Chatty AF 232: 2025 Summer Mid-Season Check-In (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

VRAI: Sometimes you just have to throw a rock and kill—and hit a guy in the head, and that’s bowling!

DEE: And that’s bowling, baby!

[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 Anime Feminist. You can find me being sad about vampires on Bluesky @writervrai. And joining me today are Dee and Peter.

DEE: Hello! I’m Dee. And I’ve been here the whole time.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

PETER: The Phantom of the O…pera…

DEE: Yeah. Uh, I used to do a bunch of stuff at AniFem. Now I hang out and I record podcasts sometimes, because the staff is cool and lets me continue to hang out. Currently not doing any anime stuff because my new job keeps me very, very busy. But, you know, maybe someday I’ll get back to doing reviews and things. And that’s my intro. Peter, your turn.

PETER: Nice. Yeah, I’m Peter Fobian, I’m an editor here at Anime Feminist, and I’m @peterfobian on Bluesky.

VRAI: And thank you so much, you two here and all of you at home, for joining us today for our Summer 2025 mid-season check-in! If you are new to the podcast, what we do is we go through our Premiere Digest, we start at the bottom and we work our way up to the top. We also try to prioritize shows that our readers have voted for us, ones they’re especially interested in, because there’s a lot of anime and sometimes you can’t watch it all and you can’t discuss it all in a podcast that’s a certain length because we have to pay our wonderful transcriptionist, CJ. 

So, if you want to do that, you can go to patreon.com/animefeminist. We start from the bottom of the digest. We work our way up. We try to keep spoilers somewhat light, but there will be discussion of plot events up to the middle of shows as they’re airing, so if you want to go in completely clear, just a heads-up for that. We keep these shows where they were initially listed from the premiere, just because that’s easy for reference. It doesn’t mean shows don’t change or grow, get better or worse as they go along.

So, with all that in mind, we are going to be starting today with Clevatess, which Chiaki and Peter are both watching. And, Peter, you are here today, so how’s it going with its grimdark stuff?

PETER: I think at this point it has largely passed. I think it kind of introduces itself as a lot more grimdark as it is and peaks in episode 3 with Nelluru’s backstory, which included a lot of… she’s kind of amongst a bunch of sex workers and is personally the victim of a lot of sexual assault. When that plot resolves, they kill all the raiders that have been keeping these women captive and Nelluru gets a new lease on life after a kind of torturous scene. And then it becomes more standard fantasy fare, I would say. There’s definitely the aspect where Alicia, the main character, is kind of a reanimated-with-beast-blood immortal warrior, so a lot of her fights involve body-horror–esque use of the fact that she knows she cannot die and her opponents don’t know that to win via receiving some sort of gruesome, fatal wound while surprising them. And I think that’s kind of the grimmest it gets about then.

VRAI: That does kind of rule is the thing. It reminds me of The Missing.

PETER: There’s definitely a lot of… I’d say gruesome but no longer grimdark as it sort of leans more into Clevatess deciding that they are going to… I still don’t know if Clevatess is a he or she… giant wolf monster deciding they’re going to possibly direct the development of human government by becoming the personal tutor of the surviving member of the royal family after they killed [Chuckles] the rest of the royal family. So, more and more like intrigue, standard fantasy fare after that. So…

VRAI: Gotcha.

DEE: So now it’s The Royal Tutor? What a turn of events.

PETER: A little bit. Yeah, right now in the manga, they’ve gone full into, like, “They’re at magic school” arc. Uh… so…

DEE: Oh, boy. Okay.

VRAI: Oh… Oh, so it’s got a case of—

DEE: [crosstalk] So it really does settle into, like, standard fantasy stuff then, huh?

PETER: Yes.

DEE: Not that magic school… isn’t bad. Like, we’ll talk about a magic school show later that I like a lot. But yeah.

PETER: Yeah, there’s just so many of them, and Clevatess was doing really cool stuff that wasn’t magic school. Also, to make Alicia a spy in there, Clevatess compacts her body so it looks like she’s younger than she is, which she isn’t really… Yeah, that’s kind of a running joke, that she is ultimately Clevatess’s kind of slave, so she doesn’t really have—

DEE: Hilarious joke!

PETER: It becomes more of a give-and-take later on, I do want to say. Yeah, I guess that is worth mentioning. The only thing keeping her alive is Clevatess’s blood after Clevatess killed her, so she is kind of serving Clevatess’s whims, but Clevatess is also like, “Well, I know you wanted to be hero, and you can still do that. I will let you do that. It’s just… I plan to…”

VRAI: Whims of an immortal monster god and all of that.

PETER: Yeah. And to be fair, humanity did attack Clevatess first.

[Chuckling]

PETER: Clevatess kinda went, “Seems like you guys are obsessed with killing me, so maybe I should wipe you all out,” and then somebody convinces Clevatess to, I guess, use a baby as a way of passing judgment over the entire species. So, Clevatess is kinda going like, “Well, maybe I could just rule over humans instead.”

DEE: This show sounds so edgelordy. [Chuckles]

PETER: A little bit. Yeah. I think it could be—It is more… It’s got a bit more narrative than that. Like if you… Yeah, definitely the elevator pitch, you’re just like, “God, this person is super grimdark.” But I think it’s surprisingly humorous and kind of… Clevatess is an interesting character, too. Then there’s politics with all the… there’s, like, cardinal beasts.

VRAI: You know what it sounds like, is, um…

DEE: It’s intriguing, is what it… yeah.

VRAI: Like if somebody wanted Witch and The Beast with a little less gender? I don’t know why anyone would want that. That’s the most interesting part about Witch and The Beast. But, like, if they did.

PETER: Uh… maybe? I don’t know that there’s really a corollary for Clevatess in Witch and The Beast, although I do hope that gets a season 2 because they stopped it literally before the sexy vampire arc. I don’t know why they did that.

DEE: Monsters!

PETER: Literally, you take an elevator to the vampire world in Witch and The Beast, and all these sexy vampires are trying to fight over control of the night and they get involved in that. And it’s sick. Sick as hell.

DEE: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Alright.

PETER: But that is not Clevatess.

VRAI: I feel like you had—

DEE: No.

VRAI: No. Yeah, I feel like you had me and then you lost me when you told me it has a case of Shonen Jump syndrome, but it does sound like the sexual assault stuff mostly tapers off into more general gore, so that might appeal to people who like a dark fantasy, and that’s good to know.

PETER: Just episode 3 is the big “danger signs” episode, yeah.

DEE: Yeah. Lots of content warnings there, yeah?

PETER: Mm-hm.

VRAI: Mm-hm. Moving on, to switch tracks basically completely, we have Ruri Rocks, which is a very nice hobby show where all the girls’ shirts are, like, vacuum-sealed to their boobs as near as I can tell.

DEE: Yeah, the screenshots of that one made me go, “I’m good. I think I’ve got other things I can watch.” So I have not even attempted this one.

PETER: Mm-hm. I gotta admit, I was pretty sussed out by the show when it started, but it has completely won me over. It is so dang earnest about loving minerals, man. Like, even Ruri, who I’m just like, “I don’t get this character as a focus character because it doesn’t seem like she actually has any interest in minerals beyond, like, pretty jewelry,” has pivoted in this really interesting way where she’s also just so damn stubborn that when they’re just like, “Yeah, we think there’s sapphires here but you have to do this thing where you collect sand samples, and then we have to look through these to find out what diversion from the river it’s from,” she’s just like, “I will not be defeated by this.”

VRAI: Good for you, sweetie.

PETER: [crosstalk] And it’s like, “I’m gonna get those goddamn sapphires,” and literally just puts in so much scientific legwork, with Nagi’s guidance, that she manages to get results. And she even ends up… Even small victories are good for her, like she gets a sapphire that she has to pick up with a water dropper. But that’s a win for her.

DEE: But she got one, by God.

PETER: Yeah, and I mean they find bigger ones later, but I feel… I’ve come around on that character. I mean, the character designs are the character designs, although I do have to admit they do dress surprisingly practically, because they’re always, like, in waders or big boots, that kind of thing, when they have to go out in the water.

VRAI: Is it like one of those shows where the first episode is super horny and then it just kind of falls off? Or is it just like you learn to ignore the character designs because the rest of it’s fine?

PETER: Maybe I’m just like a boiled frog at this point, but I do think they really laid off all of… They laid off. Yeah, there’s a lot less interesting choices when it comes to camera angles, I’ll say. And they’ve really done like a lot of character focus, too. I really like the new character Shoko, who is a classmate of Ruri that’s actually been interested in minerals since she was a kid, and her parents supported her but she overheard them saying like, “God, I hope she doesn’t become like a… study minerals or something. Hey, you’re not going to make any money that way. Please!”

