowloon right now.

[Laughter]

TONY: I love that for you, Peter. So, I thought that… In general, I was curious how they would pull off the ending, given the manga has not quite ended, as far as I know. Or…

VRAI: I think… Yeah, I think it’s in its last arc, but it hasn’t concluded the stuff that’s in the last episode. Like, I don’t think it’s covered that.

TONY: I think one thing that was pretty satisfying to me is this theme that it had of how people could be unknowable to you even as they are somebody you love and think you know deeply, especially when those people purposefully hide parts of themselves from you, because they’re ashamed or feel stigmatized. I think stigma and the parts of ourselves that we hide from people is a running theme in the show. Right? It’s what ultimately arguably kills… ah, what’s her name? Damn it.

VRAI: Reiko.

TONY: Oh, Reiko.

VRAI: The first Reiko, A… uh, B! Kujirai B!

TONY: What kills Kujirai B is this kind of sense of shame around her depression, it seems like, and inability to talk about it with anybody. I mean, it’s heavily implied that she never talked about it with Kudo before she passed away. And then, you know, what ultimately kind of saves so many of these characters is their willingness to expose these more vulnerable parts of themselves to people and be loved. Right?

VRAI: Yeah. I think one of my favorite— I mean, Miyuki’s still my favorite character. I like pretty much every character in this show except for Kudo, and I don’t even hate Kudo. But, um…

TONY: Oh, he’s a dumbass, is the thing. There’s a reason he’s kind of the villain of the show in some ways.

VRAI: Mm-hm. But I was especially touched, I think, unexpectedly, by Xiaohei’s storyline because I think it’s a very—

TONY: Oh, I love it. Yeah.

VRAI: —it’s a very common story to see in anime, right, and true to life in some ways, where… this expectation that when kids are androgynous, you know, you can do what you like, but then puberty hits and the reality of not being able to pass means that you have to give it all up. And I like that turn from this idea that nostalgia is poisonous and can stop you moving forward, but remembrance is something— You don’t have to give things up; you just have to keep moving forward. And I thought that was a really nice evolution of the show’s themes.

TONY: No, it’s brilliant and beautiful. Like, the idea of him carrying with him at all times this kind of feminine part of himself and how it doesn’t disappear, right, when the rest of the city does. Because it is fundamentally changed from what it was when he was a kid, right? It’s a different— It’s changed by him having done it now, right, as opposed to… And I’ll also say… and it’s not like he’s given up his love of fashion. I mean, his outfits are so, so… mm, I love them. They’re just more masculine. And, I don’t know, I relate to that pretty heavily, you know, as somebody who… I have become much more muscular recently, and partially because… almost a form of self-protection and to fit into the gay male scene. To enter into certain parts of the gay male scene in New York City, you kind of have to look a certain way to be fully accepted. And it’s really fucked up in some ways, but not something that I can singlehandedly solve, myself, if that makes sense.

VRAI: It does.

TONY: But simultaneously finding people within that scene who I can go to the club with in a skirt, right, who want to explore feminine presentation with me in creative and interesting and fun ways, has been really meaningful for me. So, I really related in a sense to Xiaohei’s arc. And I also appreciated that it didn’t force a romance between him and Yaomay. I was nervous that it was going to do that, in a way that would feel kind of like slapping a hetero sticker and being like, “He’s hetero! See?”

PETER: “Fixed now.”

TONY: What’d you say? [Chuckles]

PETER: “Fixed now.”

TONY: He’s fixed now.

VRAI: Well, I mean, listen, Yaomay is clearly a lesbian, so they could still make it up in five years.

[Laughter]

PETER: True, true.

TONY: [Chuckles] Well, it’s… You think so? Because she says partway through the season that she’s super into… Well, it’s heavily implied she’s super into Xiaohei, even if, you know…

VRAI: You’re right. Yeah, no, I’m saying that Xiaohei is an egg. [Chuckles]

TONY: [Laughs] And she’s into an egg because he’s an egg? [Chuckles]

VRAI: [crosstalk] Yes, that is—

TONY: Many such cases.

