“There’s nothing to be scared of. They only come after me.”

Kurumi Saijo, Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 1

The gathering of Ai Ohto, Neiru Aonuma, Rika Kawai, and Momoe Sawaki under a streetlight at the end of Wonder Egg Priority‘s fourth episode marks the end of the series’ first arc. With the four major players of its perverse game assembled, the series can now take a turn into further exploring not only the individual trauma of Ai and her counterparts but the societal pressures that drove them to enter a losing battle to bring their friends back to life. And the pressures that drove their respective charges to commit suicide.

Here, the series already gives us an answer of how these girls can defy the system. Regardless of how many eggs they break, their friends aren’t going to return but what they can do is forge new friendships with each other — bonds that can hopefully stand whatever tests the system has in store for them going forward. This is presuming a lot and is based on Wonder Egg Priority‘s obvious influences, but the groundwork is all there.

With that in mind, here is a closer look at the monsters in the system of Wonder Egg Priority and what they can tell us about Ai and her newfound friends.

Episode 1 — The Domain of Children

An introductory episode does a lot of heavy lifting for any anime series, but this goes doubly for a show like Wonder Egg Priority, which is dealing in thematic nuances, magical realism, and (presumably) dismantling existing societal norms. The Mawaru Penguindrum premiere had opening and closing monologues from two of the three main characters that to this day are stuck in my brain and memorized. Wonder Egg Priority doesn’t have similar monologues but it is a visual assault that’s just as memorable, with pieces that only become clear after watching later episodes. Given the series’ technical prowess thus far, if it continues on its current trajectory and sticks the landing, this first episode will continue to be a font of information on successive watches.

Although we don’t know this until later in the series, The Domain of Children gives us a clear summary of not only how the basics work but of Ai’s personal world: the world she will always go to when fighting for each “egg girl” or as the series calls them “captured maidens.” Ai’s world is her school, where her friend Koito Nanase killed herself. We learn that Ai is a shut-in, and presumably hasn’t been to school since Koito’s death, but returns to this scene of her trauma every time she fights — the domain of children.

“All of you at school today, a question: What should you do if a classmate is being bullied? You got it! The right answer is: Pretend not to see!”

-announcement over the school PA system, Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 1

Kurumi Saijo, the first captured maiden that Ai has to “save,” is the perfect introductory charge. No sooner does she hatch from the egg that Ai breaks than she dusts herself off and complains about the fact that Ai opened the egg in the bathroom. Kurumi has a nonchalant air about her that speaks to the fact that this is hardly the first time someone has showed up and fought. Her words inadvertently touch upon Ai’s guilt when she talks about how her attackers will only attack her — recalling Ai’s memories of how she herself was a bystander to Koito being bullied. Not-so-coincidentally, bystanders or “seenoevils” are what the smaller monsters in this world are called. Alongside the larger “wonder killers” that Ai is conceptually introduced to in the second episode, seenoevils are the smaller jabs — the thousands of cuts that build upon each other and lead to a death.

Although the concept of a wonder killer has yet to be introduced in this episode, Kurumi’s wonder killer is likely this short-haired girl with an axe, in tandem with the two faceless girls by the locker. Kurumi talks about how she had friends, but none of them were best friends — people she could actually trust and open up to. The driving force behind her suicide seems to have come from multiple bullies rather than one concrete source.

In Ai’s flashbacks this episode we see that Ai was previously bullied and Koito reaches out to her first. When Ai tells Koito that she shouldn’t hang out with her, Koito immediately pushes back and tells her that the thing Ai is being bullied for, her heterochromia, is beautiful before asking Ai to be her friend. These memories lead to Ai’s choice of taking an active role in fighting for Kurumi, even after she previously had guiltily apologized to Kurumi without interfering or trying to stop the seenoevils.

A few other important bits of this episode are the pen that Kurumi leaves behind which becomes Ai’s primary weapon. Additionally, this is the first time we hear Ai say her fighting catchphrase, “Now I’m mad!”

Most importantly, we see how Ai’s relationship with her captured maidens is going to work: she is looking for a close friend, and her interactions with the girls in this world always reflect that, from Kurumi onward.

Episode 2 — The Terms of Friendship

Ai’s greatest strength is her ability to reach out to others, and we see this on full display in Episode 2 through her interactions with fellow fighter Neiru and the captured maiden of the week, Minami Suzuhara.

Unlike Kurumi, who acted as a guide to Ai in this strange new world of monsters, Minami is confused and knows nothing about what is going on. It’s up to Ai to play (and later truly become) the hero in this situation.

Once again, we’re in the school, the setting of Ai’s trauma. All of Ai’s flashbacks to Koito start somewhere on the school premises and here we’re shown a scene where Ai finds herself unable to film Koito being bullied for fear that retribution would also fall onto Ai herself. Ai’s fear is both palpable and relatable, as is her guilt. It makes sense that she wouldn’t want to immediately invite bullying back into her life. She hates that Koito is being bullied, but also doesn’t want to become a target again. This reiterates themes introduced by Kurumi’s monsters in the first episode: which were more scattered and faceless young women, presumably classmates of Kurumi’s or even her friends. I know in my personal experience, the harshest bullying I received was from people in my own friend group.