DEE: “Geologist bum!”

PETER: “Please, please take an interest in law or medicine or something.” So I think she’s kind of ashamed that she’s interested in… Also, you know, like none of her friends are into that kind of thing. So she’s just kind of been nursing this yearning for years and then happens upon Ruri meeting with these girls. And at that time they’re looking for glass for some reason, and so she thinks they work for a glass studio, but then she finds out that they’re studying mineralogy at college and she just has this, like, “I just met a rock star” moment and kind of, like… They have this really great scene where she’s kind of not-really-asking, like, “Is it okay for me to study this? Is this something that somebody can do?” And the person went, “Well, it’s hard, but of course you can!” And she feels, you know, super affirmed after that. 

So, I really think the person who made this is genuinely in love with the subject matter. You really… you learn a lot, watching the show, about, like, how minerals are formed over the course of a billion years, so Nagi’s narration kind of really lends to the grandeur of, like, you know, cosmic heat and pressure creating these sparkly stones over the course of millions of years and how rocks can move over the course of thousands or tens of thousands of years thanks to, you know, all that. So, I think, past the initial suspect elements, the show really is going a hundred percent into the mineralogy part and seems to have a genuine respect—

DEE: [Crosstalk] Like a real good hobby show, yeah.

PETER: And they have narratives that are really stuck to the scientific method, like Ruri mislabels some stuff, which sends them down a blind path and then they have to go back and check their notes and reassess. And over the process, they make a discovery that they might have looked over in the first place. So, also, it really appreciates the science and the legwork you have to do, and that’s a big focus. So, I really respect the way it’s been doing its storytelling so far.

DEE: That is cool. I feel like there’s not a ton of hobby shows about the hard sciences necessarily, so having somebody really into geology and rocks and stuff and sharing that love does sound like that could be very charming.

VRAI: Yeah, we had Asteroid in Love a while back, which was a little bit too slow paced for me but was very excited about science and… astrology. I’m so sorry, astronomists: it’s about astronomy. But, yeah, it’s been a little minute. So, it’s nice. It’s nice to see that that is a thing.

Yeah, let’s see. With You in the Rain, Chiaki is still watching and enjoying, I believe, but it’s one of those shows that’s doing what it says on the tin, so I will refer you back to her premiere review about it.

And shows that are completely different from where they started out in their first episode… Dee, where do we start with Turkey?

DEE: Turkey! is an experience! Turkey! is something. I binged it… I binged all of what there— I think I’m one behind because I think an episode dropped like the day we’re recording this. But I’ve seen the first six. Yeah, I binged them in a night and I had a great time! It feels like a show that someone pitched as a joke and then everybody else in the room took it seriously, because the premise is absolutely bonkers and the show does not wink at the camera. Like, every episode bends itself over backwards so that the girls can solve this historical Sengoku-era problem with bowling. And there is no sense that the show thinks this is silly. It is like 100% earnest. And I love that particular blend of just full-throated, all-gas-no-brakes nonsense. So, if I take two seconds to think about it, the whole thing kind of falls apart, but watching it all in one go was an extremely fun time.

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of time for shows that take… for stories in general that take, like you said, an extremely bizarre, stupid, weird premise and say, “Okay, can we make this workable as a compelling narrative?” I have a lot of time for that. And, by God, you’re right.

PETER: Love shows with a bizarre adventure.

DEE: Ha-ha!

[Chuckling]

DEE: It really does have that… I mean, kind of like Zenshu earlier this year, although Zenshu was much, much, much, much better, top to bottom, but it is also kind of a throwback isekai. Like, these girls get—I mean, it’s time travel, but they get transported back and they’re trying to figure out how to get home, and they’re learning about themselves and solving some of their personal issues while they’re here and also sometimes saving the day with bowling! [Chuckles]

VRAI: Mm-hm, mm-hm. Yeah, I do think it’s a little bit unev— I think episode 6, the most recent one we watched, is definitely the best of the lot in terms of just matching the melodrama to the stakes, because during the Sengoku period people are dying a lot. But previous episodes have kind of had problems finding an equivalent between the girls’ personal emotional struggles in a way that resonates with whatever they’re doing to grow as characters. 

Like the episode with the fashion girl, who’s— I haven’t learned these girls’ names. It’s not that kind of show! That one was a lowlight because it had such… It has really good intentions. It’s like, “Oh, she says mean things and she seems shallow, but actually she’s a good girl and she really cares a lot.” So, like, she rescues the wee… the smallest member of this house. But the way the show decides that it needs to convey her character development is by having her give a monologue, saying out loud about herself that actually she says mean things but really she is a good person. And I’m like, “This is the most artless thing I’ve ever seen.”

DEE: It was very clumsy, yeah.

VRAI: “But the bombast is sliding me through.”

DEE: Pretty much, yeah.

VRAI: Yep! But—

DEE: The most recent episode made me wonder if the show is about to take a turn into maybe some darker material, because it was really, genuinely grappling with the fact that it is a dramatically different culture and it is during wartime, and just killing people was a lot more common… and the characters of that time, their sort of mentality towards that, and also just the idea of duty and it not necessarily being about what you personally want; it’s about what the community needs, what your family says needs to be done, and then that’s the thing you do, because that’s what needs to be done. So, I thought the most recent one was like… It was the first time I was like, “Wait, is this show gonna actually do a secret smart thing maybe?” But then she did bludgeon a dude with a giant rock, bowling-style. And I was like, “It’s silly, still, though. But it’s silly!” [Chuckles] So…

VRAI: Uh-huh! Yeah, and I do kind of want to spoil that most recent episode because I think it is probably the most likely thing to be of interest to our folks… readers at home, so maybe skip forward ahead about to the next show timestamp if you don’t want any spoilers on this. But yeah, so, episode 6 reveals that the young lord of the castle is the oldest of five sisters and was assigned female at birth, and his father decided that, you know, the castle needs an heir so he’s going to live and present as a man and fill that role within the family. 

So, we learn… And everybody in the village knows this and is cool with it and they all treat him as a boy, and they have this interesting conversation about, like, “Well, surely you must want to live as a girl,” which happens in so many of these shows, even Ōoku, which I really like and is doing different things about sex and sexuality, so it’s fine. And he’s very much like, “Well, no, that doesn’t mat— This is what I needed to do for my family and my culture, so I don’t regret it at all.” And it was just like… yeah, it was very shockingly well-handled for a show that, again, is not previously at the top of its game with writing subtlety.

DEE: Oh, yeah, no, again, there’s no subtlety here, but I also don’t think there’s… thus far, it has been a very, I would say, warmhearted show. There is not malice in this show. I do think it is maybe trying to touch on some more progressive-leaning ideas at the bare minimum. But yeah, the way it handles it is kind of interesting because it really is like… it’s almost like “My identity doesn’t factor into it. This is who I need to be, so this is who I am.” It definitely is like… There’s a long—We can trace a lot of these storylines back to, like, Rose of Versailles and Oscar as a character. So, I think it has echoes of that, as well, in terms of, like, “I am comfortable with this person,” while maybe not exactly being like a modern trans narrative, which, you know, I mean, for the time period, wouldn’t necessarily track with the concept of gender anyway. So, yeah, I thought it was surprisingly well handled as well. 

And, yeah, that combined with the running arc about the modern kids being more focused on… It’s having an interesting conversation about modern era versus this famous Warring States period and the cultural norms of the time and how those clash. So, yeah, it’s still a deeply, deeply silly show, but maybe it’s gonna do a thing by the end. We’ll see.

VRAI: Right? Well, yeah, and especially for… Just, I feel like there’s an extra interestingness as Western viewers because the narrative over here is still so strongly, “Well, Japan is a collectivist society,” and this show has become kind of about the ways that that has shifted and the ways in which progressive individualist elements have changed in important… not like “And then they emerged,” but, you know, the way that collective-versus-self has evolved in Japanese society across eras.

DEE: Yeah, for sure. I agree with that.

VRAI: So, it’s interesting.

DEE: So, yeah. But also bowling!!!

VRAI: Also bowl— Sometimes you just have to throw a rock and kill— and hit a guy in the head, and that’s bowling!

DEE: And that’s bowling, baby!!!

[Laughter]

VRAI: It’s so silly!

DEE: It’s great.

