Hi, all. This post should be significantly shorter than the previous check-in, mostly because I’m just cleaning up a few episodes of shows that hadn’t had second episodes at the time I wrote the first post (or which I cut for time and my own sanity). If you’re a new reader, it might surprise you to know that I do actually like to write things other than episode reviews! Yet, I find it helpful to go through the process even if writing about it isn’t as interesting as it could be (though maybe some folks out there find it interesting to read).
I’ll mention this again – these recaps won’t be a weekly feature of the blog, but if there’s an interesting episode of anything in particular in the coming weeks I might take time to write in more detail about that episode specifically.
Click the links below to navigate to each series:
Cells at Work!! ep. 1-2
EX-ARM ep. 2
Kemono Jihen ep. 2
Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation ep. 2
Scar on the Praeter ep. 2
Wave!! -Let’s Go Surfing!!- ep. 2
Wonder Egg Priority ep. 2
Cells at Work!! ep. 1-2
Summary: The inner workings of the human body generally run like a well-oiled machine, but when the host body bumps its head, all of our familiar cells are thrown into disarray. Even though the epidermis hasn’t been breached, a lot of red blood cells, including our familiar heroine, are left to float around in space inside the contusion. The platelets arrive to deal with the problem, but one little platelet wonders if she can manage to help rather than hinder her comrades. White Blood Cell finds himself getting involved in the situation.
Later, B Cell and Memory Cell find themselves faced with a sudden invasion of disease cells. Memory Cell believes he’s been sent visions of the future, when in fact he’s just been recalling a time in the past where the body faced a similar foe. White Blood Cell later finds himself called to the intestines, where he wanders into a hostage situation perpetrated by a group of campylobacter. It takes some trickery to free the hostage and send the hostile bacteria packing.
Thoughts: After the real downer that Cells at Work! Code Black turned out to be (no worries, I’m not planning to drop it, it’s just very bleak), it was nice to return to the workings of a healthy body with the second season of the original Cells at Work! anime. How did the show know that I really needed some cuteness? I loved the hapless little platelet and her quest to better herself.
The second episode provided some unwelcome-but-comical flashbacks to my own experience with campylobacter about a decade ago. It was literally the worst bout of food poisoning I’ve ever had in my life, though I was much better off than a friend of mine who got it from the same source and had to haul his butt off to the first day of nursing school the next day or else lose his place in his classes. The first thing I was able to eat and keep down was canned cheese on saltine crackers, and they were the most delicious thing I had ever tasted (or so I felt at the time). Good times! Anyway, campylobacter is evil and the specimens in this episode got exactly what they deserved.
This series continues to be entertaining and educational, which was really all I was hoping for – more of the same.
Content Warnings: As usual, there are warnings for comical/cartoon violence with some blood/gore, bacteria/viruses getting killed, etc. You, like I, may have specific adverse emotional reactions to the material if you have a personal relation to a particular illness or ailment that’s portrayed.
EX-ARM ep. 2
Summary: A rash of suicide bombings have been taking place in the city, and the perpetrators are traced back to a cult which promises its followers passage into heaven for doing the leaders’ bidding. The ability of the cultists to turn their bodies into bombs is the result of another EX-ARM, one of the many reasons law enforcement has a special task force to collect and put them out of commission. This unfortunately includes Akira in his current state, though his abilities as a brain in a case afford him an in to help with the current investigation. He connects with surveillance cameras around the city to help locate the bombers, which can be identified by their heat signature. This is also how the EX-ARM counter division identifies the priest at the center of the operation. Though he attempts to escape via helicopter, Alma (with Akira helping out via her body), manages to put a stop to it.
Thoughts: It’s extremely tempting to me just to dunk on this series and be done with it, but when my husband caught me in the middle of watching the second episode, sighed, and asked me “are you seriously watching more of this?” I told him that it was like watching an explosion occur in slow-motion; you know the end result’s not going to be good but as the sparks start to fly it’s so difficult to look away from the carnage.
