#qfi

Hoo boy, this one is complicated.

Okay, so this one is definitely not gonna be “quick” (and I’m thinking of renaming this column in the future as I’ve had a lot more to say lately), so if it’s tl;dr, I completely understand. This show is not gonna sit well with everyone who doesn’t go into it with full context, and that involves a really heavy introduction.

I’ll start with something you’re probably all familiar with, the concept of “moe”. An exact definition has never really existed, but in recent years the term has essentially come to mean something cute that should be protected. It isn’t inherently sexual but can become so depending on the person experiencing it, and quite often the target of this concept is a young girl, since they’re depicted fairly often in anime in normal circumstances (see Kanna from Maid Dragon, Tsumugi from Sweetness & Lightning, etc.)

Last year, we saw the airing of a show by the name of Angel’s 3Piece!, which spent its first episode setting up a charming plot about a music producer who gets approached by an elementary-aged band of girls wanting his help producing a song for them, until the final minute of the episode where it takes a heavy swerve from “playful innocence” to overtly sexualizing six year old girls by having them offer their bodies to the protagonist in exchange for his help. The important thing to keep in mind here was the framing of this moment. It might have been a little uncomfortable but ultimately salvageable if it had been played as a joke, but instead, it crosses the line by being played completely seriously. Even if the protagonist refuses (which I don’t know the answer to, because there was no way I was going back to find out), the tone has been irreversibly set as a show that is absolutely going to pander to men who are explicitly attracted to little girls, and there is no possible way to change that.

The other problem was perhaps a little more clear to people who don’t overanalyze things the way that I do, and that’s context. In this scene, the protagonist is not really active in the crucial moment. All on their own, these three actual children have decided (somehow) that offering sex with no prompting whatsoever is the best way to get what they want. Rather than the protagonist sexualizing these girls, it’s themselves, followed by the camera (very deliberately, just so we know this is meant to be taken seriously) and by extension the viewer.

This is sort of an inversion or deconstruction of moe, but since the project pretty clearly had no intention of following through on that idea (which is fine, we got Made in Abyss to do that pretty thoroughly), I washed my hands of it, called it a waste of time, and gave it a 1/10.

Now, finally, let’s talk about Happy Sugar Life.

Over this pretty excellent slow burn of a premiere, we learn a few things, and this one I have to spoil in order to talk about, but lucky for me the dark turn is clearly going to happen from the start, so I feel I can discuss in-depth what’s happening.

We have our protagonist, Satou, who looks like a high-schooler (and is the correct age) but we don’t see her in school, only ever at home or at work (a maid cafe), despite the fact that she almost always is seen wearing what looks like a school uniform. She rejects a boy’s advances (who then immediately insults and objectifies her to his friends, not that she seems to care at all), and tells him her heart belongs to someone else. We very quickly learn whom - a girl named Shio, who looks to be about half her age.

Woah. Slam on the brakes, because if you don’t really get it, this is gonna instantly make you never wanna touch this one again, like how I feel about 3Piece.

We see the two of them interact a lot in this episode, but there are important things to take note of, the first being that at no point in this premiere does it directly paint Satou as a good person who is making good decisions. From the very beginning, we see the creeping shadow of coldness in her heart that only dissipates when she is around Shio, and this girl is pretty much the only thing she thinks about, ever. This is framed correctly as a red flag in-universe.

The second thing is that we don’t see Satou sexualizing Shio, at all. (There is a scene of them in the bath together, but this is a much more common thing for families to do together in Japan to begin with than it is in the States.) Indeed, her entire outlook on love seems to paint it as almost completely nonsexual. She isn’t innocent by a long shot, but more along the lines of a complete separation of the ideas of love and sex where the two never, ever mix.

My point boils down to the fact that this is one of the most intentional deconstructions of moe I have ever seen.

Because make no mistake, this is indeed what she’s feeling for Shio, with the caveat that it’s being projected onto a real girl and not an anime waifu, and that she has taken things way, way too far. We never ever see Shio leave the apartment they share, and at the end of the episode, we see why: Satou has kidnapped her from her parents.

Just that one in-universe justification for this story premise tells me that what we’re seeing is indeed supposed to be a poor situation, despite the apparent bliss of the two involved people. I assume we’ll find out why Shio is so attached to her kidnapper, what her parents are like, and why Satou decided to do this in the first place, but the other important justification is one you might not even think about until the end of the episode - if Satou is so desperate for money so she can take care of Shio, how does she afford their nice apartment?

At some point in the recent past, she murdered the owners and chopped them up to fit in trash bags, Dahmer-style.

What a strange show.

It's an American mob story, something we haven't seen in a few years, but unlike 91 Days, this one takes place in the modern day (having been updated from its original setting in the eighties) though they do seem to share the trait of having two protagonists. Time will tell if they subtextually fall for each other.