VRAI: Speaking of other shows that you are having fun with, Dee, how’s… I hear that Secrets of the Silent Witch is kind of a sleeper contender.

DEE: It’s great. It’s not doing a ton of… Like, I’m not going to be out here like, “Oh, it’s totally reinventing the wheel,” but it is a really, really well-staged, well-written, character-driven magic school show. I mean, I think the one big point of note, other than the fact that everybody in this show is incredibly likable and… it has the pace of an old-school anime where you had like 50 episodes to tell the story, so you had episodes where the characters just got to kinda hang out and have some low-stakes adventures in between the high-stakes political machinations. And so, I would happily watch like 50 episodes of this show because I’m just enjoying spending time with the characters.

I think the one thing that’s worth highlighting is the main character is a socially anxious math nerd, which, you know, kind of talking about the hard sciences being fairly rare, I feel like it’s very, very rare to have a female character who is like mathematics… who is solving problems with geometry and stuff. And that’s why she’s so good at magic, is because the formulas are similar to math formulas. So I really like that element of it. And when she, like… You know, she does that thing that people do when they’re really passionate about something, where she will just fully go down a hole of, like, “Oh, now I get to excitedly explain to you how geometry works when dealing with proportions and things like that!” and solving this mystery and everybody’s like, “What?”

Yeah, it’s a very earnest show. It is…I forget the name. It’s the director who did Princess Connect, and you can feel that same…just oozing charm. This director is very, very good at making likable characters hang out with each other. And I’m sure that the source material has a lot to do with that, as well. But yeah, I started it just because… honestly, I think it was some people in the AniFem… in the Discord were saying it was, like, their favorite show of the season. And I was like… It was kind of on my docket because I like to watch shoujo. I was super far behind at the start of this season, so I caught up with that one, and, yeah, I have been… I really, really like it. I hope it gets multiple cours and I get to keep hanging out with these characters. Peter, you did start this one. Are you caught up?

PETER: Oh, yeah, I, like, watched the whole thing over the course of a weekend. I figured I should study up, and then it was super easy because it turned out it was really good, so… [Chuckles]

DEE: It’s extremely watchable, yeah.

PETER: Yeah, very unexpected. Like, I’d seen some stuff from the first episode, and I was just like, “Oh, and then she headshot 500 dragons at once,” and so I was like, “Okay, so it’s gonna be like a high fantasy action series.” But no, it’s really… Obviously, there’s broader political implications of what’s going on and she’s like this secret OP character in the middle of this school, but I feel like the narrative is really well written around the politics of the school, and, yeah, as you said, just the characters are so charming and the interactions are so great. I love… Her “in” in the school is that girl she saved, who is just like, “Oh, yeah, I’m gonna pretend to be like your mistress and that I really hate you, and I’ll pretend your—”

DEE: Your, like, evil stepsister, yeah.

PETER: Yeah. “And every time you’re in the room, I’m gonna be throwing teacups around and screaming at you, but then we’re totally chill, though. We’re best friends. Can I be your best friend?” [Chuckles]

DEE: Isabelle is so good.

PETER: Been practicing her villain laugh for months before she showed up, in preparation for her role. Like that kind of stuff where you’re just like, oh, these characters are so great, and the guy had a strong idea. And the main character has all that social anxiety, but I feel like the story’s balanced around that. She obviously is constantly just kind of struggling with all the talking to strangers she has to be doing, but people are pulling her in. Not only is she making friends and appreciating the fact that she’s actually making real friends, but also she’s getting pulled organically into things that interest her, like she ends up in the chess club. Some guy’s just like, “Oh, you’re good at math?” and then she almost kicks his ass at chess and goes like, “Wow, chess is super fun! I think we’re gonna stick with it.” 

So, I think one of the weaknesses we both felt around Bocchi was just like, this girl needs help and nobody’s helping her. But in this show, I feel like it’s more balanced in the presentation of her social anxiety, with the push and pull of it and her support group and her emotional support cat that gives her beans therapy and all that, yeah. [Chuckles]

DEE: Yeah. That was one of the moments when I was like, “I think I love this show,” is when she was stressed out and her magic cat was like, “Shall I squish you with my paw pads? I know you love that.” She’s like, “Yes, please!”

PETER: “Yes,” [Chuckles] she says through tears.

VRAI: Aw!

DEE: And I’m like, I get that. Sometimes when I’m stressed, I also have to squish my cat’s toe beans. [Chuckles] So, yeah, it’s—

VRAI: Oh, that’s very good!

DEE: Yeah, it’s just a really good show. The dub is solid, I will say. I watched the first few episodes dubbed. But I do think I prefer the sub overall. The cast does a really good job. And it’s one of those shows where I feel like every episode they add a new character and I don’t have trouble keeping up with everybody. They’re all really solidly written without us necessarily having a big, long monologuing backstory. It’s all worked very organically into the flow of the narrative. So, yeah, it’s a really well-done fantasy series and I’m pleasantly surprised by it, so definitely my sleeper hit of the season, for sure.

PETER: Same.

DEE: So far. I mean, it’s halfway. We’ll see. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Right. Well, then let me move on to my show I’m watching that I really like that no one’s paying attention to, because Cygames fucked it up, which is Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show. This is, y’all may—

DEE: Okay, so you do like it.

VRAI: I do! It’s—

DEE: Okay, because I was keeping an eye on it, and I think it was around like the third or fourth episode, I think Chiaki asked you how it was doing, and you were like, “Eh.” And I was like, “Okay, I won’t bother watching it, then.” But, okay, this is good. Sorry, continue. I’m excited to know that this is one I could catch up on, then, because I liked the look of it, so, yeah.

VRAI: Yeah, so… I mean, it is definitely like… So I said this in the three-episode review, that this show is written by… ah, yes, Makoto Uezu, who wrote the Devil Survivor 2: The Animation anime, which is truly the worst video game adaptation I’ve ever seen of one of my favorite games. But I said that if Necronomico turned out to be gay, then I would forgive that man for what he did. And so I must provisionally forgive the man. [Chuckles]

DEE: Hey!

VRAI: Yeah, no, the first— Episode 3 or 4 is not… The early going of the show is never bad, I don’t think, but it is very tropey early on, like very traditionally death game tropey, where kind of what’s carrying you through is the aesthetic and they’re shaving down the cast and getting rid of like two or three other people. At one point—you don’t understand—somebody says, “If you die in the game, you die in real life,” and this is a serious line.

DEE: Yes!

VRAI: [Laughs]

DEE: Yes!

VRAI: Yeah! But once they get it down to the cast they clearly intend to keep to the end, it’s balanced itself out a lot more and focused on developing the cast. And I also think it helps a lot that— I have a fondness for death game stories, but the biggest problem with the genre is that they run out of steam very quickly because they’re relentlessly grimdark and there’s nowhere to go for that, and by the time you get to the ending, it’s like, “Who gives a fuck?” Whereas this—

DEE: Or it’ll turn into Future Diary, in which case… aces, start to finish.

VRAI: In which case you escalate forever in ways that no human has ever talked. And I’m—

DEE: All ride, baby!

VRAI: Yep! It’s true! Yeah, Necronomico is still technically, you know, “The Old Gods are putting on a game show for question mark question mark reasons. This will help them take over the Earth somehow,” but it broadens out into a much wider-ranging parody of various types of variety and game and live TV shows, which I think gives it a lot more space to play, a lot more room to vary itself even though it drops the very neat visual play that it was doing in the first episode where it looked like Fall Guys. 

I was disappointed that that went away, but it’s made up for it in doing more dynamic things in other ways. And then, yeah, actually, as of episode 5… [Corrects self] 6, episode 6 (there’s 7 out as we’re recording), it did commit to the fact that Miko is in love with her co-streamer childhood friend who is in a coma and Cthulhu-stole her body.

DEE: Oh, geez!

VRAI: Which is very dramatic. But I think this is like a Yurikuma situation, where Mayu is kind of like Sumika, because she’s like this very treasured object who’s been dead since episode 1, and I think that her fellow contestant is probably the actual love interest, which I’m fine with because Kanna’s a fun character. It actually did surprisingly well with her backstory, which is that she lives on her own because her father was physically abusive, but he was a doctor so he was able to cover it up. So, yeah, considering how sort of silly and artless episodes like two, three, and four are, it has really surprisingly upped its game in a way that I’ve been really enjoying. And, my God, it’s got aesthetic out the ears. Also, also, the bad guy, more than the Old Gods, is the shitty dudebro gamer–streamer, which always makes me happy.

