Many anime series have ruined an excellent start with a mediocre or bad ending. Tsuritama is not one of those series. Instead it’s one of the most well-plotted and tightly-written anime to date. Visual and aural bookending wrap-up neatly in an emotional finale that is as ridiculous as it is perfectly-executed. Tsuritama foreshadows its own ending from the first moments of its premiere episode but never feels like any of the individual pieces are included in the ending because they have to be. They come together in the ending because they’re meant to be, tying together multiple emotional narratives to a quirky accidental alien invasion plot that somehow manages to be both poignant and affecting.

As the various pieces neatly fall into place, Tsuritama still finds moments for character acting that reinforces the leads’ relationships with each other.

At one point, Yuki is set up to succeed: he’s figured out Haru’s role in everything, Natsuki has taught him exactly how to fish for their elusive catch, and Akira steers their fishing boat. The viewer knows that Yuki is going to succeed and yet there’s still dramatic tension, especially when one of the military boats that he somehow has to miraculously cast his line over swings in a direction that causes their radar array to obstruct his path. Natsuki flinches while Yuki simply swings his fishing rod to the side, dragging the line (and Haru) up and over the boat.

In this moment, Natuski turns to Yuki and praises him — not in the teacher/student manner that they’ve had for most of the series, but in a moment of awe at Yuki’s ability. He lets out a surprised “すけえ~” (“Wow, so cool/You’re so cool/Amazing,” depending on how you want to translate it) and takes a slight moment to gawk at Yuki, genuinely impressed.

This is followed by quick cuts to Haru (who looks at Yuki gratefully) and Yuki (who nods at Haru as if to say “I’ve got you”). It’s a small moment that takes about six seconds of the entire finale, but it encapsulates what makes Tsuritama so successful by taking a quick pause during the dramatic climax of the series to reinforce the relationships between Natsuki, Haru, and Yuki in an organic and believable way.

Have you heard? I’m a sucker for a good Greek chorus element in anime.

It’s a rare viewer who will watch Magia Record without prior history of the Madoka franchise. These viewers likely exist — simply because it’s a new anime, looks interesting, and hey, cute girls — but the majority of people tuning in will be Puella Magi Madoka Magica fans. A subsection of these fans will watch any Madoka content regardless. The other group of viewers will be looking for a very specific element, attributed to Gen Urobuchi or Studio SHAFT overlord Akiyuki Shinbo or both, that they cannot define and arguably go into Magia Record already with the idea that it will never live up to the original.  

I have a lot of personal hangups with how the original Madoka television series is put on a pedestal, and even more about how it is erroneously credited for adding “dark” elements to the magical girl genre (it didn’t, they were always there and you just weren’t watching those shows and/or looking hard enough). I’m also of the opinion that Rebellion is the only thing in Madoka that approaches anything resembling a deconstruction.

The largest slight against Magia Record from Madoka Magica fans is that it was aired to promote a mobile game — as an aside, the game isn’t available in English anymore after a poorly-communicated closure — and is presumably not a part of the original Madoka canon. “Side Story” is in the full title of the Magia Record series after all. There’s also the fact that neither Gen Urobuchi nor Akiyuki Shinbo were involved with this particular production. I’ve seen a few comments about how Gekidan Inu Curry, a two-man team of Ayumi Shiraishi and Yousuke Anai, was playing in the Madoka sandbox when they took on Magia Record, but even this is a bit unfair since Gekidan Inu Curry played a large role in the original Madoka television series production design, particularly when it came to the otherworldly collages of the witches. For the record, Yousuke Anai (Doro-inu) is credited as chief director of Magia Record.

Magia Record purposefully plays with all of these fan expectations from its opening episode.

“Have you heard? Has anyone told you? That rumor about magical girls?”

–Magia Record, Episode 1

It’s a bit of a stretch to say that Magia Record has a true Greek chorus element structured like Kunihiko Ikuhara’s Revolutionary Girl Utena or subsequent works, but it does bring a repeating fan element into the series from the beginning through faceless girls gossiping. They’re remarkably close to Utena‘s shadow girls and appear later on in the series. Yet, unlike a modern Greek chorus, which would comment on the action with more of an existing knowledge of what has happened in the past, and what is to come in the future, the faceless girls of Magia Record seem to know nothing about what has come before in the first episode (or are commenting very tongue-in-cheek) and it’s the informed Madoka viewer who brings their expectations to the series that give their commentary an added bite. Calling Kyubey a “white fairy,” bringing up whether magical girls fight good witches or bad witches and then answering “Bad witches, of course,” and ending their opening discussion with “Ahhhh I want to be a magical girl too” are all designed to make a Madoka viewer pay attention. They set up somewhat of a pattern with their early-episode remarks, but the truth of that pattern is completed by the viewer’s knowledge. This “chorus” also comments on the existence of other in-universe elements like the second episode’s Staircase of Severance, in a more traditional way.

Ultimately, Magia Record has a lot of flaws that grow as the series progresses. However, I thoroughly appreciated how it never tried to be Madoka, or even a defining part of the Madoka canon yes even with the known guest appearances, but instead played with said expectations.

It’s impossible to describe the plot of Children of the Sea beyond this: a girl named Ruka Azumi goes through puberty. That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t make sense — in a way it’s one of the most visceral visual representations of a young cis woman going through puberty that I’ve ever seen — but that it’s more symbolism than action. What begins as a simple coming-of-age story for Ruka ends in a beautifully-animated barrage of visual analogues. I personally loved Children of the Sea, but can certainly see why viewers would be completely turned off by it, especially as the movie progresses. In many ways, Children of the Sea has a lot more in common with the imagery-heavy first half of Hannibal‘s third television season than it does with other anime movies or series.

One of the most used visual shortcuts in Japanese animation is flower language and imagery. Children of the Sea is no exception, using the hibiscus flower as an emblem of Ruka’s adolescence and a wilting sunflower as one of the film’s final images.

Ruka’s transformation that occurs later in the series is prefaced by several shots of red hibiscus flowers as two characters talk about what has already happened (a character named Sora disappearing) and obliquely reference what is to come for Ruka and Umi. It’s a turning point in the movie because this is one of the last scenes that seems grounded in reality before the film becomes an animators’ showcase of symbol after symbol.

Hibiscus flowers mean “gentle” in Japanese hanakotoba or flower language. Ruka has been shown to be anything but gentle. Her introduction involves her injuring a classmate in soccer and she initially seems both fierce and somewhat guarded. Yet a large part of her transformation through puberty involves Ruka coming to terms with herself. When she admits at the end of the movie that she knew nothing, an older mentor tells her that she’s perfect as she is, and to have faith in herself and her chance encounters throughout the movie. Her gentleness shows in how she interacts with both Umi and Sora. At the very end of the movie, Ruka happily throws a ball back towards the girl she hurt in the beginning, indicating that Ruka is going to reach out to other people more often, inspired by her fleeting relationships with Umi and Sora that summer.

Furthermore, in western flower language, the hibiscus flower is specifically tied to femininity and women. One of the meanings behind a hibiscus flower in western floriography is an ideal woman or ideal wife. In Victorian flower language, hibiscus flowers were given to tell the recipient that they had delicate beauty. Red hibiscus flowers specifically represent love and passion (like many red flowers). These meanings all act as a framing device for Ruka’s adolescent summer.

“And that is everything that happened that summer.”

-Ruka Azumi, Children of the Sea

At the very end of Children of the Sea, a wilting sunflower is shown as Ruka finishes her narration. It signals the end of her summer (and the end of her initial transformation). In Japanese hanakotoba, sunflowers mean respect, passionate love, and radiance. In other flower languages they can mean bright (like the sun), radiance, lasting happiness, positivity, and strength. Despite the fact that the flower is wilted, the sun shines brightly behind it and Ruka’s narration is happy, albeit a finite conclusion to her summer, so it’s doubtful that the wilting is supposed to represent a perversion of these meanings.

One of the few, yet common, criticisms levied at the 2017 Made in Abyss television series was at animator Kou Yoshinari’s creature designs and animation. When Yoshinari was given creative control of how the creatures of the Abyss would be designed, he purposefully made them visually-jarring and otherworldly. They’re animated as an other, with blurred lines that distinguish them from sharply-detailed backgrounds of the Abyss itself.