VRAI: Many such cases. I feel like the best logline for this show is also kind of a spoiler but is fun to say, is that this is a mystery about a Manic Pixie Dream Girl gaining self-awareness.

TONY: [Hums in consideration]

PETER: [Chuckles] True. And it turns out it’s not very fun.

VRAI: Turns out not having a sense of identity outside of a person whose regrets you represent kind of blows, and maybe you don’t want to do that anymore.

PETER: Yeah. I am very happy that it ended with her kind of… It’s almost good that they didn’t get together briefly and then she’s just like, “This isn’t actually gonna help me. I need to figure my own shit out. Goodbye.” And I guess they can be friends at the end or whatever, I guess, but I’m glad that she… I mean, that was like the only good possible outcome, it seems.

VRAI: Honestly one of my favorite things about adult romances, both erotica and romance about adults, is that, yeah, you can have that thing where the characters get together in the second act, and that opens up so many more doors for where the relationship is going, often. And, yeah, I think in this case it reminded me a lot of Paradise Kiss, which is one of my favorite manga of all time and is also about a deeply toxic relationship. So, yeah, I— Yeah. My feelings.

PETER: Love characters realizing they’re not right for each other. It’s great stuff.

TONY: Or at the very least that the romance is based upon things that a romance should not be based upon, like regret and shame and…

PETER: Kudo sucking.

TONY: [Chuckles] … and grasping. Like, in Buddhism, we talk about the idea of grasping, you know, trying to hold on some positive thing so tightly that you suffocate it, like a little bird in your hand that you crush to death.

VRAI: Yeah!

PETER: True. They’re very clearly doing that to, like— She was trying to almost use him as an anchor to define her existence there for a second, and he really needed to move on. So, yeah, great conclusion for those two.

VRAI: [crosstalk] I’m glad he’s going to therapy.

PETER: Yep.

VRAI: And I know Chi— I’m looking forward to reading the manga. It’s not all out in English yet. Chiaki is caught up on the Japanese release, and I know she’s been saying that it seems like the manga will have a slightly different ending than the one the anime ended up with just because of how it’s framing certain revelations, I get the perception, so I think that’ll be really fun to have side by side once they’re both finished.

PETER: Yeah. I read a couple volumes of the manga, and it was much slower, more vibey, so I definitely want to pick that one back up, just because I think there’s a lot of atmosphere, and I think Chiaki even mentioned there was a lot of casual hanging out that you miss out on, and the characters are real fun, so…

TONY: I feel like—

VRAI: And a lot more with—

TONY: You were saying?

VRAI: Oh. Please, go ahead. Oh, just that there’s also more of a consistent thematic throughline with success. That is a thing in the anime, but much more backgrounded. But you were saying.

TONY: Do you think that weasel boy is gay?

VRAI: Oh, the white-haired guy? I mean, I’ll be honest, I sort of lowkey assumed he was in love with Miyuki, but that’s just because that’s the trope that he is, more than it being extremely evident on page. You know?

PETER: He seems real jealous to me.

TONY: Yeah, he did. This show is just kind of teeming with every single gay male trope there is in anime and manga but then doing it so well that you can’t complain—if that makes sense. And I—

VRAI: [crosstalk] Uh-huh. No, I’m just—

TONY: [Chuckles] I kind of love that about it.

VRAI: Uh-huh! Yeah, as somebody who didn’t click— Like, even after reassessing it, I respect it more but I did not click with After the Rain, but I loved this so much. I’m really looking forward to her next series, honestly—the mangaka.

TONY: [crosstalk] Oh! Is she coming out with one soon?

VRAI: Well, no, she’s gotta finish Kowloon. And she seems like the type who gets really interested in something and really falls down a research hole, but some day— Jun Mayuzuki. That’s her name. Yeah, some day, if she makes a third series, I will be there, is what I’m saying.

PETER: Yeah, especially after After the Rain, I was not expecting about 90% of what happened in this series. [Chuckles] So, I agree: eager to see what she does next.

TONY: So eager, yeah. I’m a big fan.