DEE: Powerful, powerful. Yeah, this one might be one where I let you tell me if it sticks the landing because death game stories can be so iffy, but I’m definitely interested. So I’m glad you’re keeping up with it because I’m curious to see how it ends.

VRAI: I am tentatively allowing my hopes to rise. We will see.

DEE: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Because, I will say, Cygames has been killing it lately with producing shows that are gay and make it all the way to the end.

DEE: They have. No, Cygames has been… That’s one of the other reasons I was keeping an eye on it, is because they’ve been kind of knocking it out of the park recently.

PETER: Yeah, I feel like we’ve been saying Cygames is cool since, like, Princess Connect, which was quite a while ago at this point, so I don’t think it’s even old news.

VRAI: [crosstalk] And it’s also pretty gay, if we’re honest.

PETER: [Chuckles] Oh, true! Yeah.

DEE: [crosstalk] Also pretty gay! Yeah, no, we liked Cygames before it was cool.

[Laughter]

DEE: Ahead of the curve. Ahead of the curve, us here at AniFem.

VRAI: Alright. So, with that note that maybe you should all watch Necronomico, I will move us on up to Bad Girl, which I have not had time to watch in my busy watching schedule, but Cy gracefully checked in on it for us, so I will go ahead and read their notes, which is: “I love yuri. I think it’s really an important specific aspect to the overarching queer manga landscape, and I think its history, presence, and the types of stories told within it are so often overlooked as servicing men when in fact they are for the most marginalized and speak to sapphic love that those who want it deserve.” 

“That said, Bad Girl continues to be a struggle for me, though I’m starting to think that’s on me as a critic, at least in some regards. When I did our check-in, I felt disappointed with the series in regard to what I felt it could be. I still feel that way. It isn’t bad but it feels like a letdown. But what I’ve come to realize is that it’s because it butts against my personal desires and expectations of what yuri should do in a time when there are so many more robust stories that explore women my age falling in love and seeing what that can be. But that’s not what Bad Girl is.”

“Even now, in episode 7, it remains a story about the foibles of a girl trying to navigate friendship and her crush, and I think that allowing myself to meet the series where it’s at, antics included, makes for a much better viewing experience, even if this is still a solid C+ for me. Now, I still don’t like the camera and some of the leering shots, but I never will. I’m never going to be comfortable with female teenage bodies being sexualized for comedy, even in a romcom.”

“Still, I think now that I’m letting my expectations for what Bad Girl could be go and working with what it is, it’s… perfectly fine. Not necessarily memorable, but I don’t think every anime has to be. After all, if shounen and seinen don’t have to shoot for the stars, why should we expect yuri to be constantly the best thing in creation? It’s okay for sapphic and queer stories to be just okay, and I think that makes Bad Girl actually really good in that regard. While not my favorite, I do hope others are enjoying it. Anime needs more queer stories, and this is certainly an open story about girls loving girls.” Yeah!

DEE: [crosstalk] Good comments. Thanks, Cy.

VRAI: Thank you, Cy! Also—

DEE: I have nothing to add because I’m not watching it, but, yeah, great notes!

VRAI: The only other thing that I’ve picked up about it from Steve’s comments over on Bluesky—she’s an ANN reviewer, you may all know at home, is that it’s really leaning into that puppy girl supremacy. [Chuckles] That’s all I’ve got!

DEE: Well, there we go!

PETER: See, I must say, I do like the premise of Bad Girl, so I did want to check it out. I think it’s very fun. Somebody pretending to be a delinquent just because they think their crush is into that is very funny.

DEE: Oh, it’s a great premise, yeah.

VRAI: [crosstalk] It’s a cute premise.

So, before we get into It’s Complicated, I do want to take a brief detour, because this is definitely where it would go, to talk about Let’s Go Karaoke. This show came out at a slightly weird time, and by the time this podcast goes up, God willing, there will be a review of basically just the first arc because it aired during Otakon, and so I thought we’d try out… we’d play around with the review format. There’s peek behind the curtain with all of that, but I will write up a post on Patreon to tell y’all more about it. The long and short of it is this… I think… Peter, you’re watching this too, right?

PETER: I have watched the first two episodes.

VRAI: Yeah, it’s an inter… because… So, Let’s Go Karaoke was released as a one-volume doujinshi in 2019. Then it got picked up and given a bookstore release. And then I guess there’s been a sequel series that’s happened since, if Wikipedia is to be believed, it also only has one volume. But it might also be ongoing. I’m not sure. It really seems like the first four episodes basically cover what must have been the original doujin and, I think, what happened in the movie, the live-action movie, as well. And the thing about it is that this is about a 40-year-old man and a middle schooler.

DEE: [Startled] AH!!!

VRAI: Yeah…

DEE: Jump scare. I feel like you opened a closet and a skeleton fell out on top of me.

VRAI: [Laughs]

DEE: Okay, keep going. Sorry.

VRAI: No, no. Anyway, I think I kind of like this show. Wait, wait, wait, come back! [Chuckles]

PETER: [crosstalk] Oh, I really like it, too.

DEE: More skeletons!

[Chuckling]

VRAI: Well, because here’s the thing, is the first arc, what must have been the original story, is one of those shows that’s very… it will pepper in the fact that it definitely wants you to ship these two, but it’s not really about that. It’s about, like, what would happen if you stuck these two extremely different types of people together, and what can I spin a thought experiment out about. It’s very that kind of indie creator story, I think. You know what I mean, right?

DEE: Mm-hm!

PETER: Mm-hm. Yeah, like, an unlikely friendship type of deal.

VRAI: Right. So, yeah, it’s like they… You know, the yakuza holds out an umbrella for him and they walk together in the rain in the first episode. And his classmate sees him get a text and he’s like, “Oh, is that your girlfriend?” You know, that kind of stuff. But it doesn’t actually… It’s not actually going anywhere. And first of all, it has an absolutely killer voice cast. Daisuke Ono is playing Kyouji, the yakuza, and Shun Horie is playing Satomi, the middle schooler.

PETER: Doing Kansai accents, too.

VRAI: Uh-huh! Yeah. And it’s about… you know, he’s at a transition point in his life, he’s about to end middle school where choir won’t really be a thing anymore come high school, and his voice is changing. And now I’m thinking again about how there should be a Shonen Note anime.

DEE: I was gonna say, “Oh, I love Shonen Note.”

VRAI: Exactly.

PETER: Yeah, dude, that was so… because, you know, the premise is you think it’s going to be yaoi and it’s like, “Oh, no, my voice is dropping,” and I’m like, “Oh, my God!” I was prepared to scream watching this. So, the fact that I love it so much, I think, is pretty… yeah.

VRAI: It’s got a shockingly subtle touch for dialogue in a way that feels grounded despite the absurdity of the situation and also surprisingly good visual comedic timing, which helps a lot considering that this show desperately needs subtitles for the songs and it does not have them. Like, the songs are so important to this story, it licensed X Japan, Dee!

DEE: Damn!

VRAI: I know! An X Japan song is crucial to the central throughline of this narrative.

DEE: Wow.

VRAI: And it rules. But yeah, so they end it with, like, you know, he realizes something about himself and yadda yadda yadda. We get to the end of the story; nothing has happened. And then, at the end of episode 4—once again, I’m going to spoil some things—episode 4 ends with a time skip.

DEE: Okay…

VRAI: The premise of this is that it’s leading up to the yakuza is doing a karaoke contest for his boss and the person who sucks the most gets subjected to the boss doing hobbyist tattooing on them. And that’s why he’s gone to the local community center and decided that this kid is the best singer, so I’m gonna get him to teach me to sing so that doesn’t happen to me. And so they both get to their respective events, that ends, and then they don’t see each other again until Satomi graduates high school. And it ends with him going off to college, and they cross paths at the airport. The end.

DEE: Yeah. But not the end, so there’s more.

VRAI: Right. Right, right. Well, but the… This is a pretty common tactic in age-gap romances, where it’s like these two characters had an intense but not romantic or sexual interaction when one party was way too young for all this, and then we do a break for them to grow as people so that it’s not like a grooming narrative, and now we have an age gap and an emotional investment, but it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine! I swear to God, it’s fine! And… um… I don’t—

PETER: Well, I think it also maybe kind of pushes back against the shipping by… I think it’s trying to show you that Kyouji is a very charming, affable guy. He’s really treating… what’s the kid’s name again?

VRAI: Satomi.