This episode does a bit of world-building, suggesting that the events of 2020 (no, not the actual events we recently suffered through, the in-story events of the anime that left Tokyo in shambles) left a lot of folks in poverty and many children without parents, making them vulnerable to the empty promises of con-men offering bottled salvation. The social consequences of disasters are often good fodder for speculative fiction, since human beings don’t and often can’t act logically in the aftermath of traumatic events. The power-hungry find power vacuums, and the powerless fall in line.
Instead, we’re distracted from all this by the animation again, which really just continues marching along to the beat of its own drummer. A “kiss” between the two female leads became a meme this week, since compared to its manga counterpart it appeared to be censored (see the main image of this post if you’re somehow not familiar with what I mean). I’m part of the contingent that believes it wasn’t hidden or “censored” for reasons of being too lewd for TV (I mean, considering some of the anime that’s currently available I doubt a fairly chaste same-sex lip lock would cause problems), but instead was a consequence of downright bad character modeling and animation. I guess we’ll never know for sure unless someone comes clean about it in the aftermath, but it doesn’t really matter. It seems to basically be emblematic of a production that’s been doomed from the start, put together by folks with big egos but without even the most basic experience in anime direction to back up their words. And it’s sad, because I can sense the seed of a competent story buried in these first couple of episodes… somewhere.
Content Warnings: Mild nudity (obscured). Violence (suicide bombings, firearms in use, physical violence/hand-to-hand combat). An individual being thrown from a helicopter.
Kemono Jihen ep. 2
Summary: Kabane tries to make a place for himself at Inugami’s special investigative office, although the two other kids who already work there, Akira and Shiki, are a little less than enthused about having to share resources with another kid. Shiki especially seems to take it upon himself to run Kabane through the ringer, despite the fact that they’ve developed their special abilities due to similar biological circumstances.
The group is called to aid the police in a situation unfolding in a residence; a woman and her son are covered with horrifying tick-like bugs and no one else can get close enough to rescue them. The bugs are identified as “sanshichu” and are attracted to guilt; if the source of the guilt can be identified and removed, then the problem should resolve itself. Kabane has no blood and feels no pain, so the sanshichu have no effect on him. When he uncovers the source of the swarm, it becomes a good reminder that one’s good intentions can’t offset a guilty act.
Thoughts: The second episode of Kemono Jihen settles into what I assume will be a more standard routine – the group is asked to help solve a mystery which requires their specific supernatural expertise, Kabane and the others demonstrate their skills in helpful ways, etc. While I enjoy this aspect of the show so far, it’s the material in-between the “monster-of-the-week” content that I find more intriguing. Kabane’s birth family is an interesting puzzle to me, especially the question of why his mother and father felt like they had to leave him with relatives. Now that Kabane seems to want to know more about them, perhaps those puzzle pieces will begin to fall into place.
One of my favorite anime is Mononoke, in which malevolent entities are generated from negative emotions of individual people. While I find it academically interesting to learn about specifically Japanese supernatural entities, the real benefit of this type of storytelling is its use of mythology to provide more insight into the way that people think, feel, and act. I realize I might sound like an alien when I say that, but what I mean is that stories about people and the things they do are always a good way to augment our powers of empathy and help to examine our own biases.
This series seems poised to follow in the spirit of that kind of storytelling, though I’d perhaps argue in this case that a child being made to feel guilty for stealing shoes for his mother (whose only pair of shoes is threadbare) is maybe less than the guilt society ought to feel for allowing people to exist in those kinds of circumstances. Though perhaps ultimately that’s the line of thinking we’re meant to follow; Mononoke presents us stories of women overtaken by demons in order to shine a light on the injustice of their individual circumstances, after all.
Content Warnings: Bug swarms, including bugs crawling on eyeballs. Misidentifying a character’s gender.
Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation ep. 2
Summary: Rudy upgrades his magic prowess under Roxy’s watchful eye. His skills increase at a rapid pace and soon it’s time for his final test. Because it involves extremely powerful spellcasting, the test needs to take place out in the open, and therein lies an issue that Rudy hasn’t yet had a chance to address; in his former life, he was bullied to the point that he never left his bedroom. To him, being outside the safe boundaries of his home is too much to bear. Yet Roxy insists, and manages to help him through the worst of the situation. After he passes his test (with flying colors), Roxy moves on, having nothing left to teach Rudy (but having taught him more than she may have expected).
Thoughts: Mushoku Tensei is probably the one series that I’m currently still planning to watch in it entirety that I’ve been having the most difficult time with. I often tell folks that I watch a lot more anime than I’m willing to recommend to other people, and this series so far is a prime example of that. It has its high points – its beautiful animation, entertaining supporting characters and loving nuclear family, and even its portrayal of social anxiety and PTSD in many instances so far. But its stumbling blocks are high and jagged, and each episode (has it really been only 2?) has been a constant calculation of whether the components that might otherwise be deal-breakers (especially for folks I know who are especially sensitive to certain types of content) are counterbalanced or outweighed by the ways in which the story excels.
I’m especially frustrated by the manner in which our protagonist’s former life has been portrayed. On one side, the depictions of his days of being bullied are brutal and I think one would have to be severely detached not to feel some kind of horror at the situation and sympathy toward someone who’d been made to endure that kind of treatment. I was bullied in middle and high school, and while it was the garden variety kind of nerd-dunking that I think a lot of folks experience, I do still think about it sometimes and wish that it hadn’t happened. There’s no questioning the fact that his classmates were terrible to him. Yet there’s an infuriating trend in anime storytelling that equates (especially with young men) having social anxiety or being bullied and subsequently withdrawing inward with indulging in perverse habits and generally disrespecting women. This is a big subject that’s probably worth a separate blog post, but the short of it is that I have a difficult time connecting with Rudy as a protagonist because he continues to make the choice (as a grown man in a kid’s body, we should remember) to peep on his teacher and steal her underwear, which the story implies is not really his fault because he was bullied. He’s an adult with a chance at a new life; social anxiety, being horribly bullied, and having PTSD doesn’t turn people into perverts (and as someone who deals personally with the first and third issues especially, to imply otherwise is harmful and hurtful).
This is sad to me, as a general advocate of anime and a lover of its storytelling style, because this episode has a particularly powerful moment during which Rudy is able to make real progress in dealing with his social anxiety and I felt the way it was portrayed was especially sensitive to the experience of having anxiety. Because of his residual PTSD he’s been unable to leave the confines of his own yard. He’s even experienced hallucinations of the neighborhood kids jeering at him and snapping photos, much like the bullies in his class used to. Roxy gently but firmly is able to lead him outside his front gate on horseback, reassuring him all the way that the outside world doesn’t have to be a scary place. As he slowly opens his eyes, he starts to feel more and more comfortable being outside of his safe zone. While exposure therapy certainly isn’t the solution for everyone, being forced to face his fears is the medicine Rudy seems to need. At the end of the episode, as Roxy is riding away, Rudeus narrates that the most important thing he learned from her, even more important than the magic itself, was how to cross that threshold, physically as well as from within. And how much he respects her for it.
Except then we learn about the stolen panties. *sigh*
Anyway, it would be difficult for me to recommend this series to most people I know (especially just 2 episodes in) without a lot of caveats and warnings. I’m also not the type to implore folks to “just watch until episode [whenever] when the main character becomes tolerable.” But despite the story’s bungling of some emotional matters that happen to affect me personally, I think I want to keep watching – if only to confirm to myself the lengths to which redemption stories can still be effective (or not). Flawed (even deeply flawed) stories can often be worthwhile in one way or another. It’s just really, really disappointing to feel connections to a piece of fiction only to then be insulted by it in turn. It’s not the first time anime has done this to me, and it won’t be the last. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way.
Coincidentally, the author of the original novel recently addressed some of the concerns about the “perverted” protagonist. I guess we’ll see how it goes with the anime adaptation.