Alongside the citizens of Orth and cave raiders of the Abyss, we as viewers know little about this gaping maw other than what the series tells us. The series’ visual direction makes us part-time travelers with Reg and Riko, and part-time voyeurs, watching them from a distance with a calculating eye (like the monsters, the Abyss which is a character all its own, or high-level cave raiders like Bondrewd who have eyes everywhere).

The monsters aren’t animated badly, they’re unnatural by design.

An interesting choice made by either Yoshinari’s direction or one of Made in Abyss‘ animators was that, at one point, Reg’s robot arm becomes equally blurry to the monster he is fighting. It happens early on in his and Riko’s journey, but for a moment, the animation style of Reg — a main character in the series — becomes identical to that of the monsters that populate the Abyss. At that time, I wrote:

The first layer’s silkfang is shown as perpetually blurry with a dark, thick outline that moves constantly, but Reg’s robot arm is given the same treatment when it grabs hold of the monster. This could be a simple animation necessity, but in Made in Abyss, it could always mean more.

Reg’s existence throughout the series was always a mystery, with Riko and viewers piecing together his backstory the further the two delved into the Abyss. He is likely a relic, but doesn’t appear in any of their compendiums or existing data. He was presumably sent by Lyza as a gift to her daughter Riko, but neither Riko nor Reg know why or where Reg came from. Like the Abyss, he isn’t known, yet Riko treats him as if he’s another cave raider and, for the most part, Reg is animated accordingly. Even when he uses his most powerful weapons during the scope of the series, he retains his clearly-animated form, delineating him from the monsters outside of this specific occasion.

In the sequel movie, Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul, Reg becomes overloaded with power and loses his sense of self. During this time, he fights noted white whistle Bondrewd: Sovereign of the Dawn. Bondrewd’s villainous tendencies are painfully human — which make his machinations worse, not better — but he’s shown sharply in relief to Reg who fights  like an animal or monster of the Abyss. Reg has the same blurry look and thick outlines of an Abyss monster while Bondrewd is clearly and precisely drawn. Not only does this momentarily align Reg with the monsters, but it tells us visually that Bondrewd is in complete control of his actions (which again, makes it worse, not better) regardless of how vile those may be.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that Kou Yoshinari is once again credited in Dawn of the Deep Soul, this time under “biological design” rather than monster design.

“Bird…go?”

Despite including the combination of Gatchaman Crowds and Gatchaman Crowds insight in my best anime of the decade list, I was nervous to return to Gatchaman Crowds for many reasons. I didn’t rewatch it for that list save a few scenes in key episodes, and hadn’t rewatched it since mid-2016. The rapid evolution and effect of social media in society generally has rendered more than several specifics of Crowds obsolete. I maintain that if the insight season hadn’t course-corrected a few of the generalizations made in it’s initial season, Gatchaman Crowds would be a completely un-rewatchable time capsule: a monument to ultimately believing the best in others while time definitively proved otherwise.

It’s still somewhat of a time capsule.

Yet, in returning to it, I’m already pleasantly surprised by how much I still love. The naive me that wrote all of those Crowds posts in 2013 certainly doesn’t exist anymore, but I appreciate that she did exist at one point in time. There’s still a lot to take away, especially in a rewatch where you already know what’s coming, both in the scope of the series and in the real world.

I’ve already written about Kenji Nakamura’s tendency to use visual framing, and the first episode of Crowds is no exception. The series starts with the morning routine of straight-laced Sugune Tachibana for a reason. In most other superhero series, he would be the protagonist. He has a strong sense of duty alongside a strict societally-driven moral code that’s reflected in the way he carries himself and the setup of his apartment in the opening scenes of Gatchaman Crowds‘ premiere. When Hajime Ichinose first enters the fray and joins up with the rest of the G-crew, it looks like she’s going to play quirky sidekick to his straight man. And while the two do fall into this pattern, it’s Hajime who takes the lead role and almost immediately skewers his ideals and perception with her actions. Sugune’s prominence in the first cold open of the series is more of a point of reference than a path forward. It tells us that this is what needs to be challenged, not upheld.

This is reinforced by Sugune’s actions on the train. On his commute to school, we see a woman struggling with illness who consults the gamified do-gooder app GALAX to help. Behind her in a fox mask is one of the “hundred,” a group that will later rise to prominence as GALAX’s importance increases throughout the show. By contrast, Sugune sees a pregnant woman who didn’t ask for help and forces a younger man (who is most likely ill given the fact that he is sweaty and wearing a mask) to give her his seat. This doesn’t make Sugune “wrong” here but it also doesn’t necessarily make him “right” and the entire exchange encapsulates how he sees himself in the world, doing the right thing based on existing moral codes without question. That’s his idea of heroism.

At the end of the first episode, we get a hint of just how much Hajime is going to stomp all over the status quo — this is reinforced visually already by multiple nods to modern art — with her amazingly irreverent “Bird…go?” while transforming. Sugune says “Bird, go!” with authority, sounding exactly like what we would expect from a traditional gatchaman member. Hajime sounds curious and confused when she starts her transformation. She doesn’t sound anything like a gatchaman is supposed to sound like and it’s a harbinger of what is to come.

Returning to Violet Evergarden was more difficult and emotionally-affecting than I thought it would be.

On July 18, 2019, a man set fire to Kyoto Animation’s main studio, killing 36 people and injuring at least 33. Not-so-coincidentally, I stopped blogging about anime shortly after this happened. Part of my absence from blogging was due to an increased workload at my job. The other part was simple sadness.

Since my initial entry into currently-airing anime (see: watching it streaming weekly rather than through Adult Swim) around 2010, Kyoto Animation’s series have meant a lot to me. I remember when Clannad — a series that I regularly dunk on now, albeit fondly — was one of the more interesting things I had ever seen from anime. From there, I was recommended The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and the now-defunct time capsule of Lucky Star. They all had this one studio in common: Kyoto Animation. Hyouka, Sound Euphonium, K-On!, Free, Nichijou, and others have been some of my favorites alongside adjacent works like Tamako Love Story, High Speed! Free! Starting Days, and Liz and the Blue Bird. Some of my favorite directors and animators have been housed at Kyoto Animation and some of them are no longer alive due to the arson attack last year.

Others have written specifically about how the Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll movie became something far greater than was ever intended following the studio fire. It was a side story that became a main story due to circumstance. Yet, for me personally, Violet Evergarden was something that was made more spectacular for Kyoto Animation’s involvement and stunning execution. It was appropriately ostentatious for something set in an anachronistic Victorian-era setting and while not every episode succeeded, when they did succeed it was beautiful and emotionally-devastating. The animation and attention to detail from directors Haruka Fujita and Taichi Ishidate alongside the entire Kyoto Animation team elevated the source material to something special.

Returning to it after not having watched anything new by Kyoto Animation since the fire was also special. The lush backgrounds and scenery were back. The needless trappings of Violet’s outfit and focus on Victorian-era footwear and flowers were back.

Despite everything, Kyoto Animation was back.

The simple opening storyboard in Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll speaks volumes. One of the characters in the movie, Taylor Bartlett, is shown arriving by boat to Leiden, home of Violet’s workplace, the CH Postal Company. Her eyes widen as she sees the scenery, which will be familiar to anyone who has watched Violet Evergarden. The movie then cuts to a view from Violet’s window, and finally, Violet herself typing out a letter using her prosthetic hands. It’s as if the movie itself is welcoming us back to Violet’s world, surrounding us in a warm embrace where, in that moment, we can momentarily forget whatever is going on or whatever happened and immerse ourselves in Violet’s story once more.

At least we’ll always have Mamoru’s comical, “Merry christmas! And a…happy new year!” line. The Sailor Moon S movie really is a holiday classic.

There’s a general consensus on which Sailor Moon movies are the best and Kunihiko Ikuhara’s Sailor Moon R movie always takes the top spot. The Sailor Moon SuperS movie is the one that everyone forgets exists (the only thing I remember about it is that there’s something called a “black dream hole”), and the Sailor Moon S movie is the mediocre one. It’s the one that people watch because the R movie and the S season are both so good — and directed by Ikuhara so their quality is not a coincidence — only to come away mildly disappointed.