PETER: Yeah, he’s treating Satomi with kids’ gloves, he’s trying to keep him separate from the business. Whenever he runs into another yakuza guy he’s like, “You gotta be polite to this kid, man. He’s trying to help us out.” But then it also kind of lets you peek in and show that he’s actually kind of the devil, too. Like, the kid finds a severed finger in his glove compartment and shit. So, he is a yakuza guy who does yakuza things like kills a guy with a briefcase. So, I—

VRAI: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, Peter. Peter, he does not just kill a guy with a briefcase. He kills a guy with a briefcase because Satomi comes looking for him in the bad part of town and he shows up in the nick of time to defend his honor from a guy who’s trying to take him… who’s trying to pick him up. This could not be more clearly a romantic trope if it tried!

PETER: Yeah, just, I’m saying… it is showing you that he is a dangerous person despite the fact that he is so polite and charming.

VRAI: Oh, yeah. For sure. I feel—

PETER: Not a nice guy. He should not be spending time around him at all. Run.

VRAI: This is like at the midpoint between the cuddly yakuza thing that I think is hopefully starting to die down and something like Yakuza Fiancé, which is about “What if this girl decided to lock in and go harder than any of these people, and good for her”? [Chuckles] Where this is about, like, “No, this yakuza’s a bad guy and yakuza are bad people. But also, what if he was soft for one person? What if, though?” It’s very classic in that way.

PETER: I caught up to Yakuza Fiancé, and I was like, “I need some more problematic shit just like this,” and I guess a monkey’s paw somewhere curled and we got it. [Chuckles]

VRAI: I mean… I’ll be honest: I’m gonna watch the rest of it.

PETER: Oh, me too. It’s so good.

VRAI: If it becomes a romance from here, I don’t know that I’m super bothered, now that he’s an adult.

PETER: Mm-hm. Wasn’t Kyouji 40? I thought he was like 25.

VRAI: No! He is 40! [Chuckles]

PETER: Oh, my God, he… Okay, alright. Well.

VRAI: The age gap is large, Peter!

PETER: Huge. Yeah, that’s huge. Like 2x.

DEE: [crosstalk] That’s… a lot.

PETER: Yeah. Oh, well.

VRAI: Yeah.

PETER: It’s really good, though.

VRAI: Yeah.

DEE: Okay. I’m gonna… I’m a hard pass on this one. But…

VRAI: Yeah. It’s a… Yeah. So, it’s certainly doing what it is doing, but I guess it has enacted the safeguards that are more likely to make me find an age-gap fiction romance tolerable. Shrug. [Chuckles] Uh… yeah! For more, I will hopefully have that review up by the time this goes.

But we must move on into the Complicated category with… oh, God, now I have to talk some more about me liking problematic gay shows… with There’s No—

DEE: Let’s go!

VRAI: [Chuckles] There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…

DEE: [Saucy] Unless…

VRAI: [Chuckles] So, I want to say I stand behind Chiaki’s three-episode review completely, insofar as the biggest problem with this show continues to be that Mai is basically a cis-swapped version of Geordo from My Next Life as a Villainess, where the show knows that she’s that kind of character that is like, “Oh, this is a haughty, rich person who’s always gotten everything that she wants and always been fawned over romantically, and now that is causing her to be pushy and break boundaries in ways that she shouldn’t in this relationship with somebody she actually likes.” 

And to me… Like, I will say for this, episode 4, following on from episode 3, does at least make this an issue where Mai is… she runs away, she’s like, “I have to cut off all contact with you,” to the point where Renako comes looking for her and like, “No, I didn’t want you to do all of that.” Which, like, on the one hand, I hate stories where a character gets sexually assaulted and then they do the apologizing, but on the other hand, it at least isn’t doing… it’s not doing, you know, “Oh, well, you secret—” Like, you know, Mai isn’t doing any kind of victim-blaming language, which I was sort of braced for because I was reading Rebecca’s review of the manga and it sounds like there is maybe a little bit in that version. 

But this one really doesn’t. Mai is very like, “No, but I hurt you, so I need to go away forever,” which is very accurately teenage, honestly, like the level of overcorrection. And I think what makes it work for me is that the show from the get— And Renako is like, “Well, no. I’ve been into this and I should have told you that beforehand.” And, to me, what makes that meaningfully, contextually different from a “Oh, well, you were enjoying it” defense is that this has always been a show about “This is our weird relationship that we set explicit rules on except when we don’t, because we’re teenagers and we’re bad at this,” and Renako is very specifically… she clearly kind of has a kink for being pushed, but also she’s desperately trying to use these rules, not because she’s not into Mai but because she is holding on to some version of herself as, like, a normal heterosexual. 

And so, when she says, “I broke the rules. We’re supposed to be trying to convince each other, and I didn’t tell you that I kind of liked when you did th—” I don’t know. The fact that Mai is contrite and Renako is couching her apology in these rules that they have established for their relationship made the reconciliation scene work for me.

My problem continuing with Mai that she’s contrite in that scene, but then once she realizes that Renako forgives her, she kind of like… we’ve ended the arc, so she kind of snaps back into being the blonde smug asshole role, and the show never really goes far enough in making her a pathetic wet cat for me to like her. Like, I love a Hime or a Nanami, but Mai’s never really hit that point, even though the second arc is entirely about her childhood friend character, who, speaking of comparisons, is both a softened version of Senjougahara and also kinda like if you cis-swapped Kyoya, who decides that she is going to get back at Mai for going over to her and being like, “Hey, so you’re in love with me, right? I need to know what it’s like to hold somebody that I have absolutely no feelings for.” So, she decides that “I’m gonna date your girlfriend to get back at you.” And these are the things that I love about this show. [Chuckles] Because it’s deranged!

DEE: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it kind of knows it’s problematic, if that makes sense, like it is engaging with that somewhat directly. And, I mean, if you know that’s what you’re doing and everyone going in knows that’s what’s happening, like, yeah, I mean, it sounds like it is at least doing it in an interesting way. So, again, not for me, but I’m not out here shaming people for liking stuff, so…

VRAI: Yeah, well, and it’s also just… it’s kind of fun and interesting to have what’s a pretty straightforward harem show in some ways but it’s yuri. Like, it’s not the first show to do it, certainly, but it’s the first—

DEE: [crosstalk] Yeah. But it’s not super common.

VRAI: Yeah. And it’s also… The other ones I’ve seen are much more fanservice focused, where this one has some sexual scenes but they feel very contextual rather than being like… although, to be fair, there is an “Oh, no, I fell on her boobs” moment. And Renako does have some—

DEE: [crosstalk] Of course. It’s a harem show.

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah. Renako does have some Potato-kun type moments. But I don’t know. I think the direction is so bright and lively that it really pulls me along. And also, I’ve heard that it’s not just a harem but legitimately poly later on, and that is kind of the other thing keeping me hooked. So… yeah!

PETER: Yeah, I think… This may come up later as well, but I think there’s also something to be said for a show that has teenagers being shitty and is self-aware that they’re… It’s like, “This character is not being good, and that’s because teenagers are super messy and do bad stuff quite often.”

DEE: Oh, yeah, I totally agree there’s a place for that. The thing about this one that kind of made me go ugh is that it doesn’t sound like the character necessarily changes after that moment, like there’s no real development there, and that’s usually when I get frustrated with those kinds of storylines. So…

VRAI: Yeah, for sure. And, like, it’s a step up for me from shows that are like… from when this kind of love interest just spontaneously decides to start treating the heroine better because they’re in love now. Like, at least we’re having a real conversation about it and why that’s not okay. But it’s still… I can completely see why people would be frustrated and be like, “No, all this framework doesn’t work for me. I’m still really frustrated and Mai still kinda sucks,” because Mai still does kinda suck. So, yeah. But yeah, so I’m still watching and enjoying that one.

PETER: Also, congrats, Miles, on your first anime credit. Friend of the show.

VRAI: Oh, yeah!

DEE: Friend of the show. Congrats, Miles!

VRAI: [crosstalk] Friend of the show, friend of the show, Miles. Miles Crunchyroll, no longer at Crunchyroll.

DEE: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Alright. Moving on, Tony finished watching all of Takopi’s Original Sin, which is a miniseries. Yeah, Peter, you and I have both read the manga, but neither of us watched the anime, yes?

PETER: Yeah, I didn’t feel like watching the anime after reading the manga, to be perfectly honest.