Content Warnings: Bullying (extreme, including forced nudity, non-consensual nude photos, destruction of property, stalking). Depiction of masturbation (obscured). Voyeurism. Realistic depiction of social anxiety. Non-consensual upskirt peeping committed by an adult in a child’s body. Undergarment theft committed by an adult in a child’s body. Animal injury from lightning (animal is healed through magic).
Scar on the Praeter ep. 2
Summary: After receiving Eiji’s Tattoo and witnessing his death, Kai Yamato passes out and is picked up by the police. The special squad in charge of investigating Scard crimes offers him protection in exchange for loyalty, but Kai’s younger brother encourages him to be true to himself. Rather than live a caged life, Kai leaps out the window. He’s immediately confronted by Kazuma, Eiji’s younger brother, who cannot accept the fact that Eiji is dead, nor that Eiji willingly transferred his Cerberus tattoo to Kai. When Kai’s wound reopens, Kazuma and Kagami, another member of his group, take him somewhere safer, thus throwing the police off their trail.
Thoughts: In this episode, we learn a bit more about why the Akatsuki Special Ward is such a hot commodity. In an obviously ill-fated move, private companies were given control of the area which, of course, started generating a lot of income. But as expected the existence of such a large concentration of wealth started to breed animosity and augment greed, while also attracting violent outsiders to the region. The situation quickly went downhill from there. While this eventual deterioration is a logical plot turn in-universe, the original decision to allow companies, rather than the government, to take control of managing a part of a city seems like the sort of thing which would never actually be allowed to happen (though arguments can certainly be made about what changes can be made due to pressure lobbyists and such in our own world). Just like many of the choices made in the writing of this series, there’s a general feeling of “this would never happen in the first place” and “people don’t actually behave this way toward one-another,” at least not in the simplistic manner that’s portrayed in this episode. Like a fanservice series that invents convoluted ways to explain in-universe why women are required to show their underwear, I’m pretty sure that any world-building detail in this series was invented for the express purpose of getting hot dudes to fight one-another.
And for a series that’s billed itself on the coolness of its dudes and the ridiculousness of its battle choreography, there’s disappointingly little of that in this second episode. I was promised copious T-poses and 2005-era FMV backdrops, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt… I mean, crummy unlikeable protagonist. Although, what did I really expect from a show that uses a sexy jazz music soundtrack to complement a scene in which the main character has a conversation with his (adoptive) younger brother?
Content Warnings: Character death (offscreen, via flashback). Violence, including sword and gun violence. Bleeding from reopened wounds. Residual blood stains on the street. Corrupt police.
Wave!! -Let’s Go Surfing!! ep. 2
Summary: Masaki has gotten really into surfing, now that he’s had a small taste of the experience. He’s out almost every day, and he’s even gotten better at staying on top of his board. One day a typhoon starts to roll in, but this doesn’t seem to phase him (though Sho and Tanaka insist that it’s not a good idea and that he shouldn’t try to surf on such choppy waves). Of course the situation quickly goes awry and he nearly drowns; luckily his friends arrive just in time. Masaki is struggling with Tanaka’s upcoming move to Hawaii and doesn’t want to face the fact that they’ll be separated once they start high school. But, as he’s reminded, they’ll always be connected by the sea.
Thoughts: It’s interesting to be watching multiple sports anime this season, because the urge to compare them all is difficult to resist. They’re all different stories about different people, with different tones and different focuses (foci?), yet it’s in human nature to want to find patterns and similarities. For what it’s worth, I think Wave!! is doing a decent job of defining itself within a crowded field by taking a more laid-back approach and honing in on smaller character moments.
I’ll still never get over the fact that Masaki picks up surfing without really learning how to swim; all of the persistence and grit in the world won’t save you when you’re hit by choppy waves or an undertow, as we learn quite bluntly during this episode. That said, I do enjoy the camaraderie the characters share and I think the surfing action has started to grow on me.
There’s not a whole lot else to say; this doesn’t seem to be a very plot-heavy sports series and it feels like we’re still kind of waiting for stuff to happen. But it’s pleasant and solid entertainment that’s fun to watch.