VRAI: Nice. Alright, so, regrettably, I have nothing to tell you all about The Gorilla God’s Go-To Girl. It seems like… It’s not a terrible series, but even the folks in the Discord—hello, AniFem Discord, which you can join by joining our Patreon for $5 a month—

PETER: Nice.

VRAI: —even the folks in the Discord who were keeping up with it kind of petered out towards the end. So, it seemed like—

PETER: [crosstalk] We do do that.

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not— Very, very tropey and had a hard time trying to pivot back into being a drama again at the end, a common issue that I think we have all seen in a lot of shows. So, yeah, I wouldn’t warn folks— Just having observed it all season, wouldn’t warn folks away from it, but nothing really glowing to say either.

As far as The Too-Perfect Saint, I know that both Lizzie and Dee both finished the series and enjoyed it, although they enjoyed the sister character a lot more than the main… just felt she had more going on than the main girl. I believe it will be cropping up in our seasonal recs, so there will be more to hear about on that point then!

Alright, to make sure that we have some time left for our sequels, let’s move on up to Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty, a show that I liked and still haven’t quite finished by the time that we’re recording this. But, Tony, you’ve got overall thoughts on it.

TONY: Oh, my gosh. Okay, so, Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty… first of all, it’s a fantastic show. It is, I think, actually doing more interesting things with its commentary on class in its second half than it does in its first. I think the moment in the second half where I realized that the show was actually very aware of the complexities of class was the moment where she meets the former Noble Maiden and she thinks, “Oh, my gosh! This lady is gonna tell me the secret I need to know to be able to become the Noble Maiden! Surely there must be something I can do to become the Noble Maiden!” 

And, you know, it kind of builds this up, being like, you know, “Oh, yeah! You know, I love the music room! I’m just going to go do…” (you know, this is the former Noble Maiden talking) “… I’m just gonna be 30 minutes late to the meeting because I’d rather do what I want to do!” And, you know, Lilisa’s reading this as, “Oh! Well, you know, somebody else who’s a fellow rebel against the system…” (well, not a rebel against the system but somebody who’s a free spirit, right?) “… somebody else who understands just how restrictive this environment is.” And then, frickin’, this lady is like, “You know, guitar? That’s never going to be a lady’s thing. You need to make sure you”— and she whispers to Lilisa—“have your fun in moderation.” And I was just like, “Holy shit!” And before this it’s revealed that she… and Lilisa asks her, “So, how did you become a Noble Maiden?” And this is what really killed me: “Oh, I just donated enough money to fund half the fucking construction of the new campus.”

PETER: Oh, my God.

VRAI: Yep!

TONY: And I was like, “Oh, my God! This show actually knows what it’s doing!” This is a critique of meritocracy! There is nothing that Lilisa can do in her current position to actually become the Noble Maiden. Unless I’m totally misreading the show. Right? This is a show that’s like— And all of the things like being 30 minutes late to the meeting? That’s not because she’s a free spirit; it’s because the rich people can do whatever the fuck they want!

PETER: Damn. Damn.

VRAI: Mm-hm.

PETER: [Sighs] I gotta watch this one.

VRAI: It’s good! It’s fun.

PETER: Yeah, it looks really fun, yeah.

TONY: And if you have enough money to donate to the school, they’ll just look the other way and you can kind of jerk them around. And so, it was really— I thought that was honestly my favorite moment in the show so far, as much as I’ve loved all the lesbian BDSM imagery that’s borderline porn throughout the show.

VRAI: I’m a fan of that.

TONY: I’m a fan of that. But that moment was like, “Okay, I’m locked in. This show actually knows what it’s doing and what it’s trying to say.”

PETER: There’s politics, too? Yeah.

TONY: Yeah, no, for real.

VRAI: Yeah, it is one of those things where occasionally I’m not— Like I mentioned before, I get antsy about shows where they’re built so firmly on the firmament of “Technically, these could all be misconstrued innuendos.” It frustrates me from a creative standpoint, not because it makes the actual content less gay. But with a show like this it is nice, when it’s kind of functioning on that “We’re saying it but we’re not saying it,” to also have something else it is being demonstrably really quite smart about. You know?