VRAI: Yeah, fair. So, I will read Tony’s notes, which they so graciously wrote up for us even after having a really terrible day. So… “I’ve often written articles meditating on—and occasionally defending—tragedy porn. My feelings about it are particularly strong when it depicts children who are violently harmed by oppressive systems, and in fact, many of my favorite shows fall into this category, such as Madoka, Vinland Saga, Utena, and Penguindrum. I’m firmly of the belief that to understand the experience of childhood, we must understand one fundamental reality: that to be a child is to be treated not as a human being but as property by adults who often do not have your best interests at heart.” 

“Takopi’s Original Sin stretches my tolerance of this excavation to its absolute limits, depicting how abuse and neglect can break the minds of children with very little in the way of meaningful solutions. I think part of what is frustrating to me is the extent to which the show is dedicated to displaying the broken minds of these children and their cruelty. We watch children kidnap each other, beat each other near to death, lose their minds, cathartically beat our Doraemon stand-in to a pulp, and generally just be completely monstrous. Yes, children can be terrible to each other, but bringing the show to the point where the children are likely having paranoid psychosis episodes, such as Shizuka having delusions that her father’s other children ate her dog, on top of the already existing depictions of suicide, makes the show’s ending feel completely superfluous.” 

“These are children who need help, and bonding over a shared repressed memory of a fallen friend in Takopi does not feel like an adequate ending point for Shizuka and Marina’s story. Survivors can and do support each other, and representation can set the goal of raising awareness of how moving away from savior mentalities and towards mutual aid can help us better actually support survivors without pathologizing them.” 

What makes the ending of Penguindrum so powerful, a series that deals with many similar situations to Takopi, is its acknowledgement of the inadequacy of children’s ability to protect each other in the face of systemic violence and how, despite that inadequacy, these attempts are still worth valuing and cherishing. It refuses to pathologize the poor. Takopi, by contrast, feels at times like it is entirely pathologization. ‘If only these broken children would just understand they have more in common than they have in conflict, then they could protect each other from their broken parents,’ who, by the way, are deadbeat dads, neglectful sex workers, and violent, jealous wives. It’s tiring, and honestly, I came away from the show not really feeling much of a sense that it understood what it was trying to say, other than ‘Shit sucks, but survivors can band together if they just get over their bullshit.’ I mean, I guess?”

DEE: Another great writeup. Thank you, Tony.

PETER: I think that that really encapsulates it, yeah. I felt like… The ending almost felt like an apology for writing the rest of the story, and it kinda just takes them out of the situation via narrative device, so it’s really like, “I guess it would be better if those bad things didn’t happen to them in the first place,” which is not much of an argument to make. Yeah, it’s not like they resolved any of the issues; they just kind of were no longer an issue.

VRAI: My feeling walking away from the manga was definitely that I think its heart is in the right place insofar as it wants to say, “Hey! Hey, child abuse is a problem! And it’s bad, and these kids deserve better!” But it goes so hard in the beginning to depicting the extremities of child abuse in such graphic detail, and then its ending is so woefully inadequate in its niceties and lack of complexity of how hard getting better is. Just like “Boop!” button, and then they were happy. And I’m like, “You did not earn this.”

PETER: Yep. Yep.

[A few seconds of silence]

PETER: Yep.

DEE: Noted, good to know.

VRAI: So that’s that!

[Chuckling]

DEE: Thanks everyone for that.

PETER: Mm-hm.

VRAI: [Chuckles] Alright, speaking of grimdark and edgy things, Peter, Tony dropped Gachiakuta but you’re still watching it. How’s it going?

PETER: [They] dropped it. Why?

VRAI: They dropped it. [Chuckles] They dropped it!

PETER: I don’t think— I don’t think— I think Gachiakuta has, like, a grimy-type setting, but it’s more of a Dorohedoro in that it’s about a bunch of lovable psychopaths in a kind of dark setting with anticapitalist vibes. So, I think that is maybe a better comparison to make for people who are potentially interested, because its trajectory… I mean, there’s definitely kind of this revenge story and it gets into some dark stuff, but I don’t really think it ever really stays there, and we haven’t gotten around to the point of the narrative (and I’m completely caught up on the manga) to where it’s like Rudo’s going to take down the system and burn all the rich people to death up in their little safety planet away from the garbage dump that the rest of us are forced to live in. Which, again, is very Dorohedoro.

VRAI: Yeah, actually, I have a coworker at my day job who started watching it specifically because she likes Dorohedoro—which I got her to watch and I feel very happy about that.

DEE: Nice.

PETER: [crosstalk] Nice. Good, deep… I have liked it more and more the more I’ve read about it—er, [the more] I read it itself. I think the characters are really charming, and I feel like the women in particular… both are very stylish, as is the case with Semiu, and have a lot of agency in the narrative. I don’t want to quite say it’s like Black Clover, where it’s kinda like the main character is sort of just doing the main hero thing while it sort of spends more time on other characters’ developments, but I think there is an element of that. 

Like, I think maybe one of the most interesting characters in the main group is Riyo, who is the girl with the magic scissors, because she’s obviously got something… she is obviously fucked up. Like, something’s going on with her, and I think the story is kind of building up to a big narrative reveal with her since she has kind of ostensibly agreed to the team’s no-killing policy, but I don’t think she is too interested in carrying it out so long as nobody catches her doing something bad—to, you know, a villain, not just… She’s not like a serial killer or anything. And I think it’s been— I didn’t notice this in the manga, but it’s about to introduce a nonbinary character in the anime who practices, like, graffiti magic.

VRAI: Good for them.

PETER: Since I’m working on the series, I’ve heard some… Like, I’ve finished the first 12 episodes already. So, I’ve heard… The voice casting kind of clued me in [to] what I didn’t notice in the manga—

VRAI: Was it Romi Pak? [Chuckles]

PETER: I don’t know if it’s been announced yet, but I actually…

VRAI: Okay, fair. Forget I asked.

PETER: [crosstalk] Even if it was, I couldn’t tell you. I can’t— I just… I was like, “Wait, are they going for kinda, like, a nonbinary—like not obviously male or female—type voice?” And then I checked the wiki and it turned out that, yeah, they had an established gender for that character, which is cool. I like that character a lot.

VRAI: I love to see the legacy of my wonderful baby Crona.

PETER: Mm-hm. The character is a wonderful little piece of shit. And their laugh in the manga is “Nyuk nyuk nyuk.” So…

DEE: Let’s go. [Chuckles] Love a nyuk-nyuk.

PETER: [Chuckles] Yeah, I really like that character.

VRAI: Oh, that’s good!

PETER: [crosstalk] I think there are— You know, the characters are really zany. Some of the action set pieces later on are really amazing. And I think just the cast is pretty diverse and kind of leaning into a lot of alternative cultural and fashion spaces. Obviously, they’ve got a whole city of people who make graffiti. Most recently, they’ve introduced this character who’s kind of like a… oh, my God, I forgot… kind of a… is a woman but has sort of a drag queen costume-changey aesthetic, very coded in that direction. So, I just think there are a lot of neat things about Gachiakuta.

DEE: [Chuckles] You just think it’s neat.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

PETER: Yeah. It has a bunch of really fun stuff, so… And I would describe my experience with it as fun rather than, like, engaging with a grimdark story, like what would be maybe a more accurate corollary to what people have been… Have there been comparisons between Gachiakuta and something else? Maybe [there] have been people saying it’s more Tokyo Ghoul or Berserk. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think it’s goofy and very stylized. So, I think, yeah, Dorohedoro, if you enjoyed that one, I think you will like Gachiakuta.

VRAI: Rock on. Alright.

DEE: [crosstalk] Mm-hm. I’m interested in it. It’s just… It’s just committing to another longrunning series that is not finished, you know? So, I’m staring at it. It could make its way onto my watch list at some point. We’ll see.

PETER: Yeah, I know. And you’ll promise you’d read Black Clover when it was done, too, so I know you’ve got that coming up. Yeah, so…

VRAI: Any day now.

DEE: [crosstalk] Is Black Clover finished?

PETER: It’s getting there. It’s getting there, for sure.

DEE: Alright, alright. Well, you let me know when it wraps, and I’ll reup my Shonen Jump sub.

PETER: I’ll be there!

DEE: We’ll make it happen. Peter will show up at my—Peter will pay for my subscription.

PETER: Mm-hm.

VRAI: [Laughs]

PETER: I’ll do it, yeah, if that’s what it takes.

DEE: Do it! “How’s volume 1 going, Dee? Hey, Dee, how’s volume 1?”

PETER: Mm-hm. It’s quicker.

DEE: “Are you on volume 2 yet?”

PETER: Don’t you worry. [Obscured by laughter]

DEE: Alright, I will prepare myself. It’ll be great.