By contrast, Minami’s bullying can be pinned onto one primary source: her gymnastics coach. Through Ai’s flashbacks we’re also told that one of the reasons why Koito is being bullied is perceived special treatment from one of their teachers, Shuuichirou Sawaki.

Others have brought up that the gymnastics teacher’s transformed wonder killer form resembles a kerakera-onna or other youkai specifically related to and/or representing older women as monstrous or the feminine as monstrous. This furthers the framework established in the first episode that Wonder Egg Priority is specifically dealing with women’s societal issues. Minami’s coach berates her for things out of her control, like body changes during her period, and then says it’s tough love, reiterating that it’s Minami’s fault. In a system that automatically pits young women and women in general against each other as enemies to keep them from being allies, it’s pointed commentary both visually and baked into the language used.

Before Ai can say her, “Now I’m really mad!” line, Minami interrupts Ai and assures the teacher that it’s all her fault. Minami agrees with the teacher that she’s not good enough or dedicated enough, and submits herself to the teacher’s abuse, causing Ai’s weapon to immediately de-transform. It’s not until Minami accepts that the treatment from her coach isn’t deserved and says goodbye that Ai is able to say her line and eliminate the monster. She also uses Minami’s lasso with Minami instructing her on how to avoid being beaten up en route to defeating Minami’s teacher.

This sets a precedent and makes it clear that the captured maiden needs to accept that the situation was not their fault before Ai vanquishes their wonder killer. The title The Terms of Friendship is perfect for this episode since the “terms” framed are those set by things beyond the girls’ control (hint, hint: the social system). It’s heavily hinted that Minami was separated from her peers due to her coach’s treatment of her. While she was being abused by her coach, Minami was also perceived by her peers as receiving special treatment and isolated from them, unable to make friends. Friendship here is all-too-often on the terms of others.

While the first episode put in relief that Ai’s only true friend was Koito (following up on Kurumi’s speech about how she didn’t have real friends) this second episode frames adults’ involvement and how they affect or hinder these friendships.

Episode 3 — A Bare Knife

This is the first episode where we see a world outside of Ai’s, which gives us a lot of context into Ai’s world by extension.

Former junior idol Rika’s world is a field of white and/or orange lilies near a lighthouse with her former fan, Chiemi, in the center of the field. Ai’s statue of Koito is located on the roof because that’s where she killed herself. Rika’s Chiemi died (killing herself through slow starvation) and Rika saw her last in a bed of funeral flowers. These lilies also change color from yellow to orange depending on lighting or setting, which changes their meaning from purity/innocence or a return to innocence in death (as funeral flowers) to a clear message of “I hate you.”

Unlike Ai, who befriends her captured maidens as part of her fight and that friendship becomes a large part their goodbyes before they disappear, Rika gets a simple “thank you for protecting me” here before the person she protects in the first few moments of the episode vanishes. This is also (presumably, based on the monster’s voice and lines) the first time Wonder Egg Priority shows a predatory man in the role of a wonder killer although he’s dispatched quickly by Rika. Later in the fourth episode, Rika is shown to receive a similar idolization from two girls that she and Ai save that she did from Chiemi. Rika has a different relationship to Chiemi than Ai has to Koito and it’s reflected in their settings, their lines, and the way that the captured maidens interact with them.

Later in the episode Ai and Rika revisit Rika’s world and are tasked with protecting two zealous idol fans named Miko and Mako who killed themselves after their idol committed suicide. Their wonder killer is another fan of the same idol who was an older woman and a stalker. Again, ageism towards women rears its ugly head and its also perpetuated by Ai, Rika, and the two idol fanatics.

“I understand. There was a part of me that resented her. We were friends so why didn’t she talk to me? If she’d asked me to die with her, like those girls did, I’d…I’d have…”

-Ai Ohto, Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 3

Although the connection of a different type of stalker as these girls’ wonder killer can seem tenuous — after all, in the eyes of non-idol fans these two types of fan are likely equal — Ai’s words regarding Koito tie everything together. It makes sense that these two young women are afraid of this older woman who became a stalker or to borrow a Korean idol fandom term, a sasaeng. It’s like a look into their own future that they’ll now never have. Wonder Egg Priority continues it’s balance on a (watch the pun, I’m so sorry) knife’s edge by showing how this toxic system that again, pits women against each other, continues to do so. The entire character of Rika, who lashes out and bullies others while also having been obviously mistreated herself, encapsulates this.

With every captured maiden, Ai has flashbacks to Koito and learns something about herself. Here it’s the genuine resentment she has towards Koito for not confiding in her prior to her death. There’s a real hint that Ai may have considered killing herself alongside Koito, or following Koito regardless because Koito was Ai’s first and only friend at school.

The bare knife of the episode title refers to Rika directly and how she hurts herself while also hurting others, but also is a direct reference to Ai’s words here and Miko and Mako who killed themselves to follow their idol.