I was recently talking to a friend who is making his way through the entirety of Sailor Moon. He was very confused when I said that the Sailor Moon S movie was my favorite of the auxiliary Sailor Moon movies, especially after he watched it. The isolated ice princess storyline didn’t match up with Luna’s romance plotline, he said. Furthermore, the romance plotline also didn’t make much sense given the fact that Luna is, well, a cat, and her love interest is a human man who once wanted to be an astronaut.

This is all true, the movie itself doesn’t make much sense, and also doesn’t fit well in the grand scheme of Sailor Moon S. It’s an excuse to see your favorite characters again, using a small manga side story. I won’t defend it’s plot, or even recommend it as a movie, but I will defend my love for it.

By the time I was in high school, I had watched the English-language dubbed version of Sailor Moon and Sailor Moon R. This was my only Sailor Moon experience until Cartoon Network began to air the S and SuperS seasons. By the time that happened, I was savvy enough to know where to pick up SailorStars which I knew was never going to air on US television.

Prior to renting SailorStars on DVD and hiding it from my parents, I bought the VHS tape of the Sailor Moon S movie. I remember that I bought it at a now-defunct video store when I was at the mall with my friends and the cashier was not only ridiculously hot but also knew about Sailor Moon. The movie was only available in VHS and not DVD but fortunately my parents were behind the times (and still have their VHS player to this day) and it was the only Sailor Moon thing I could afford. This movie became my first window into uncut and unedited anime, which I later sought out with SailorStars. Some of my favorite parts were the outer sailor scouts’ transformation sequences, which I had yet to see in the dubbed S season at the time I bought this movie. I was a fairly sickly child and caught pneumonia frequently. When I was stuck at home and ill, I would dig out this movie and watch it over and over again. Everything about it from the outer scouts to the new attacks to the winter fashion seemed amazing to me at the time.

None of this makes it a good movie, but all of it makes it my favorite. Every year I find myself returning to some part of the Sailor Moon universe, and this year was no exception. Rather than returning to my favorite season (SailorStars) or the best season (S) or the season I’ve only watched once in full and it was the English dub only (SuperS, which I never may watch in full ever) I returned to the most comforting piece of Sailor Moon media for me, and found that I still loved it even though it’s bad.

I’ve always understood why people loved Pop Team Epic, but I never really “got it.” It was too loud and too frenetic. I don’t like things that seem to be shouting at me all the time with excessive energy — this is why I don’t really get into many YouTubers. While I could recognize its quality on a technical level, and even read along with SakugaBlog posts on its animation, I didn’t watch an episode past the premiere.

By contrast, when Kamikaze Douga and Space Neko Company reunited for Gal & Dino, I was immediately hooked by Tomoe Nakano’s opening animation. Half I Spy picture hunt, half fashion photography photoshoot, Nakano’s opening sequence finds creative ways to incorporate Dino in everyday objects using drawn animation and mixed media. It was visibly reminiscent of Pop Team Epic, but the tone was completely different. Rather than a litany of fast-paced esoteric jokes, it was more laid back and chill (but no less esoteric).

The moment I truly fell in love with Gal & Dino was in the series’ second episode, where the titular gal invites her friend over to meet the dino and prove that he is, in fact, a real dinosaur. Dino stares at them with his typical open-mouth smile and bugged eyes before turning that same attention back to a television program. They start taking Instagram photos with Dino but end up sucked into the television rerun he’s watching for the rest of that day — as shown by how the lighting changes behind them in the window. It was slow, it was kind of dumb, but it was oddly relaxing. I loved it. This was followed by a Dino YouTube (Dino Channel) sketch where he tries to figure out what a toothbrush is.

Gal & Dino isn’t the type of thing to inspire loud belly laughs or dramatic reactions like Pop Team Epic. It’s more of a slow smile that stretches across your face as you watch something kind of stupid and also oddly affecting at times. Similar to Pop Team Epic, if a joke doesn’t hit, Gal & Dino quickly moves on to the next thing, revisiting or continuing jokes in future installments when it wants to, all while exploring different mediums and animation styles.

Sometimes I don’t need something to make sense. Sometimes I just want to watch this random woman’s dinosaur roommate kick her ex-boyfriend’s ass in Old Maid and smile.

A list of things I enjoyed over this past year includes Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Isao Takahata’s critically-acclaimed film Only Yesterday.

This is not a coincidence.

In a world where I couldn’t leave the confines of my apartment, I turned to starting over on a new island and building a community in Animal Crossing. When I lost my job later on in the year, I turned to Stardew Valley, where the impetus for a drastic job change and move to the countryside is summed up beautifully in a letter: “If you’re reading this, you must be in dire need of change.” Only Yesterday, a love letter to and advertisement for pastoral Japan (specifically Yamagata Prefecture), fits within the same ongoing pandemic coping mechanisms. Protagonist Taeko Okajima leaves Tokyo, to escape city life and visit a farm in the bucolic countryside where her brother-in-law’s family harvests safflowers on an organic farm.

If I had the means, I would escape to a rural farm tomorrow.

Yet, Only Yesterday differs from the other two pieces of media I mentioned — and not because it’s a film while the other two are immersive, community-building video games — in that it both revels and wallows in Taeko’s past. Her past isn’t something to escape from, but something to cherish, even when it hurts.

The original manga of Only Yesterday (Omohide Poro Poro) is a simple collection of short stories about 10 year-old Taeko and her adventures. Takahata adapts this as a fairly melancholic look at one woman’s memories while she’s obviously still struggling to find her place in life. The memories themselves are simple — a first taste of pineapple, a first crush, a part in a school play — but the direction adds weight.

When Taeko looks back on tasting pineapple for the first time, it’s also about how she so rarely was able to do things that her (more affluent) friends were able to do like try exotic fruits for dessert or go on a trip during school vacation. It’s that pineapple was so rare, that her family didn’t initially know how to cut it. Their entire experience with it is disappointing compared to expectations and Taeko, as the one who requested it, ends up eating their leftover portions as an odd penance while the rest of her family eats bananas instead.

Only Yesterday has one of the most accurate representations of how memory works. It’s not just that Taeko routinely roots through her own memories in nostalgic regret. Somehow, Takahata adds the appropriate importance to the simplest of 10 year-old Taeko’s actions while retaining the straightforwardness of her actions. Memory is complex because our brains add context that others, even while hearing you tell a story from your own memory, will never understand because they’re not you and they didn’t have that experience. As viewers of the film, we are privy to Taeko’s actions and memories, but her experiences still feel like hers and hers alone. At the same time, it reminded me of how I remember events from my past, especially those that involve regret or unfulfilled potential.

Much of this narrative weight comes from attention to detail and the ease with which Takahata and team swap back and forth between Taeko’s past and her present. What could have come off as a series of random memories from when she was younger have just enough of a tie-in to her participation in the safflower harvest and developing relationship with the countryside itself that they too reflect her emotional growth. Everything in this movie is purposeful, but it feels natural.

In flower language, safflowers are used as a symbol of catching or finding good luck and love. Like many yellow flowers, they also symbolize happiness. In Only Yesterday there’s the obvious implications of Taeko choosing to stay in Yamagata because of potential romantic interest Toshio, but I’d like to think of them as more of a symbol for Taeko’s new beginning and her happiness with that choice.

The greatest technical and storyboarding triumphs of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken‘s first episode are not the flights of fancy that take Midori Asakusa, Tsubame Mizusaki, and Sayaka Kanamori into the world of their own animations but the framework of every day life that inspires them.

“You take something that’s totally implausible but pass it off like it is! You take reality and exaggerate it in a way that makes sense!”

-Midori Asakusa, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, Episode 1

When Midori discovers “the greatest world” of anime, she’s sick and stuck at home. Watching Future Boy Conan causes a realization that people make the anime she watches and that it’s their efforts that she truly loves. This ties into her childhood dream of wanting to be an adventurer. Our initial introduction to Midori as viewers is through an imaginary world that she creates after moving into a new apartment complex.

It’s easy to see from where Midori draws her inspiration. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken shows us. Rather than having us listen to Midori talk about her adventures, it simply shows her running around and then transfers this to drawings in her adventure logs, all while keeping the kinetic energy and childlike wonder of her exploration. While her drawings reminded me of entire worlds I would create with my friends in my own childhood, it’s the framing and storyboarding of Midori’s new apartment complex that caught my attention first.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken‘s premiere was Mari Motohashi’s debut as an episode director and animation director (she helped direct and storyboarded later episodes in the series as well). Her greatest achievement in introducing us to Midori and company’s every day life is how she manages to make everything simultaneously crowded and spacious. There are narrow alleys to explore and buildings constantly reaching into the sky, even when the skyline is relatively clear. She uses a variety of angles to make even the mundane seem large, fantastic, and worth exploring. In the words of Midori herself, Motohashi “takes reality and exaggerate it in a way that makes sense” in order to convey the inner workings of Midori’s creativity.