I liked this one, but it left me with a few curiosities, the first being why the show is paced this way. It's almost too fast to keep up with, reminding me of the Baz Luhrmann Great Gatsby movie, where because nothing ever gets a moment to land, we don't get a sense of gravity for almost anything that happens. Banana Fish is based upon a 19-volume manga, and based on this first episode, it almost looks like they're gonna try and adapt the whole thing in just 22 episodes (being a Noitamina show), so if by episode 3 this becomes exhausting to watch, I'm probably just not going to bother.

And it's a shame, because the other curiosity is the director for the project - one of the first things I noticed were the striking camera angles that immediately made me want to know who was helming this, and surprise, it's Hiroko Utsumi, who apparently jumped from Kyoto Animation just for this opportunity. This baffles the hell out of me, considering she was the director of Free! and its sequel, though not the films, so she may have been off the franchise for a while. Still, it's a shame to lose her for the third season.

Banana Fish looks like a modern Mappa show usually does; okay character designs behind great color composition and stylized well enough that you don't notice the choppier animation. Beyond the already-mentioned camera instinct, I don't have much to say on the production end.

One last strange thing about this adaptation, though, is some of the language used. I understand the story was written in the eighties, but hearing or seeing any modern work use the word "fag" as a serious insult is just so cringy these days, and not because I myself am a gay man. Terrible writing in shows like Glee have just completely robbed the word of meaning by acting like kids still say it constantly, when in most of America, the only time it gets thrown around is by actual gay kids making jokes about themselves. Amazon's translators haven't really been known for nuance, but this seems like something that should have been changed by the production team, and shouldn't have gotten put in the show to begin with. Just sayin'.

I waited on this one, because it was already getting positive buzz.

But honestly, it was very good, with the most imaginative representation of the body I've ever seen, and hilarious ideas and biology jokes that sold me on the concept. I really don't have much to say that others haven't already - the platelets are cute, White Blood Cell is awesome, really, this was a lot to pack into a premiere.

Really interesting for a mobage production.

To clarify, the studio behind this (Happy Elements) makes mobages, but this isn't directly adapted from any of their projects, though it certainly watches like a dating sim show, albeit one with a refreshingly small pool of suitors. It reminds me a lot of Code:Realize, though it's already at least more visually interesting, and the fine details of the inherited-ancestral-magic setup have some originality to them.

The protagonist has a go-getter attitude you don't often see in shows in this genre (at least not in female leads), and I appreciate how immediately different the three men she meets are, as well as the fact that rather than swooning and declaring our hero the chosen one, they actively try and keep her away from the danger, even if the audience knows this won't be a long-lived idea.

It’s like never finding out that Recovery of an MMO Junkie was directed by an actual Nazi!

At this point, I think I might have to admit that I just have a bias towards shows about adult characters. Maybe I’ll write an op-ed about it sometime, but for now, we have a pretty impressive one on our hands right now.

I’m loving the concept of finding brethren at your workplace and having people come out of their shells. In a country like Japan where individuality is usually frowned upon, there’s something appealing about the idea of the few people with unusual interests at this company finding each other and becoming friends, even if that’s not quite the point of the show. We basically have the usual setup of a girl and her childhood friend whom she’s definitely going to end up with, but I love the energy that goes into this one, because the OP alone is a boatload of fun. The characters are all fun and relatable, and we’ve got clear motivations from the beginning, which is always a plus.

My only negative is that the animation is a little choppy, but in this case I think it’s really a case of the studio choosing a good project for their resource level, unlike the studio behind Golden Kamuy, because the polish elsewhere is pretty evident.

If you've already played the game, you probably don't need to watch this.

Based on this first episode, it looks like what we're gonna get here is pretty much what we got from P4tA, a utilitarian, condensed version of a story meant to be told over a lot more than 9 hours, made more boring by the change from Production I.G. (who made the cutscenes from the game) to A-1 Pictures, where the most complimentary thing I have to say is that they didn't homogenize the game's art style.

If you weren't a fan before, it won't win you over, but it's still pretty fun.

We continue the concept of "Magical girls, except gay" but with a reboot and an all-new (yet fairly familiar) cast. It makes for a pretty good place to start if you're not familiar with the franchise, but there are plenty of references to the previous seasons for returning fans, even though we're essentially starting today fresh.

I've seen only the first episode so far, but I have some thoughts on this one, because it grabs me in a similar way to Made in Abyss, beyond just the artwork.

I love that this episode doesn't concern itself with telling us the full story of how the world ended and I hope that stays consistent; this show would be miles less interesting without the wonderful air of mystery about it. It also demonstrates excellent uses of "show, don't tell" in such uses as showing us that Chi is afraid of heights, or Yuuri's demonstration of the concept of war over food. I like that we don't get any sort of internal monologue, the show uses its visuals to tell most of the narrative.