TONY: Well, also, I mean, they’re saying it but not saying it because these girls can’t actually express their desires in any socially acceptable way and maintain their status as ladies, right?

VRAI: That’s true: it does fit into the themes. You got me there.

TONY: And also, the extent to which it’s not saying it is, like, miniscule given they’re literally in BDSM imagery talking about cumming!

[Chuckling]

TONY: Like, they are talking about having orgasms with their clit from playing guitar. Like, the extent to which this is not saying explicitly, “These are lesbians who are fucking through their musical instruments,” is like…

VRAI: Fractional.

TONY: [crosstalk] I mean, they’re saying that. It’s just saying that.

[Laughter]

VRAI: And if that doesn’t convince you to watch this show, I don’t know what will. [Chuckles]

TONY: It’s fantastic.

VRAI: Alright. I regret to inform you, folks at home, speaking of Mobile Suit… not speaking of anything. I do regret to inform you, folks at home who were hoping for a Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX update, I’m sorry, I had to throw in the towel. When they brought in characters who were not just references to the ‘79 series but are in fact prominent thematic things from Zeta Gundam, I had to throw up my hands and say—

TONY: I warned you, Vrai! I warned you.

VRAI: You did. You did.

TONY: And you said no…

VRAI: I had to throw up my hands and say, “This is not for me! This is not for me. I am not the person this is made for.” And at that point, it kind of reached a density where I could not follow, and I really hope that some of you Gundam fans at home will pitch articles on this series because I do think it has a lot going on and I think is fascinating, sort of in the way of… Shout-out to contributor and previous Megan. She did an article about Build Fighters and how it’s talking back to the Gundam franchise at large. I think there is a similar, very interesting conversation going on with GQuuuuuuX. I just don’t know what it is!

I will also say it was— One thing I do know is it was really disappointing that they brought Tohru Furuya on for what amounted to a cameo as Amuro because he was Amuro’s voice actor. And for those who don’t know, he was in… I believe it was two years ago… or no, last year, 2024, he stepped down from several voice acting— He stepped down from One Piece, he was replaced some other places, because it came to light that he had been in a relationship with a much younger fan of his and had been involved with domestic abuse and pressuring her into an abortion. So, yeah. And so, there have been back-and-forths among Gundam fans, like “Ah, well, this show has been in production for such a long time. Maybe they recorded him before the allegations came to light.” It’s a very small cameo. You could have recast him. I’m gonna go ahead and stand on that point. A lot of other shows did.

So, yeah, that’s a bummer, but otherwise, yeah, I’m glad that this show happened. I’m glad that Machu and Nyaan are cool protagonists, even if, speaking of shows with gay vibes that didn’t really go anywhere… They’re roommates at the end. I could believe they’ll start dating. None of it happened on the screen, but I support all the fanfiction people will write.

Yeah, and in conclusion, animefeminist.com/submission.

TONY: Please, please, please.

VRAI: I want to hear your thoughts. [Chuckles]

Oh, just kidding. I have to keep talking, because I was the only one who watched Maebashi Witches, which I loved so much. I think I talked a lot about what I liked about it at the mid-season, but to sort of wrap up… This is another one of those shows that it bums me out that it doesn’t have a dub, although I think it’s really aimed more at older grade school/middle school girls, so you could show it to somebody with subtitles. It’s a really sweet version of my favorite kind of magical girl show, which is social commentary ones where our magical adventures in helping people are metaphors for personal issues and also contemporary stuff and… It’s good. I know that that—

TONY: So, it’s in the same universe as Fairy Ranmaru. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Mm-hm, very much. It is the less horny Fairy Ranmaru. And its ultimate trajectory is like, “Look, these girls are not changing the fabric of society, but they are making things less terrible for the friends in their lives,” and I think that that is… I don’t know, that’s a kind of reasonable metric that I kind of enjoy with what the show is, because I think if it had tried to say, “We’re going to change everything,” it wouldn’t have fit the very cute slice-of-life vibe. I think it would’ve felt dishonest in a way that wouldn’t have served the show. But this is very much talking to middle school girls as far as, like, “Look, you’re still young, you don’t have a lot of power yet, but, you know, what you can do is you can tell your friend, who is a young carer for her grandma and exhausted from taking care of her siblings and worried about her mom, that you see her and she deserves to have a nice time, too, and that also there are social programs that could make things easier for her family. And that’s a thing you can do, small child.” And, I don’t know, I really liked that.