Somewhere between legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki’s curmudgeonly insistence that the best inspiration comes from experiencing life rather than anime itself, and the litany of insular otaku-references that fill many anime series which only look inwardly towards other anime for inspiration, there’s Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken. It finds a happy medium in a way that’s realistic and acknowledges both anime and life experience as equal partners in Midori’s imagination.

As a child, Midori is inspired by every day settings and Future Boy Conan (which Miyazaki directed) alike. As an adult, she keeps this love of anime while visibly drawing backgrounds inspired by her desire to continuously explore the real world around her, creating an entirely new world.

“You don’t belong only to yourself, you know?”

-Yuuko Ichihara, xxxHolic Kei, Episode 3

I don’t believe in much. This is because I find it difficult to trust even what I am able to feel or perceive with my most basic senses, but also as a defense mechanism. I make a baseline level assumption that everyone I meet dislikes me for some reason, and go forward from there, which often means denigrating myself preemptively before others have the chance to presumably do the same. Additionally, I can’t think of anything I’ve done in life that has contributed to others in any meaningful way.

The first time I watched the Lady Jorougumo arc in xxxHolic Kei, it was a bit of a revelation. Until that point, xxxHolic had been a fun, episodic series of ayakashi and youkai stories that were very loosely tied to another ongoing CLAMP manga series that I was much more invested in: Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles. The Lady Jorougumo three-episode narrative changed that the moment she called out protagonist Kimihiro Watanuki for being so willing to throw away his own life to save another.

Why would she value his life in exchange for the life of someone else (in this case, a zashiki-warashi spirit who has fallen in love with Watanuki) when he’s so willing to throw it away? She tells Watanuki that his inherent callousness towards himself not only makes him less valuable in this situation, but also mocks those, like the zashiki-warashi, who do care about him.

At the time, her words resonated with me profoundly in a way that’s probably a bit ridiculous and overly-serious for the source material. By denigrating myself from the outset, I was not only denying people a chance to know me more genuinely, but I was unwittingly disparaging anyone who already cared about me in a remarkably self-centered manner. To this day I still insult myself liberally, but I have improved significantly over the past ten years. It’s a work in progress.

On returning to xxxHolic, what struck me was not Lady Jorougumo’s words to Watanuki or their ensuing fight, but Yuuko Ichihara’s words to Watanuki afterwards and his acceptance of Shizuka Doumeki’s gift. Echoing Lady Jorougumo’s sentiment with an added layer of caring, she tells Watanuki that he doesn’t only belong to himself. This is literal in a way due to the circumstances of Watanuki’s existence, but also figurative in that he needs to accept the fact that others care about him — that throwing his life away will hurt those who care about him just as much, if not more than directly attacking them. He’s made connections as a micro level that are just as important as any larger overarching contribution to society. She then holds out her hand and presents him with half of Doumeki’s eye, which Doumeki gave up so that Watanuki could see out of his right eye again.

Before his confrontation with Lady Jorougumo, Watanuki surely would have blustered and fought accepting anything from Doumeki, never mind something as valuable as half of his right eye, even if he would have been forced to take it eventually. Yet, the Watanuki who has just fought Lady Jorougumo and been confronted with the fact that others care about him simply accepts it with a sad expression.

It’s been particularly difficult this year to see myself as someone of any value whatsoever for myriad reasons. I’d like to thank xxxHolic (on top of an amazing group of friends) for reminding me that this is not the case.

A few weeks ago I pitched a podcast idea to a few friends. We would revisit an old anime to see if it was rewatchable or not and additionally, as one of the friends’ anime experience was and is fairly small, whether it was accessible to an uninformed audience.

This premise isn’t to be confused with the many wonderful anime podcasts out there that genuinely cover older, more vetted material like Anime Nostalgia (who just did a great recommendations episode on older manga) as a recommendation source. Instead, it’s more of a tangentially-related aside at specific genre pieces from the past ten to fifteen years.

My first suggestion was the 2007 Kyoto Animation adaptation of Lucky Star.

I recommended Lucky Star for our first watch not in spite of, but because it’s so tied to one specific time in anime history. Its initial buzz owed much to the then-recent success of Kyoto Animation’s adaptation of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and less obviously or overtly-referenced, the success of the 2002 J.C. Staff adaptation of Azumanga Daioh. When I first watched Lucky Star, it was a year or so after it’s release and immediately after I had finished the first season of Haruhi. Haruhi was so immensely popular that everyone was waiting for a second season as soon as possible and Kyoto Animation announced the Lucky Star adaptation during Haruhi‘s run.

From the opening moments of “Motteke! Sailor Fuku” a nonsensical song with a dance designed to become a memetic hit like Haruhi‘s “Hare Hare Yukai,” Lucky Star was courting a specific, informed audience (i.e. people who were waiting for another season of Haruhi to be announced). As an anime fan who was just getting into watching recent shows that hadn’t been curated for me by Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and had just watched Haruhi, Lucky Star was fun and enjoyable. I got enough of the references (probably less than a third of them if I’m being honest) for it to be a funny addition to my ongoing anime education. From there, I went on to watch Azumanga Daioh and loved that more for its stronger characterization and more esoteric episodes.

Although I expected Lucky Star to be impenetrable now, I still underestimated how inaccessible it would be for anyone who hadn’t seen Haruhi, watched any Kyoto Animation series, or even had any sort of experience with 4-koma adaptations or manzai routines.

Each episode is also packed with Japanese culture references, other anime and/or manga references, and hyper-specific voice actor and actress references. For many jokes, the audience is expected to recognize voices since their inclusion is part of the joke. Aya Hirano as Lucky Star‘s Konata Izumi attending an Aya Hirano concert where she performs “God Knows” from Haruhi since she was Haruhi‘s voice actress is probably the easiest example to point out but there are many more.

One of the more entertaining Lucky Star bits is the ever-rotating ending, where various characters from the series sing karaoke to popular songs (often from anime or with a well-known anime tie-in) but this too relies on the audience recognizing where the songs are from.

The initial joke of Minoru Shiraishi as himself in the series’ closing segment, “Lucky Channel,” relies on whether you know him as Taneguchi from Haruhi or not (although as he and disillusioned idol co-host Akira Kogami develop their own rapport that becomes one of the best parts of Lucky Star). Revisiting the existence of Minoru Shiraishi in 2020 is uniquely depressing when you learn that he underwent treatment for facial paralysis in 2015 and hasn’t done many roles since.

An odd addendum to this is the entire in-universe existence of Akira as a jaded idol. Her volatile mood swings between overly-cutesy teen and exhausted cynic are something I found amusing when I first watched, but now it looms over the Lucky Channel segments with a darker tone — especially considering Aya Hirano’s career. (To be clear, Aya Hirano isn’t voicing Akira, but her subsequent “scandal” adds an additional layer of nuance in the year 2020.) To top it all off, the years also add context to Lucky Star director Yutaka Yamamoto’s firing after four episodes.

Lucky Star isn’t the only series to age gracelessly due to extenuating circumstances, but it was already such a hyper-specific time capsule of a series even while airing and the passage of time has made this all the more true.

My friend who hadn’t seen Lucky Star or Haruhi was completely lost, leaving it up to the three of us to explain that not all 4-koma adaptations are like Lucky Star, and even the manga itself wasn’t nearly as reference-filled. The manga is more character-focused and has a relaxed slice-of-life feel which makes the characters if not more endearing, at least like actual people. Kyoto Animation’s adaptation “elevates” the original material by including myriad references, leaning in on labelling Konata Izumi an otaku and using her as an audience stand-in.

A byproduct of this is that the other Lucky Star main characters — the Hiiragi sisters and Miyuki Takara — feel more like a collection of moé tropes for Konata to point at and be like, “Hey, you sure are fulfilling this otaku stereotype,” with the expectation that the audience will find it amusing. Konata’s relationship with Kagami Hiiiragi approaches something more genuine in the back half of the series, but because the series is so reference-heavy, character development suffers. When partnered with the girls’ mundane conversations (the most famous being Konata’s chocolate coronet discussion) it gives the viewer little reason to care about them despite the fact that the conversations themselves are realistically banal.