Content Warnings: A near-drowning experience. Mild nudity.
Wonder Egg Priority ep. 2
Summary: With the prospect of being able to save Koito serving as a beacon shining in her heart, Ai buys another wonder egg. She also reaches out to Neiru, whom Ai watched fill her suitcase with wonder eggs at the end of the previous episode. Neiru seems uninterested in connecting with Ai, but they trade contact information anyway, if only to more effectively avoid one-another.
Ai opens her new wonder egg and meets Minami, a rhythmic gymnastics athlete struggling with body image and confidence. Ai learns rather quickly that Minami’s coach wielded verbal and physical abuse like weapons, meant to mold Minami into the perfect athlete but instead causing her to hate herself. Ai takes on the task of defeating the coach, who morphs into a horrifying monster before her eyes. It takes the right tools to rescue Minami from being further berated. Ai is inspired to reach out to Neiru again after this encounter.
Thoughts: This episode of the show switches gears a little bit, eschewing the dream-like disorientation of the first episode and dealing more concretely with the type of action Ai needs to take in order to achieve the goals provided by each wonder egg. It’s a little sad not to sense as much of Ai’s interior life and her personal struggle this time around; there’s one scene in which she’s trapped in a discussion with her mother and teacher (social worker?) where she seems to take on her former introversion and it’s easy to perceive her discomfort. Instead, though, this episode marks a shift in her attitude. With Koito’s resurrection as a goal, Ai seems to have been given a new sense of purpose and finds herself taking the lead in reaching out to others.
This is the aspect of the episode that I found the most interesting, because it’s a state of mind I end up in frequently, almost like a cycle. I become aware (sometimes painfully) of components of myself that I want to change, and get a renewed sense of energy toward making big sweeping alterations instead of more manageable, incremental ones. The reinvigoration of my desire to watch anime and write about it is a recent example; I got a sense that there were people in my anime club who were doing a “better job” of following seasonal anime than me (did I mention I have issues with feeling inadequate, and a terrible case of imposter syndrome?), which honestly stings in a stupid way because it’s something that I’ve tried to make myself known for over the years. So I got it in my mind to re-work my process (again) to make it more likely that I’d keep up with my watching and my writing. In all likelihood I’ll run up against some minor road block at some point and be faced with the prospect of giving up or trying to push through the frustration. It seems silly, but when you’ve spent your life disappointing yourself you start to fall into a pattern. I wonder if Ai, who’s clearly sensitive from having been bullied, will reach some point where success isn’t as guaranteed and it becomes too hard to push through adversity in order to maybe achieve it.
There’s some pretty grotesque symbolism in this episode worth talking about. When Minami’s coach transforms into a monster, she suddenly gains gigantic, distended breasts. While I think there’s an impulse to giggle at this considering anime’s general track record with representing women’s bodies, I found it to be an interesting representation of the coach’s twisted manner of encouraging the athletes looking to her for guidance. In a perfect world, teachers and coaches are meant to be nurturing figures, using their power to bring out the best in their students. Likewise, breasts are body parts meant for nurturing and providing sustenance to infants in their earliest, formative months. In this episode, the monster’s breasts only excrete poison that harms and blinds Ai, reflecting the coach’s poisoning of Minami’s self-perception. It’s a fairly obvious use of symbolism, but considering the circumstances I felt it was worth talking through.
The emotional world of the story is expanded now that we’ve met Neiru. While I would have been satisfied with an anime series focused on Ai’s journey alone, I feel like it fits with the central message to have the lives of two (and more, judging by images in the OP and ED) characters intertwine in interesting ways. While they are certainly two very different stories that happen to have some similar elements, after struggling with Mushoku Tensei this week I feel happy to also have this series in my life, which appears to treat heavy subjects like bullying and being a shut-in with a more delicate, sensitive hand (or at least a hand that doesn’t have a penchant for self-sabotage).
Content Warnings: Bullying (verbal and physical). Assault by an adult on a child (verbal and physical). Body horror. Body shaming. Physical injury (with blood).