PETER: [crosstalk] Nice. I got it recorded.

VRAI: [Struggling not to laugh] I have to—I have to move us on!

[Laughter]

DEE: Yeah, it is—I did… I did. Yeah, it’s—Oh, man, it is recorded. So, yeah, I’ve committed to that. Let’s do it. Alright, I’m down.

VRAI: [Chuckles] Oh, my God!

DEE: Okay. Uh, next on the list.

VRAI: [crosstalk] City the Animation!

DEE: City the Animation! Yeah.

VRAI: Nichijou’s ascendant descendant.

DEE: Yeah, City’s great. You know, I feel like I can get through this one quick. It is a really well-done comedy. It is like a— I mean, it is KyoAni and… oh, I’m gonna blank on the writer’s name, Keiichi Arawi, both more experienced than they were when they did Nichijou. Nichijou’s one that I ended up really liking, but I don’t think I would have finished it if I hadn’t been watching it with a friend. It took me about the midway point to really click with it. 

And I think the issue with Nichijou early on is it does just kind of feel like a bunch of disparate bits that don’t really connect, and if a bit is weak, then it makes it hard to get back into it when it moves over to some characters or some jokes that you’re more into. City does a much better job, from the jump, of establishing that these… Like, it is a sequence of bits, but there’s a lot of interlocking storytelling going where it all takes place within this one city and a lot of it on this one street, and so the way characters kind of weave in and out of each other’s lives… And then a joke from an early episode will get explained of how that happened in a later episode when you meet, like, a different character. I think it was like episode 5 or 6, is like honest-to-God art. They tell multiple stories simultaneously on screen with split-screen frames, and the way it all kind of culminates together with this rich lady in town throwing a big party basically… My friend and I were kind of gobsmacked that we were like, “That was incredible.”

So, I mean, it is first and foremost a comedy. Thankfully— The first episode doesn’t start off on a great foot because it’s got some slightly mean-spirited jokes about a boy crossdressing because he’s told that it is his lucky item for the day and he wants good luck. It doesn’t do that anymore. It keeps kind of circling back to this trio of college girls. Which I also appreciate that the story has more adult characters, characters across a range. Nichijou was much more focused on high schoolers, and I thought it, overall, by the end of it, did a good job with them. It hits a lot of the things that Nichijou did well in terms of highlighting the absurdity of the everyday and the way a minor frustration might feel inside your head and kind of poking fun at that but also validating it. I wrote an article about Nichijou where I talked about this on AniFem, so you can go read that, too. It’s great. I’m really enjoying it. I’m watching it with the same friend I watched Nichijou with, and we are having a great time every week. So, yeah, it’s really well done. And animation-wise, it’s gorgeous because it’s KyoAni. So, yeah.

VRAI: Yeah, I am in fact the person who fell off of Nichijou because I really like the schoolgirl bits but the robot bits were kind of a slog.

DEE: Yeah. I mean, that’s… Yeah.

VRAI: So, you and Tony speaking so rapturously about City is really tugging on me. Maybe I’ll get around to it. It seems real good. Mm-hm.

PETER: Everybody on Bluesky was just talking about how episode 6 was like a landmark in animation history, too, so…

DEE: Yeah. [Chuckles] It was… Yeah, it was that… Yeah. It’s definitely worth your time, I would say. And even… like, there’s a few… Like, I mean, you know, it’s comedy. There’s a few weaker bits, but there’s nothing that’s absolutely unwatchable, so that’s also really nice. It doesn’t have, like, that one super shitty character like a lot of comedies do. So, yeah, good show.

PETER: [crosstalk] The Zenitsu.

VRAI: Alright. Let us move on, then, Betrothed to My Sister’s Ex, which Alex very kindly checked in on for us: “I mentioned in the check-in that this show was trying to balance the sweet escapist tone of its romance and the darker elements of the characters’ lives and world. Mostly, it manages this and settles into a pattern. People are over-the-top rude or cruel to Marie. Those people get admonished or comically beaten up, and Kyros gallantly reaffirms Marie’s good qualities while Marie tries to believe him. She’s growing a cute little found family of eccentric servants, and it’s all pretty much the same case of ‘It’s not that deep but it’s nice’ that we talked about in the premiere review and elsewhere.” 

“Later episodes put this balance on a real tightrope, and I’m fascinated and baffled to see where the show is going. Episode 7 is the wildest example, swinging between scenes of Marie and Kyros on a date and scenes of the castle servants going detective mode and investigating the possibility that Marie’s titular sister, Anastasia, isn’t actually dead and there’s been some sort of sinister cover up. The servants sneak into Marie’s family’s manor and find a creepy lifelike doll of Anastasia, which apparently has her real hair and is wearing her clothes from the night she died. It’s grim! It’s weird! It’s such a departure from the twee sweetness and simplicity of some of the other parts of the show, I really didn’t see it coming! So, good job for executing an unexpected twist, I guess! The switch in tones… well, let’s just say it’s keeping me on my toes. I can only assume we’re heading for a reveal that Anastasia is alive and in disguise somewhere, which will be played for maximum drama.”

“Now that Marie is finally gaining some confidence and an identity outside of her family, not to mention falling in love with her fiancé, I have my fingers crossed that this gives Anastasia more character and autonomy and doesn’t just dissolve into a love triangle.” Editor note: I’m still holding on to the dream that she’s living her best life as a lesbian, making those suits for dashing women. Ahem. Returning to the statements, “But I guess we’ll have to wait and see. And after this sudden dive into macabre twists, I kind of don’t feel like I can make predictions.”

DEE: Well, at least it’s not boring.

VRAI: It’s true! This is a show that’s really… I feel like I keep saying over and over, “This isn’t for me, but good for it. Good for it doing what it’s doing.”

DEE: Mm-hm. Yeah, that one’s also on my shortlist, so we’ll see how it shakes out and maybe I’ll check that one out, too.

VRAI: Yeah. Alright, let’s move up to the top of the list, then, with a show that I’ll be really surprised if we don’t end up doing an entire podcast just on it. The Summer Hikaru Died was made for me. It was made for me. This is my hole.

DEE: I think it was also made for Tony. I think they are also really, really into this one.

VRAI: Good God, it’s so good. It’s just the level of small-town horror anxiety and, like, closeted anxiety, and Yoshiki is such a mess. I can’t remember who on Bluesky was describing the most recent episode as taking your dog out for a really nice walk before you have them put down!

DEE: Before they get Old Yellered? Oh, no!

VRAI: Yeah!

DEE: It was basically! Yeah!

VRAI: Yeah! [Chuckles] It’s a surprisingly funny show while also being incredibly dark and serious in places and genuinely kind of spooky. Like, I’m pretty much inured to all passive horror experiences. (Video games still make me jumpy.) But yeah, it got a rise out of me in a couple of places in that most recent episode! It’s really, really beautifully made.

DEE: Yeah, it’s really well put together. There are definitely moments in the early episodes… because I watched the first four all in one sit-down. And there were moments in the first episode where I was like, “Oh! Oh, we’ve got a director on this one that’s making art.” It’s a very thoughtful adaptation in terms of… there’s clearly a lot of thought into, like, camera angles and different scenes and using different imagery to convey character moods and what’s going on. And, yeah, it’s a very effective series, for sure.

VRAI: Yeah, well, and the manga’s… I think the anime has probably at least caught up to, if not outstripped, the manga at this point because it’s a lot more slow-paced and it’s ongoing, but from what I understand, Mokumokuren is quite involved in the anime production, so this might just be a complete adaptation in its own right, which would be cool, sorta kinda like what we got with Kowloon last season. Yeah, I was at Otakon, and I talked about this more in a bonus podcast (patreon.com/animefeminist), but I got to go to a panel at Otakon with Hikaru’s voice actor there, and there were some prerecorded messages from the director and Yoshiki’s voice actor and some of the rest of the staff. And just the amount of love and care that just oozes from everything that people working on the show have said about it is really touching and beautiful to me. Like, I’m feeling feelings.

DEE: Yeah, I mean, you can totally tell. Again, it’s very well put together.

VRAI: Mm-hm. Yeah, and I think it’s… it’s thoughtful. It has something to say about place and time and…

DEE: [crosstalk] Small-town queerness? Yeah.

VRAI: Yeah. Well, and also, it’s like my favorite type of ghost story, which is ones where at a certain point a land is just fucked because of the amount of generational trauma that has seeped into it, like The Devil’s Backbone and stuff. It’s a type of ghost story that I enjoy. I said it before and I will say it again: literally the only reason I can see not to watch this show is if you have extreme photosensitivity issues, because it does use some strobing light effects, or if horror is an absolute no-go, ever, for you. Other than that, you should be watching this show.