Ultimately, Lucky Star is rewatchable with the massive caveat that you are already an anime fan who saw this as one of their first series and/or have an existing attachment to this very specific point in anime history. This specificity has an effect of making it more personal to a select few, unifying a certain subsection of anime fans who share that viewing experience. Just yesterday, a 38-second video clip from Lucky Star was the top post on the anime subreddit, but the vast majority of comments were from people who had experienced Lucky Star at a formative time. I have an attachment to it because it was recommended to me as a must-watch following Haruhi, and rewatching it (admittedly we only made it through four or five episodes) made me think about how anime is curated today as opposed to even five or ten years ago.

When I first began getting into currently-airing anime, there were myriad blogs and websites as well as Twitter in its infancy, where people would recommend older series or favorite recent series. Some of the first series recommended to me were Clannad, Toradora, Honey and Clover, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Lucky Star. As I delved more into the online anime community, I found entire podcasts and blogs dedicated to recommending older works like the original Gundam movie trilogy and Patlabor, or even more recent gems like Mushi-shi. There was a level of curation that has all but disappeared in the current social media climate where everything is available to stream and discussion is skewed towards instant reaction, particularly in short video form. Returning to Lucky Star reminded me of this and additionally made me realize just who ended up shaping my initial foray into watching anime as it aired.

I personally will always have a soft spot in my heart for Lucky Star, but I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

The first season of The Promised Neverland ends like this.

Emma thinks of Norman and how they finally escaped while Mom Isabella tends to the rest of the children and wishes them luck. Running towards the light, the group’s exhilarated panting from running is replaced with a timely swell of the soundtrack.

The opening moments of The Promised Neverland‘s second season play with this, transitioning seamlessly from the optimism of the first season’s finale to a chase scene. What initially appears to be a direct continuation of the escape is actually set a short time in their future during a different and more immediate need to escape (which also is the series kicking things off in media res before going back and establishing setting). While the first season was all about careful planning and setup, this is about surviving moment to moment in a world that they do not understand where they are still near the bottom of the food chain.

The majority of The Promised Neverland‘s first season — everything but the final moments of the last episode — occurred on the closed stage of Grace Field House. Most of the storyboarding played with the idea of a closed room mystery. Who knew what was an important part of the visual direction, keeping both the audience and in-universe players guessing. In particular, Ray’s entire character, his betrayal, and his redemption are all foreshadowed and tracked through visuals.

Now that the kids have broken free of Grace Field House, the visual direction and storyboarding must follow. Where we learned nearly the entire layout of the house, even Isabella’s secret radio room, in the first season, the second season is about showing the scope of the larger world around Emma, Ray, and the rest of the escapees.

This begins with a shot of the vampiric vidar flower, used to drain children as part of meal preparation for the monsters that run the orphanages, raising children as food. It’s shown clearly in the foreground with the children smaller in the background as they walk. It dwarfs them figuratively and literally. The children are also shown dwarfed by the forest itself, which is wildly different from the confines of their upbringing at Grace Field House.

Most importantly, unlike the first season, the children are shown on a level playing field as much as possible. It doesn’t suit them to withhold information from each other anymore. They all know the terror of the monsters and the truth of the orphanages, so sharing information is far more fitting and relevant to their survival.

Even in scenes where Emma and Ray take the lead and are dispensing information, the group is included. This is shown visually when they remain small in comparison to the forest that’s surrounding them, but are joined first by Don and Gilda, and later the entire group. In the first season, information was shared like this, with necessary layers of distrust between the main trio, and then Don and Gilda, then the entirety of the group. Yet here in the second season, you already see the group being shown on an equal level visually and information being almost immediately shared with all of the children who escaped. Emma and Ray also seek out others’ opinions to fill in the gaps.

When Yvette speaks up about the water anemones, they listen and it’s used as a learning tool for the group. When the monster from the opening scenes appears mid-episode, it shows close-ups of not only Emma and Ray’s faces but all of the children. When they have to split up into groups, it’s communicated efficiently. Not everyone is on an equal level physically or mentally, but to Ray’s point, they would be best-served using their advantages to cover their weaknesses. This becomes vitally-important when both Emma and Ray are incapacitated in different ways and the rest of the group needs to make decisions without them.

Visual framing most resembles season one in the final moments of the episode, where Ray and Emma discover that they and the group were saved by demons and are in the more closed environment of a cave. Here, it’s again about obfuscating things visually and using varying levels of focus to show how much or how little they know.

Naoko Yamada’s influence throughout the anime industry, particularly with various directors’ use of flower language, continues to impress me. In Shin Wakabayashi’s Wonder Egg Priority, flower language is front and center throughout the entirety of the first episode as running visual commentary alongside Ai Outo’s journey to save her friend, Koito Nanase.

It’s no coincidence that the first large flower reference we see is a white lily — outside of cherry blossoms, white lilies are one of the most ubiquitous and obvious flower references in anime. Above all else, a white lily in a Japanese animated television series typically points to one, if not more, of the women in said anime being lesbians (or at the very least, realizing their attraction to other women). A white lily, or yuri, became a moniker for the entire girls-love genre. More generally, white lilies mean purity and chastity in Japanese flower language. Similarly in Victorian flower language, a white lily meant innocence, modesty, and virtue. They’ve become funeral flowers as a way to represent one’s return to innocence in death.

Coupled with a few off-handed remarks from Ai about another girl at the end of the episode, and the nature of her relationship with her now-deceased best friend Koito, it’s probably safe to assume from the appearance of this lily in a prominent place, that Ai is not straight. Furthermore, a connection can potentially be drawn from the lily, to the obvious bullying that happened — particularly in a flashback where Ai claims that people shouldn’t get involved with her because she’s “ugly” — that Ai’s sexuality has something to do with the treatment she received at school. White lilies also appear in the doorway through which Ai remembers her friend’s death as funerary flowers.

Upon Ai’s return to school, albeit in her dream/otherworldly sequence where she ends up fighting a spectre of school bullies, the white lily appears in the foreground, obscuring her classmates from our view. It overrides them.

Ai herself wears a sunflower hoodie throughout most of the first episode. It’s her default uniform when she’s outside of her reality of being a shut-in (presumably following Koito’s suicide). Her sunflower is shown in close-up shot once, immediately after she is injured in the alternate reality.

Sunflowers represent radiance or brilliance, passionate love, and respect in Japanese flower language. More broadly, sunflowers can mean lasting happiness, positivity, strength, and longevity. This is particularly interesting in the context of Ai, who sees herself as anything but these various traits despite boldly wearing a sunflower. It could be commentary on how others, particularly her best friend, see her despite her outward gloominess. The fact that the one close-up is shown in tandem with an injury tells us that she may once have been a more positive, happy person, but isn’t one anymore or had that part of her directly “injured” by various circumstances.

The flowers around the feet of Koito at her death appear to be pink evening primroses. Generally in Japanese flower language, primroses mean desperation. In Victorian flower language they represented young, volatile love, inconstancy, or a desperate “I cannot live without you.” They can also have a meaning tied to women/femininity as well as youth. Like the white lily, if these are primroses, the meaning supports the fact that Koito and Ai’s relationship was something beyond friendship (even if they didn’t openly express this to each other).

Wisteria flowers are used to transition Ai from the “real world” into a garden where she can buy the eggs she believes she needs to “save” Koito, or return her from the dead. Representing long life and immortality, due to their own longevity, wisteria are often used to symbolize a strong love that can stand a test of time. By contrast, in Victorian flower language they can also be a word of caution to overly-strong love or feelings towards another person.

This season’s latest critical darling, Shin Wakabayashi’s Wonder Egg Priority, has been described as, if Kunihiko Ikuhara (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mawaru Penguindrum) and Naoko Yamada’s (A Silent Voice, Liz and the Blue Bird) respective animated series had a love child. This is a fairly apt description based on the first episode, and although many upon first hearing this will wonder what exactly that looks like and how two styles that seem fairly incongruous would go together, those styles do work and the result is Wonder Egg Priority.