I do think that there are things throughout the show that it kind of nods towards a little but doesn’t get into, like one of the girls having some stuff with gender that she’s sort of struggling with, which doesn’t end up being the core of her actual arc, but on the other hand, the core of her actual arc is “What do you do when your friend gets creepy DMs from an online influencer that she liked?” And that was handled, again, in that very sedated but kind of touching way that I like, where, you know, you listen to her and you believe her. Like, that’s a thing you can do. And, I don’t know, it’s a small show but in a way that really, really touched me. And I think that people should check it out. It was good. Yeah, and I think it will fly under a lot of people’s radars, just because, as I mentioned in the mid-season, the character designs are kind of unmemorable. But, yeah, I liked it a lot.

Anyway, ending at the top of our list is Anne Shirley. Peter, are you still following this or did you kind of drop off?

PETER: I have not been able to keep up with it, although through no fault of the anime.

VRAI: Mm-hm. Yeah. I will say… I know that Alex is still following it and a little behind as well. My thoughts on it are basically the same that they were at the mid-season in that I am glad it exists and it’s introducing new people to Anne of Green Gables; it is not my favorite version of the story because it… I predicted at the end of the mid-season that it was going to hit the major event that ends the original 1979 series at around the Episode 12, and, yeah, I was right! It gets to the end of the first book about Episode 12 because it’s clearly… the point of this is to sort of do a highlight reel of stories that longtime fans of Anne have seen before and then rush on to stories from the later books that haven’t been adapted. And, you know, it seems like there would be a name for this phenomenon, but sadly nobody has ever coined it, so I guess I’ll just have to call it, um… yeah, Green Gables. Yep. I think that should be the moniker of the shows that do this kind of thing.

TONY: Green Gabling? Green Gabling?

VRAI: Yeah. Mm-hm.

TONY: It’s Green Gabling.

PETER: Ah, nice.

VRAI: Yep. Yeah, it’s—

PETER: Heard it here first.

VRAI: That’s right. So—

TONY: What’s some other shows that Green Gable? [Chuckles]

VRAI: You know, I hear that… you know, the one by that nice cow lady. She made a really good farming manga a few years ago. I think they might have done something like that with one of hers.

PETER: Ah.

TONY: Cow lady?

PETER: Arakawa, right.

TONY: Oh, yes, that’s what I was thinking.

PETER: Yeah, yeah.

TONY: Oh, oh, oh, ah, oh, oh, oh. [Laughs] I get the joke that you’re making! It took me way too long, wow! Nobody has ever thought about this ever in the universe. Nobody’s ever considered a term for this, ever. Wow.

VRAI: It’s true.

TONY: Never. Okay.

PETER: We’re taking it back.

TONY: The joke’s on me.

[Chuckling]

VRAI: So, yeah, with this show I would say, if you’ve seen other adaptations of it, this might be fun because it’s a chance you get to see new material. I wish that the ’79 series was a little bit more readily accessible in English. Like I said, the English dub has been uploaded officially on YouTube. You can watch it there, but I don’t think a lot of people know about that. And so, it’s not for me, this version, but I am glad that it exists and is doing its thing. You know?

TONY: I know… you’ve said that you quite like Anne with an E, right?

VRAI: Yeah, Anne with an E and the 1979 Takahata series, which does end at about the point that Episode 12 does here.

TONY: Alright, so that’s what I’m gonna watch. Alright, should we move on to sequels?

VRAI: Let’s do it! Any… Tony, thoughts on The Apothecary Diaries? You, like, blazed through catching up.

TONY: Oh, I am nowhere near done with Season 2. I’m gonna be honest with you.

VRAI: My bad.

TONY: It’s ok, though. I like it. Lihaku’s hot. So is Jinshi. Oh, my God, I just said something very controversial.