DEE: Yeah, I’m kind of with— I’m being cagey in my comments because this one to me is really going to depend on how it ends. So, I think we should do a… I don’t know if I’ll be on it, but I do think a retrospective on this one… I think there’s enough to chew on that that would be worth it. So, I’m kind of okay with letting this be a teaser and be like, “Yeah, we’ll probably have a full episode on this later.” So…

VRAI: Mm-hm. Rock on. Alright, that leaves us with just one title left, then, which is See You Tomorrow at the Food Court.

PETER: What a weird place to end after all that.

VRAI: Anyway, See You Tomorrow at the Food Court. It seems perfectly nice. Lightly, lightly subversive in that it’s talking about, like, girls and social roles, but mostly they’re just shooting the shit. Is it still doing that?

PETER: Yeah, it’s actually over. It was only six episodes. So, that’s it.

VRAI: For real?

PETER: Yep. So, it’s finished. I think, you know, it was… uh, nice. I do think, as I mentioned earlier—it was a bit of foreshadowing—I think the girls do… they are shitty pretty frequently, especially one of them, but I think it is with the awareness that, you know, teenagers are messy, and in this case, she’s kind of conceited, which is something that her friend kind of accepts about her and thinks makes her kind of entertaining whereas most people kind of hide that aspect of themselves. So, they do get judgmental about other people’s appearances sometimes. 

Maybe the standout bad thing I think I really remember it doing, in addition to that weird Indian guy face thing they did—I think that was all the way in the first episode—they have a scene where (is it Yamamoto?) she’s talking about how a boy drove by on a bicycle and grabbed her chest. And most of the discussion seemed to be around her questioning her femininity because she didn’t think that the reaction noise she made was… she thought she’d sounded too masculine when she basically screamed out in surprise that this guy grabbed her chest. And then it just kind of placed— I think the joke is that… uh, Wada, Wada, yeah. I think it makes a valiant attempt to bring it back where Wada is just like, “Oh, well, I’m way more masculine than you, so that doesn’t matter.” And then she ends up accidentally getting splashed with cold water and saying “Eek,” which is kind of the noise that Yamamoto had thought would have been more appropriate for her to make if somebody was sexually assaulting her, I guess?

VRAI: [amused] Alright!

PETER: [crosstalk] So, that joke felt a bit strange, not too good just, you know, textually. But most of it is them kind of, you know, just being messy. Kinda… I don’t know if I want to make the comparison to Galko, given, you know, unfortunate circumstances.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Oh, grim.

DEE: Yeah.

VRAI: I was gonna say it sounds like it… actually, no, it doesn’t sound like it goes as hard as Asobi Asobase, but that show still has the best boob joke in all of anime, so I did think about it.

PETER: Oh, I think, yeah, that is a good vibe. I think Wada is a very Asobi Asobase–type character. It’s just kind of like she mixes a lot of the derangements of some of the girls in that one, whereas Yamamoto is more of a straight man to all of her derangements. And I think it kind of frames it in a nice way where Wada is kinda being problematic right now and textually problematic and Yamamoto often tries to kind of talk her down or just distract her. So, that’s part of the charm, too. But overall, it’s kind of just like it was a fun six episodes. So, nothing groundbreaking.

VRAI: You know what? More shows should just end when they’re done.

PETER: Yeah, I think they already kind of were stretching this one out. And I don’t think it’s a 4-koma, but it definitely seemed like kind of a… especially, you know, where the conceit of the show is they’re just hanging out and chatting like Lucky Star or something like that, 12 episodes times 24 minutes can be a lot for that kind of format. So, I think this was maybe a good choice, yeah.

VRAI: Are there any comments that we didn’t get around to making on any of the shows that have aired so far, from either of you?

PETER: I suppose I should say that I think Mikadono Sisters is extremely good and I love it. Is anybody else watching it?

DEE: Nah.

VRAI: No! Peter, of course I am not!

PETER: I think, for one, the production’s really great. And it is kind of like a Quintuplets-type setup, where it’s like the one guy ends up living… he doesn’t really live with them in Quintuplets, but he ends up living with these three sisters. And I just think it has taken what would… you’d kind of look at the premise and go, “Oh, God.” But I think it’s been really charming. The main character, the reason he lives with them is because his mom died, and she was this famous frickin’ actress, and so everybody assumes he’s a prodigy like her but he’s absolutely not, except you do see a little bit peeking through. He’s really able to charm people. But he doesn’t really realize his own power level when it comes to that. 

And the whole reason he was taken in by their dad, it sounds like, is because he assumes that the son is as talented as his mom, so he kind of is trying to put that around his own daughters and kind of steal some prestige as well. The dad sucks. And all three sisters are super prodigies in different areas of the school. And kind of the whole conceit is that the girls have sort of been isolated by their own talent. One of them is trying to become a Takarazuka-style actress, one of them is a shogi master, and one of them is the best martial artist in the school. 

They have trouble making friends and even associating with one another since they’re all so deep in their own club activities. They never eat meals together. And the main character (is it Yuji?) … his mom was always so busy that he didn’t have a very good relationship with her, and when she was dying, she expressed to him a lot of regret that they weren’t able to do things like have dinner together. She didn’t feel like she’d been a good mother. (It’s Yu.) So, he sees that they have self-isolated or been isolated by their talents and is really trying to bring them together. He cooks meals so that they can eat together. He really wants them to be a family and enjoy moments. He finds an old picture of them at a festival together and finds out that they all have events in the same city and kind of engineers so that they can go back to the festival and experience it together. So, he’s just really sweet. He is accidentally very charming and it flusters them a lot just because… just by accident, which, you know, that’s kind of playing into the jokes…

VRAI: Because it’s a harem show. [Chuckles]

PETER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he genuinely… he is a good boy, and I think all the girls are kind of really messy in their own way. They’re not perfect. Because of their talents, they’re kind of gremlins in their own right and are kind of weirded out by him at times but also are kind of seeing the fact that he is… Like, they appreciate the fact that he’s actually been taking steps to help them. Like, they end up eating dinner together and they realize they haven’t eaten dinner together in a long time and are appreciating each other as sisters more because of his actions and are coming closer together as a family. So, I just think everything it’s been doing has been really good.

Also, the dad, I think, pressured the Takarazuka-style one… she’s like, “If you want to be a serious actor, you have to take on female roles as well.” So, they have an arc where she goes on a date with Yu to try to act more feminine and wears a wig and a dress and completely fucks up the whole thing, cannot stop acting like a prince, holds his hand to make sure he doesn’t trip when he’s going down the stairs. She’s, like, trying to carry stuff for him. They go to a Waterworld-type deal and the dolphin’s gonna splash him and she protects him from the water. And then at the end of the date… They had accidentally kissed earlier, because, you know, harem-style thing.

VRAI: Harem. [Chuckles]

PETER: Yeah, he fell, got a bloody nose, and then she fell on top of him, their lips touched, and he’s like, “Man, my first kiss sure tasted just like blood.” And he comes to her later, just going like, “I would really like if we could forget about that. I’m so sorry.” And she kinda says, like, “You know, that was kind of my first kiss, so I don’t really want to forget about it, but also, this female thing really isn’t doing it for me,” and rips the wig off and goes, “I’m back to being a prince now, baby!” And that’s how that one ended. So, it’s like… It does not, on the approach, seem like it would be such a good show, but I’m just completely charmed by it. I think all the main characters are great, really fun, and it hasn’t tripped yet, at least that I’ve seen.

DEE: Yeah, it’s nice to see a harem show doing something charming with the premise and not just being skeevy. You know?

PETER: Yeah, I’m not quite sure he’s even gonna end up with any of them, really. It doesn’t seem to really… I don’t know if it’s going on that trajectory. It’s really fun.

VRAI: Listen, people… Straight people also deserve to have a nice time sometimes.

[Chuckling]

PETER: True. [Chuckles]

VRAI: No, no, I’m glad it’s a not-shitty harem show. That’s nice. I’m glad it’s fun.

PETER: Yeah, I’m very surprised because… Yeah, very surprised.

VRAI: Alright. Well, I would say that about does it for us, folks. If we missed talking about your favorite show, please do share it in a comment below. Like we said, there’s a lot of anime and only so much time, but we love that folks help each other find shows that they might like or give them a heads-up on things they might need to know. That’s one of my favorite things about this community.

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