If you want to be particularly meta about it, the result is the description comparing two existing directorial styles and the description is also the result. It’s something new, born of known visual languages.

“If it cannot break its egg’s shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world’s shell! For the revolution of the world!”

-the student council (Touga Kiryuu), Revolutionary Girl Utena

For as much as Ikuhara is to believed in his commentary about any of his works, he claims that the saying above — which becomes the repeated motto of Utena‘s student council — came from a friend recommending him Hermann Hesse’s Demian. The original quote from Demian is, “The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.” Ikuhara added the revolution part, replacing the flight to god with revolutionizing the world.

Without delving too far into this or giving away Utena spoilers — there are entire essays written on how the Jungian philosophy of Demian relates to and/or acts as a foil for what happens in Utena — the most important thing about this phrase for the purposes of this article (and Wonder Egg Priority) is who says it: the members of the student council who are ostensibly villains to Utena Tenjou’s hero.

While there are myriad cases for their villainy, and they actively oppose Utena’s purported heroism, the true villain in Utena (like all of Ikuhara’s works) is the system itself. The student council members are complicit in varying degrees but are also victims of the system they help perpetuate, rather than breaking through that particular shell themselves. The egg itself can be both stasis and advancement. Breaking through the shell of the egg is breaking through physical and mental barriers, or in the specific case of Utena, a stifling patriarchal society that affects and hurts everyone involved.

One of the main questions floating around following the first episode of Wonder Egg Priority is whether presumed protagonist Ai Outo is being scammed. If I may be so bold, I think this is the wrong question to be asking.

Of course it’s a scam.

Ai will never be able to resurrect her friend/girlfriend, Koito Nanase, who committed suicide by hopping to different worlds courtesy of magical eggs from a gachapon machine.

As an aside, there’s another similarity to Ikuhara in the way that the method of accomplishing whatever thing the protagonists want to accomplish is caught up in capitalism. If only you buy enough eggs (acquire enough golden plates, find the penguindrum), you too can make your dreams come true! The enemy is always the system and in Wonder Egg Priority that system — dare I say, the true shell that needs to be cracked less the chicks die before they’re born — appears to be the one that leads to merciless school bullying.

In “hatching” Kurumi Saijo, Ai is brought to Kurumi’s world where monsters called seenoevils attack Kurumi and only Kurumi. In the end, Ai attacks the monsters and defeats them so Kurumi can be free, only to later find out that only Ai herself can be “saved.” Kurumi is a statue in someone else’s world just like Koito is a statue in Ai’s world. Presumably, like Ai was told that Koito could be saved with enough eggs, someone else was told similarly for Kurumi. At the end of the series, standing in line at the gachapon machine before Ai, is another girl, stockpiling eggs in service to her own personal cause.

Ai is the default protagonist for us, and she’s presented in a sympathetic way. Still, there are nods — the PA announcement that you always look the other way when a friend is being bullied, her heartfelt apology to Kurumi when she initially doesn’t offer Kurumi help — towards Ai being somewhat complicit in the system. This is in no way to blame Ai for Koito’s death (although she very obviously does this internally) but to reiterate that in a toxic system, everyone loses.

Ultimately, the solution that Ikuhara protagonists find is in creating true, genuine love with other people without the system getting in the way. It sounds simple but is remarkably difficult in execution. There are shades of this in the way that Kurumi talks about her former friends. They were people that told her things were cute, but weren’t true best friends. Having a best friend makes the so-called punishment of living (to borrow from Ikuhara’s Mawaru Penguindrum) a lot easier to bear. While Ikuhara’s series deal with large-scale societal and macro problems, the solutions are always found within the micro.

This is also where Yamada comes in. Yamada’s focus, since her directorial debut with K-ON!, has been on interpersonal relationships, primarily between young women. K-ON! goes from being a formulaic 4-koma routine to a study of genuine friendship between its five leads as she finds her footing visually. In A Silent Voice, she uses multiple visual languages — in particular, flower language — as concurrent emotional narratives, reinforcing Shoko Nishimiya’s deafness and Shoya Ishida’s inability to communicate despite being able to hear. Again in Tamako Love Story, Sound! Euphonium, and Liz and the Blue Bird, there’s a definitive focus on the micro of interpersonal relationships not in spite of but because of how outwardly mundane they are. She turns the mundane into something with infinite value to a select few — a reflection of how relationships work in real life.

Wonder Egg Priority mashes these ideas together in a beautiful premiere that shows its influences proudly, but never feels like a worse version of either one.

The opening sequence of Horimiya, a combined effort from series director Masashi Ishihama and Haruka Iizuka, is stylish and purposeful. It has a similar stylishness that the opening of the Ishihama-helmed Persona 5 anime adaptation had without a similar burden of the original source material. Characters are placed into boxes that don’t quite match up, or placed next to boxes and panels of things we don’t yet understand as an audience, but likely mean a lot to the person they’re placed beside.

Even when characters are in the same room, like the shot above of the two main characters (Kyouko Hori and Izumi Miyamura) with two side characters (Toru Ishikawa and Yuki Yoshikawa), none of the backgrounds, lighting, colors, or physical presence add up. They’re all in the same classroom, and same class, but don’t exist in the same space.

For a series that is all about the gap between one’s private and public life, this opening sequence is the perfect visual introduction.

Due to a similar focus on this gap, Horimya is most commonly compared to Kare Kano (His and Her Circumstances). For lack of a better term, I think Horimiya is a lot simpler and more intimate as a result.

Where Kare Kano focused on the upfront rivalry that Yukino Miyazawa has with Soichiro Arima, Hori’s perception of Miyamura lacks the same animosity and effort. Their classmates’ perception of who Hori is come from her genuine dedication to her schoolwork and natural attractiveness, but she isn’t actively trying to cultivate an image of perfection like Kare Kano‘s Miyazawa. When Miyamura stumbles upon Hori’s home life, Hori isn’t embarrassed that her perfect façade was cracked, she’s embarrassed that she failed to recognize Miyamura in the first place. And although there is a certain darkness that follows Miyamura (both visually in the series due to the direction and figuratively) keeping his piercings and tattoos hidden is more of a necessity due to school rules than an attempt to hide who he is. These aren’t secrets that either character are terrified of others’ discovering, but the natural way that they slide into the perception that others’ have of them at school is pragmatic (and in Miyamura’s case, a facet of his lack of self-worth).

The use of lighting in Horimiya, coupled with framing and the use of colored shadows that extend from Hori and Miyamura during key moments, there’s a lot going on with these two but it never seems forced. This is their private life and the casual intimacy of their relationship is already apparent at the end of the first episode, despite the lack of more traditional romance benchmarks that populate the majority of high school romance anime. Ishihama’s direction only adds to the intimate nature of their relationship on screen. Instead of wondering whether they’ll get together or how, we’re instead watching the private lives of two people casually merge together in a surprisingly realistic way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this in regards to my new broadcast job and my online existence in general. Within the frame of the camera, my life looks orderly and neat. The oddest things in my background are: a whiteboard with basic Korean verb conjugations organized by most-to-least used, a pencil drawing from my own drawing practice that I tacked up onto the wall, and Korean pop group Stray Kids memorabilia. These are all fairly curated. Nothing is going to appear in frame that I don’t want others to see (unless it’s a rare accident). Barring some sort of camera mishap, no one will know if the kitchen counter is covered in extra lighting equipment or that the computer rig itself takes up half of my living room area, with various cords already in an impossible snarl after just one week of use.

Similarly, this blog exists outside of my job, and frequently people don’t know that the Emily Rand who talks about League of Legends is the same person who blogs at Atelier Emily about Japanese cartoons. This is a purposeful separation, but not because these parts of my life are secret or meant to be hidden from each other. It’s just something I don’t mention because it doesn’t fit in that particular box. Someone who knows me intimately as a friend will know the reality of both of these boxes as well as what an idiot I am, or how I sometimes talk over people in a bad way, or my own massive self-esteem issues. Even writing about them here doesn’t cover the scope of who I am.

The other day, one of my friends shared a photograph of her life with her partner with the question of whether everyone else’s relationship is weird. The answer is almost always yes. Close relationships (platonic and romantic) are always “weird” to anyone not in that relationship with an intimacy that doesn’t translate to others. This, above all else, is what Horimiya understands.

If you were wondering why a shut-in haunted by her past trauma like Ai Ohto was represented by the natural positivity of a sunflower, the second episode of Wonder Egg Priority has the answer.