VRAI: [Snorts in amusement] It’s okay, we’ll let it ride.

TONY: Yeah. I like Maomao. I like the men. I enjoy the depictions of sex work. I… Yeah. It good.

VRAI: You might have heard that The Apothecary Diaries is a good show.

TONY: Just maybe.

VRAI: Mm-hm, mm-hm.

PETER: Yeah, really great cap to the Season 2. I think they end at a really good spot. So…

VRAI: I’m glad to hear it since that one was really been plagued by production issues, which is a shame. Like, yeah, it’s a seinen, but it’s so… [Sighs] it feels like one of those shows that would have been marketed to women if we didn’t just put everything in seinen as a catchall now. And I’m just glad to see it doing so well and being so popular.

PETER: Well, it’s very popular with women. And I can tell you it is being marketed to women. So…

VRAI: Hooray!

PETER: … it’s got that going for it. Yeah, yeah. It’s, yeah, doing very… very popular, too. So, um…

TONY: I appreciate its marketing towards women because it means that the men are shirtless in it more often, and that makes me happy.

PETER: Mm-hm.

VRAI: [Snorts in amusement] They are doing you this service.

PETER: [crosstalk] I enjoyed that— Who was the person you linked, Vrai, who…? They did a great video on consent in the series.

VRAI: Oh, uh…

TONY: [crosstalk] I don’t think I did. Oh, yeah, Vrai did.

PETER: There’s a YouTube video.

VRAI: That will be, yeah, yeah, in, I think, next week’s links… [Trails off uncertainly] Uh, no, that was a different one. Just scrolling up through the links channel.

PETER: Although, one of the more evil YouTube videos I’ve watched, as well, because they talk all about consent as a concept in the series and then go, “And then part 2’s specifically gonna be Jinshi and Maomao,” and I was like, “Oh, you! I have to watch part 2 now.” I got got.

VRAI: That’s some evil YouTuber feinting.

PETER: I got got, yeah. Dang!

VRAI: Yeah.

TONY: I found it. I found the video. It’s Ope thee Otaku.

PETER: Okay, okay. Yeah, great video.

VRAI: Thank you, Tony.

PETER: Shout-out to them. Mm-hm.

VRAI: Alright. Let’s see, what else? Aharen-san wa Hakarenai. Peter, I know you finished all of Season 2 of that. And when I asked you and Dee about it, you were like, “Yeah! It was pretty much more of the same good stuff! Um… That’s all we had to say about it!” [Chuckles]

PETER: What is it they say? You something with faint praise?

TONY: Damning something with faint praise.

PETER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was fine, kind of more of the same stuff you got from the first season. I kind of wish they’d done more— Dee and I both really liked the anxiety gyaru, who is one of the more first-person perspectives you get because she has a habit of just looking at situations and assuming everybody hates her. Unfortunately, I feel like the joke kind of ended up being either nobody notices and she feels anxiety or somebody notices and then they reaffirm the friendship and she feels better, and those are like the two directions that one joke could take. This is probably gonna be the last season because they wrap it all up and everybody got together and stuff. So, it was fine. It was good. If you liked Aharen, you’ll like Season 2.

VRAI: You know? That’s… Having a show that starts strong and finishes basically as strong, more or less… that’s good. You don’t see that as often as you should. So, I’m glad, and some day I’ll get around to watching it…

PETER: It’s sweet.

VRAI: … because it seems nice.

PETER: Yep. All the characters are very nice.

VRAI: Aw. The last one— You know, we’re… Wind Breaker Season 2 I know did some interesting things, so I felt like it might be a good idea to give them a quick shout-out.

PETER: Yeah. So, they introduced Tsubakino finally, who I guess identifies as a man but wears makeup and wears a skirt and seems to be in love with the… I don’t know what to call him, the main member of their gang, the head of their school gang that does hero stuff.

TONY: So, he’s either— He’s gay, at the very least.

PETER: Yes, at the very least.

TONY: Nice. Nice. It’s very rare to find gay male characters in just, like, random shounen. Almost nonexistent, to be honest. So, that’s nice.