Sunflowers carry various meanings but the vast majority of them are overwhelmingly positive. In Japanese flower language sunflowers can mean loyalty, longevity, and adoration as well as a passionate love and brilliance. When we meet Ai, she’s anything but brilliant — a shut-in following her close friend Koito Nanase’s suicide.

Wonder Egg Priority‘s premiere threw Ai into the world of Kurumi Saijo, Kurumi was already aware of what was happening. She groans to Ai that Ai could have found a better place to hatch the egg, and has to explain the rules of the world to Ai. Presumably, Kurumi is someone who committed suicide and has a friend trying to save them, just as Ai is told she can save Koito. Kurumi has experienced others coming to her world and fighting for her. Having someone like Kurumi as Ai’s first otherworldly charge is necessary to introduce both the audience and Ai herself to the initial rules of the game.

“You want to change the self you hate.”

-Neiru Aonuma, Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 2

Before Ai dives into another world, she tries to talk to Neiru Aonuma — the girl who was buying a carry-on’s worth of wonder eggs — who cuts straight to the point. Ai isn’t necessarily doing this for Koito per se, she’s doing it because she feels guilty and responsible for Koito’s death. It’s telling that instead of denying this, Ai simply asks Neiru, “You too?” She’s already accepted her culpability and the eggs are a path to atonement. This is a dark place to be mentally and is supported by Ai becoming a shut-in.

(As an aside, although Neiru claims to love herself, she also says that she’s doing this for her sister, who she “let die” hinting that she’s lying or at the very least, feels a similar responsibility.)

When Ai is talking to Neiru, she’s shown against a backdrop of sunflowers, but almost always in the shadows. In fact, she stops walking to stay in the shadows for longer as she peppers Neiru, who has already walked ahead into the light, with questions. While others may have seen Ai as a sunflower once, it’s hardly how she sees herself. This is why the sunflower on her hoodie and her interaction with sunflowers even as a painted backdrop are shadowed or perverted in some way (stained by blood in the first episode).

The system is always the enemy, but Ai sees herself as an enemy too.

It’s fitting that the second episode of Wonder Egg Priority delves into the world of Minami Suzuhara, a gymnast who, unlike Kurumi, has no idea what’s going on. While Kurumi’s egg was tough to break — presumably because she’s been through multiple “rescue” attempts — Minami’s rolls off a counter and cracks without much force. When Ai gives up on ignoring Minami and tries to protect her, Minami immediately runs through a cloud of seenoevil monsters because she doesn’t know the danger they represent or the rules of the world.

Minami sees Ai as a hero, not only because Ai protects her by fighting the monsters but because of who Ai is. When Ai says that she’s a shut-in, Minami says that Ai has spirit and guts — Minami is unable to defy even the smallest of rules that break her routine.

This not only shows a difference in perception — Ai perceives herself as a failure, Minami sees her as a hero — but also what Ai can be to others. Taking this one step further, it shows what she could have been to Koito: a sunflower despite her many flaws.

The most powerful scene of this second episode is a flashback where we see Ai actively fail to help Koito when she asks. Ai hides in a locker, presumably at Koito’s request, to film the bullying that Koito has been enduring. She finds herself unable to do it because she’s afraid of retaliation. Like the seenoevils, the girls only attack Koito, not Ai. Again, Ai is culpable but in a way that’s easily understandable. She’s afraid of what she’s seen others deal with — or has dealt with the same in her own past — and opts to be a part of the system rather than actively fight it.

By contrast, in the worlds of others, she both plays at and then actively becomes someone who takes on the system by fighting others’ demons (Wonder Killers). However, it isn’t until she stops playing at being the hero and starts caring about what is happening to Minami as opposed to being a strong figure in Minami’s eyes, that Ai is able to defeat Minami’s monstrous gymnastics teacher. Alongside Ai’s actions, there’s the important shift in Minami’s own thinking from leaning into unfair punishment to helping Ai defeat her teacher.

This episode comes full circle, back to Ai’s developing relationship with Neiru. Although she denies it, Neiru appears to be in a similar situation to Ai. Neiru takes this on recklessly, buying a suitcase full of eggs and ending up in the hospital because of it and when the two egg arbiters in the garden point this out, Ai is quick to defend Neiru.

With Neiru, we see Ai at arguably her most genuinely heroic: trying to forge a new friendship.

If Wonder Egg Priority follows a similar path to its influences from Ikuhara and Yamada, the relationship she develops with Neiru will be one of the most important parts of the series.

Emma crosses a line in the second episode of The Promised Neverland‘s second season. It’s something that, thinking back on the trajectory of the series, seems inevitable, but is particularly striking due to the series’ consistent visual direction.

As an aside, these posts on The Promised Neverland are probably going to be more cinematography-based liner notes, and shorter than, say, Wonder Egg Priority in-depth posts.

Continuing from where the second season began, there’s a defining focus on presenting the group as a group, even in closed spaces like the underground maze of Sonju and Mujika. Like the premiere, when Emma and Ray are introducing ideas or addressing the group as the default leaders, there’s also visual shifts to individuals as they absorb the information, offer their own ideas, or affirm what Ray or Emma have said. The perceived threat of Sonju and Mujika is a quick visual hit of Ray and Emma surrounded before the  entire group of children is shown easily getting along with them, framed by the walls of the cave and warm firelight.

Episode director Ayako Kurata (who also directed the first season’s tenth episode) additionally turns this on its head a bit when Gilda turns and addresses Emma for neglecting her health and not consulting them. The entire group chimes in as well, especially when Ray’s tendency to “run off and die” is addressed. This reiterates group closeness and a newfound lack of isolation — an isolation born of having to obfuscate facts or flat-out lie if necessary while at Grace Field House prior to their escape — for both Emma and Ray.

The Promised Neverland also commits to making its information dumps somewhat visually interesting, with storyboarding giving us simple clues about what is going on. Above, Emma and Ray approach Sonju to ask him questions, crossing the barrier of a root in the foreground to join him as he answers them.

All of this is buildup to what happens in the final moments of the episode: Emma taking the life of a bird so she and the group can eat. Positioned against the backdrop of the children’s existence as food for the demons, there’s already an easy ethical comparison to make that could have come off as rote or campy. Instead, based on this buildup and the storyboarding, it ends up being a poignant turning point for Emma’s character.

Consider the visual entry into Emma’s first hunt: the vidar flowers — sans blood from the gupna ritual — positioned in the foreground with butterflies or moths. In a following shot, Emma is startled by a pine marten creature with a dead moth in its mouth. As Sonju praises her for her vigilance, the moth’s wings fall from the pine marten’s mouth into the river. This setup tells us what is about to happen with Emma while also reiterating, alongside Sonju’s guidance, that Emma and the rest of the group are still being pursued by monsters who want to eat them.

Vidar flowers take center stage several times throughout this entire sequence, framing Emma’s actions. They appear as a reminder of what Emma is to the demons, but also of the gupna ritual of gratitude that she later performs after killing the bird. It’s the same ritual she saw performed on her sister, Conny, that kicked off her entire escape from Grace Field House. Perhaps most importantly, when Emma asks Sonju to teach her how to hunt, she specifically says “How to kill a living thing,” already reiterating that she is somewhat aware of the gravity of what she’s about to do in relation to what she’s seen done to her sibling (and presumed done to her close friend, Norman). We never see the moment Emma’s arrow wounds the bird, but instead a droplet of water falling is shown, followed by full, blossoming vidar flowers floating in the river.

This gravity remains throughout the entire process, even as Emma hesitates before shooting and immediately becomes ill after piercing the bird with the flower.

As she is reminded of what happened to Conny, Emma begins another journey down a familiar path of knowing something she cannot share with her siblings. The major difference this time is that it’s an experience she cannot fully impart to others (like the reveal that they’re fodder for demons). In an episode that spent most of its time visually reiterating that they’re a group now, the separation of Emma in the final moments resonates.

Wonder Egg Priority is a show that knows its flower language. The series has used specific flowers to introduce it’s second and third episodes in previews as a framing device for the events of that episode.

For the second episode, it was sunflowers painted behind Neiru and Ai during their walk together. In its third episode, Wonder Egg Priority uses an orange lily in the preview introduction of Rika Kawai.

Orange lilies have several meanings and these often conflict with each other, varying greatly depending on context, presentation, arrangement, and specific type of orange lily. For example, tiger lilies (which are only orange and have black spots on them) represent wealth. Orange lilies can also mean confidence or pride.

In Japanese flower language (and also in common western flower language), an orange lily represents revenge or a deep-seated hatred. It’s a specific and purposeful flower to bring out for Rika’s introduction, especially when it’s followed up with a field of white lilies for purity, pure love, innocence, and chastity, as well as the short-cut for girls’ love. They look orange in the sunset, but are visibly white.

White lilies here hint very early in the episode that Rika’s hatred goes hand-in-hand with a purer type of innocence or a more genuine feeling than the nonchalant freeloader attitude she espouses.

Rika is overtly self-interested, pushy, and disrupts the already precarious budding friendship between Ai and Neiru. She calls people wallets and takes advantage of Ai seconds after meeting her. She immediately cuts to Ai’s self-esteem issues by pointing out her eyes, and always seems to not-so-coincidentally say the “wrong thing,” or the exact right thing to bring out Ai’s lack of self-worth.

Their meeting is framed by hydrangeas (another flower commonly featured in anime) which can mean thank you for understanding but also a heartless nature or overwhelming pride. Rika’s outward attitude isn’t entirely a façade, but it’s also a necessary shield between her and the rest of the world that she immediately places between her and others, even as she inserts herself into their lives like she does with Ai. Her self-harm is hardly shocking, and it’s presented in such a mundane way — this is definitely the last time, she tells herself in the bath — that speaks to a well-ingrained habit rather than a one-off event.

The person that Rika hates the most is herself, and most of her hatred towards Chiemi comes from that self-loathing although there’s also a purity to that hatred as well. All Chiemi did was give Rika support and in the face of that type of love, Rika rebuffed it, especially when it became obvious how much Chiemi was sacrificing.

Rika still speaks of Chiemi in a derogatory way — calling her fatty, making fun of her sweaty palms — but also in the way that Chiemi was at her fanmeets, not how Chiemi was when she died, emaciated. It doesn’t excuse her remarks, and I wonder if the show is going to continue to use the character of Rika to show that impulse to bully others, but it makes sense given who Rika is.

Last week with Minami, Ai leaned into an idea of what a hero should be — telling Minami that she’ll save her, swinging around on a golden lasso made of Minami’s gymnastics ribbon, and that’s without considering how Minami automatically found Ai’s shut-in status as an admirable defiance of societal rules — but wasn’t able to finish off Minami’s gym teacher until Minami helped and stood up for herself.

The most important conclusion from Episode 2 is that Ai simply cannot save others without their input. Expanding the scope of this thought — it wasn’t Ai’s job to save Koito, nor was it her fault that Koito committed suicide, despite the fact that Ai obviously blames herself. The true piece of Ai’s heroism isn’t her swinging around gymnasium rafters but her burgeoning friendship with Neiru. It’s in these developing relationships where she’ll have the chance to “save” anyone at all. Again, if living is the punishment, then finding solace in building genuine relationships with others is the way to get through it all.

By contrast, this episode highlights the deep-seated hatred (both towards one’s self and to others) that comes hand-in-hand with someone close to you dies, never mind them committing suicide. The orange lilies appear again at the end of this episode, following Ai’s admission that she hates Koito just a bit for not confiding in her and hates Koito for leaving her. This accompanies her self-hatred for not helping Koito when she feels she should have, which matches Rika’s similar feelings towards Chiemi.

All Aca and Ura-aca do is play go and lie.

Let’s talk about gacha games.

With the booming popularity of Genshin Impact as the latest in a long line of gacha games the inevitable discussion of whether gacha games are “good” or “bad” was recently revisited once again on various social media platforms, most of which don’t have a format that encourages nuanced discussion.

Gacha games deserve nuanced discussion because they are so manipulative and predatory. It’s easy from the outside to tell someone that they should stop playing a game because it’s rigged and they’re spending too much money. Part of the issue with saying this is that it places the burden solely on the player in a system designed to exploit them even before they begin to play the game. That isn’t to say that we should absolve people of personal responsibility, but all too often people are blamed first rather than the system that capitalizes on them and their perceived “weakness.” Selling the idea that getting caught up in something is always a weakness on the individual’s part allows for unfair systems to thrive because the backlash almost always falls on the individual, not the system designed to keep them at a disadvantage.

(As unfortunately necessary aside, I’m not passing judgment here whatsoever and I hope my writing conveys that.)

In looking at the influences of Wonder Egg Priority, it’s apparent from the first episode that the not-so-coincidentally-framed-as-a-gacha-game system is rigged. The question isn’t whether it’s a scam, but what type of scam is it? Aca and Ura-aca reiterate that the first egg is free, but the rest of the eggs will cost you. In that same first episode Kurumi Saijo tells protagonist Ai Ohto that nothing costs more than a free gift.

The most important part of a toxic system is the illusion that you can somehow win. This mechanic is what draws people in to not only trying to play the game, but upholding the unfair ruleset of said game. A victim can also be a perpetrator and a perpetrator can also be a victim. This is a remarkably tricky needle to thread. For this series to tell the story it presumably wants to tell, it needs characters like Rika Kawai, but it’s hardly incomprehensible why a viewer would be completely put off by her. (Again, to point at one of Wonder Egg Priority‘s directorial influences, it’s not a surprise that two important characters in Sarazanmai were cops.)

There has to be a hook and the promise of a reward. It can’t be bad all the time otherwise people would immediately see how insidious the system is.

For Ai and her fellow fighting counterparts, the reward seems obvious: saving people close to them who committed suicide. And yet, as early as Wonder Egg Priority‘s second episode, Neiru Aonuma points out the real impetus for Ai to save her friend Koito Nanase. Ai is struggling with her own feelings of guilt and is lured by the idea of saving Koito for the sake of absolving herself. Similarly, Rika wants to save her fan Chiemi because Chiemi starved herself and died due to Rika’s words. Regardless of whether those words were spoken in a backhanded attempt to help Chiemi (who was shoplifting to give Rika more money) they directly led to her death. Rika’s intention is worth mentioning in light of the toxicity of the system, but it doesn’t absolve Rika from personal responsibility.

This brings us back to the two mannequins in the garden: Aca and Ura-aca, who take a more forward-facing role in the fourth episode. They are the arbiters of the system, responsible for luring young women into this unwinnable game with free eggs and keeping them there with the promises that they can save their friends. The last time I personally saw such defined arbiters of a toxic system was the Judgmens of Kunihiko Ikuhara’s Yuri Kuma Arashi — three men (the only men in the series outside of one young boy) who were responsible for approving or rejecting whether women could enter other relationships with women with multiple caveats and terms.

Wonder Egg Priority‘s fourth episode makes it abundantly clear where Aca and Ura-aca’s loyalties and thoughts lie with insulting commentary towards Momoe Sawaki and women as a whole. The most important part of it is that Aca and Ura-aca’s thoughts begin with a grain of truth (suicides are different between genders) but warp it into a poison that helps uphold their system. Suicides for various people are different due to the way that society treats them, but this nuance is lost with the way that Aca and Ura-aca brush it off alongside gendered statements that they want these young women to take as fact. Societal context is important and the words of these two mannequins allow for little to no context by design.

Again, this a really difficult needle for Wonder Egg Priority to thread and I won’t blame viewers for being turned off by the fourth episode. However, if there’s one comfort above all others in this series, it’s Ai herself.

In every episode, we see Ai cutting through societal bullshit and befriending people simply because she wants to. She pushes past Neiru’s quiet exterior easily. Despite Rika’s brash nature and bullying tactics, Ai calls on her to be truthful about Chiemi and makes an effort to understand her. Ai comforts a crying Momoe, and recognizes her as a woman.

Ai is truly heroic in the way that she rushes to befriend and help others — not in the way that the system tells her to, but simply because that is who she is. As Neiru says, “You’re hopeless and lovely that way. We need someone like that sometimes, or we’ll never be saved.”

There’s a lot going on around these girls, and it’s inevitable that the system will further pit them against each other now that they’ve grown closer. If they’re going to push past that — especially with deeply personal tie-ins like Momoe’s family name being the same as the suspicious teacher that Koito was seen with — it’s going to be by genuinely befriending each other.