PETER: Yeah. And they spend a lot of time— They have a whole background episode… well, kind of two episodes, because you meet Tsubakino’s kind of mentor, who’s like an old man. His wife passed away, but back when she was living, the two of them had kind of helped Tsubakino realize that his obsession with cute stuff was okay and natural and they let him try on her lipstick and her clothes and stuff. And that was really integral to him kind of coming out. And now that the wife has passed away, he regularly visits the old man and they kind of help that guy through his grief over her having passed away as well. So, a lot of this very strong kind of community support, building kind of concept that the series had that was in Season 1, as well, which I thought was very good. And of course it factored into the fight, as well, where somebody makes fun of Tsubakino for wearing makeup. The bad part— I’ll get into the bad part in a little bit.

The villains just seemed like… It was like there’s, I guess, a neighborhood where just everybody’s poor, and because they’re so poor they’ll just do anything to get out of it. And the main guy is… he’s kinda like a Shigaraki-coded, like, gamer, even though he can’t afford video games. He’s, like, referring to everybody as, like, bosses and saying they have XP and stuff. I’m not quite sure why they’re doing that. But—

VRAI: I mean, probably making that kind of character the villain, given the glut of reincarnation isekai where the protagonist’s entire thing is seeing everyone around them as, you know…

PETER: NPCs. Yeah, I think he even calls some of them NPCs and stuff, although… too poor to have ever played a video game. So, I don’t quite know how that— I don’t square that circle. In fact, they turn him around, turn him into a good guy and allow him to play a Nintendo Switch for the first time, is the conclusion that he…

[Chuckling]

PETER: But he thinks that, you know, of course, the makeup that Tsubakino’s wearing is very frivolous because he can’t even afford food. There’s a backstory where—

TONY: [crosstalk] Oh, no. Not the—

PETER: —he and his friends are splitting a cookie eight ways and stuff. And Tsubakino says it’s kind of like… Ah, I can’t remember the specific… It’s a good sequence. Talks about how feeling beautiful makes him feel stronger and makes him more confident in himself and lets him be his true self, which makes him a better person, that kind of thing.

TONY: Yeah, and— Yeah.

PETER: And then they beat the bad guys and convince them to be good guys by giving them all jobs, which apparently they just had a bunch of odd jobs they needed filled. They could’ve gotten jobs at any time, I guess? I don’t know. So, the whole gang gets gainful employment, I guess, and that solves it. I think all the Tsubakino stuff is really good, but the series kind of has this problem where it’s… the whole concept of it relies upon this weird world they exist in, where police and teachers both don’t exist—half of that’s pretty cool—so school gangs just don’t do anything at school all day, except they either are criminals or they act as police and wander around and support their local communities and make sure nobody’s doing crimes and stuff, which… it’s hard to… With a universe like that that they’re existing in, it’s kinda hard to [Chuckles] make any judgments because it’s so alien.

VRAI: Mm-hm. But you… What was your thought, Tony, about…?

TONY: [crosstalk] Oh, nothing. Just— Okay, I mean, I was just gonna say, I think that this whole idea of queerness as just some bourgeois luxury or just some bourgeois, decadent thing is just a very common one. I’m glad that the series is, hopefully, critical of that, it sounds like, given it’s coming from the mouth of the villain. And, you know… Because beauty is not a luxury. It is a basic aspect of survival—at the very least for queer people, for whom it is just a basic aspect of identity. So, I don’t know, it’s always interesting to hear a series engaging with that kind of idea and critiquing it.

PETER: Yeah, they were in proximity to a lot of stuff about that, as well, too, because I think essentially Tsubakino moonlights as a pole dancer in the red-light district—

TONY: Oh!

PETER: —and they had… The whole reason that they were fighting was because there was a girl from the poor district who was a singer at the same nightclub, who they kind of considered a class traitor for going there. There was maybe some gang member who paid for her as a person, too, that was involved in that. It’s not quite clear yet. So, yeah, definitely adjacent to a lot of that kind of stuff.

TONY: And I’ve heard a lot of critique of the show, centering on this idea, like, “Well, having a high schooler do sex work or sex work–adjacent things… isn’t that a bad thing to depict in an anime and stereotypical?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, y’all. A lot of trans women and queer children get kind of roped into that from a young age.” That being said, if it’s being presented as something that is necessarily a good aspect of how Tsubakino explores her [sic] identity, I don’t know, that’s a whole discourse that I don’t know if I’m ready to wade in on right now, given that there’s like 20 different layers to that. [Chuckles] You know? Because so often communities of sex work are the only communities that many trans women, when they first transition, have. So, it is very… again, deeply complex subject, not one that I feel that I really… And I hope that people understand that when I speak I’m basing what I say on, like, the memoirs of Cecilia Gentili, a beloved member of the New York City trans community who passed away recently and wrote about this sort of stuff. I’m not just saying this stuff off the top of my head. I have sources. [Chuckles]

PETER: I would be interested… again, please pitch to us. I think it’s doing a lot of interesting stuff. It’s just kind of like the world that it’s set up, while ostensibly seeming to be in Tokyo, seems so alien that I don’t know how a lot of stuff can fit in when you get into stuff like class, poverty, that kind of thing.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Right. But it’s definitely like— Yeah, like, class, poverty, community, policing, gender, and sex work. There’s a lot you can unpick there, beyond just “Did it do it good or bad?” But what does it say to have all these things in conversation with each other in a shounen that’s, in itself, a throwback to the rebel series of the ‘80s disillusionment yanki titles.

PETER: Yeah.

TONY: Absolutely.

VRAI: Honestly, all very Ashita no Joe.

PETER: [crosstalk] What if the delinquents were the cops?

VRAI: Mm-hm. Alright. I know, Peter, that you watched a couple other sequels, but since we are short on time, were there any of the other ones that you feel like folks at home would really want to know about?

PETER: I don’t really think there’s much else to discuss among the other sequels, to be perfectly honest. [Chuckles]

TONY: Chill, chill, chill.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Fair, fair. Yeah, I know that— I know that Alex has been planning to watch the new Black Butler but hasn’t. And for me, that series begins and ends with Mari Okada because I’m trash. [Chuckles]

PETER: Mm-hm. I have not watched that one. So, hopefully, if there is something, hopefully we can work it in or something, yeah.

VRAI: From all accounts, the recent short series that have been going on with it have been lots of fun and all the fans of the series have enjoyed it, and I am so sincerely happy for them. And I haven’t done that. [Chuckles]

PETER: Yeah. I have heard some insane stuff. But… yeah.

TONY: It’s truly the Monogatari of…

[Chuckling]

TONY: … um, uh, I don’t know.

PETER: Butlers. [Laughs]

TONY: Dark supernatural fantasy? [Chuckles]

VRAI: [Snorts in amusement] You swung for it and I respect that.

[Laughter]

TONY: I was like, “Something something Monogatari something something.”

PETER: What if Senjougahara was a butler?

TONY: [Laughs]

VRAI: Yes, yes. We will need— Yes. We will record another Monogatari episode. [Chuckles]

TONY: Thank you.

VRAI: [Laughs] Alright. Well, with that delightful tease on the books, if you enjoyed this episode, you can find more from the team by going to animefeminist.com. If you really liked what you heard or read today, consider becoming a patron by going to patreon.com/animefeminist. That is how we pay all of our lovely contributors, editors, the transcriptionist who makes it so that folks who either can’t or don’t want to listen to the pod can read along, and we can’t do that without y’all at home. Being able to pay folks as equitably as we can is really, really, important to us. You can also find us on social media by going to our Linktree, which is linktr.ee/animefeminist.

Thank you so much for joining us, AniFam. So sorry that this episode was as cursed, as late as it was, but hopefully you found some new excellent anime. I don’t even know, man. I don’t even know. This episode is too cursed.

PETER: Summer’s already started. You’re all watching summer anime already.

TONY: Watch Summer Hikaru Died!

VRAI: Yeah, there we go!

TONY: We hope you’re watching that.

VRAI: That— Yeah, I am hoping that people are watching The Summer Hikaru Died. Yeah, that’s how we should end this. Alright, later!

TONY: Bye.

PETER: Bye.