Episode 4 — Colorful Girls

Momoe Sawaki adds several more layers of nuance and societal issues to an already packed slate. Where Ai is looking for a best friend (a reflection of her relationship with Koito) and Rika’s interactions reflect her relationship with Chiemi as Chiemi’s idol, Momoe’s catchphrase is an angry “Get lost!” and she takes on the role of a dashing protector who earns the love and/or admiration of her captured maidens. This references her relationship with the girl in her statue, who committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train — Momoe’s setting is a train and a train station. It’s no coincidence that Momoe presents as “Momotaro” a boy hero from Japanese folk stories and her use of both “watashi” and “boku” as well as the one flashback to the person she’s trying to save points to confusion around her gender and possibly sexuality. The only reason I’m using she/her pronouns at all is because Momoe seems discontent with the fact that others perceive her as a boy and is happy when Ai immediately recognizes her as a girl.

From its opening moments, Momoe’s introduction is much different than Rika’s because she is listening to Miwa and giving Miwa space to process her trauma before jumping into fighting her monster. Coupled with Miwa’s role in luring out her predator so Momoe can kill him, it’s again a very delicate balance that I believe Wonder Egg Priority pulls off, but just barely. The words of the wonder killer are disgusting and reflect deep-seated misogyny against women — a theme that continues throughout this episode.

I cannot stress enough that Wonder Egg Priority is continuously showcasing how the system is responsible for nearly everything that’s going on, with the caveat that it could all fall apart if the show doesn’t more decisively show that by series end.

All of Momoe’s fights are interspersed throughout the episode with Ai and Rika’s continuing fight against the two idol fans’ wonder killer in Rika’s world whose words reiterate the one from Momoe’s in that women have an expiration date. This ties into the fears of the two idol fans and the words of Minami’s coach in the second episode. To defeat this wonder killer, the two fans step up and play the idol’s music, give Ai their lightsticks to use as weapons, and at the end of it all, proclaim themselves big fans of Ai and Rika.

Before her death, the wonder killer asks the two of them, don’t they want to go colorfully? The otherworldly fights are often explosions of color, especially as paint trails follow the small seenoevil monsters wherever they go. It’s a loaded question to ask in a show that’s specifically talking about suicide, especially when the two captured maidens of this episode killed themselves to follow their idol, Ai expressed similar feelings around Koito’s suicide if Koito had only asked that of her, and the gendered words on suicide of Aca and Ura-Aca in the garden.

Although Neiru Aonuma has been a constant of Wonder Egg Priority since the series’ second episode, she’s rarely been a series focal point. Rika Kawai and Momoe Sawaki each received their own introductory episodes that revealed their personal reasons for fighting as backdrops for Ai Ohto (the default protagonist of the series to this point).

Meanwhile Neiru has quietly been at Ai’s side the entire time. They meet at the end of the first episode after Ai has her “one free roll” so to speak and Ai immediately tries to reach out to her with mixed results. By the end of the second episode, they’re friends — a reflection of Ai’s desire to foster genuine friendships and a continuation of the relationship she builds with Minami Suzuhara, the egg girl or captured maiden of that week. Neiru is used as both a foil to Ai and the person to whom Ai grows closest as the series progresses. Presented as someone who rarely allows people to affect her emotionally, Neiru allows Ai to see more of her than Neiru’s personality would initially suggest, reflecting both of their loneliness.

When Neiru first meets Ai, she’s gathering multiple eggs from the gachapon in the garden and stuffing them into her rolling suitcase. Setting the precedent of flowers being used to introduce and frame the four fighting girls in Wonder Egg Priority, there are colorful daisies at her feet. Daisies mean faith in Japanese flower language, but can also mean hope, renewal, or the ability to keep a secret in western or Victorian-era floriography.

If we’re continuing to use gacha terms to frame the system in Wonder Egg Priority, Neiru would be the series’ whale. This facet of Neiru’s character is introduced in the first episode and becomes increasingly important when considering how each girl fits within the system.

Neiru is frequently presented alongside Ai for direct comparison and insight into Ai’s character or well-being. Here, the sunflowers represent Ai, but they also show who Ai will become to Neiru as a friend: someone like a sunflower with all of the passionate love, brilliance, and radiance that its meaning suggests. As Neiru tells Ai in the series’ fourth episode, Ai is too trusting of other people, but she’s lovely for being that way. There’s a sense that Neiru truly appreciates not only Ai’s friendship but who Ai is in her most genuine moments — once the pressures that surround them subside and they’re simply allowed to be friends together.

There are a few visual nods to Naoko Yamada’s directorial style in Wonder Egg Priority‘s fifth episode, Neiru’s focus episode, but none struck me as much as the use of fireworks over the bridge in Neiru’s dreamworld.

In Yamada’s adaptation of A Silent Voice, fireworks are the first “flower” — firework or hanabi is literally fire flower — shown in the series as one of the main characters is about to kill himself. A firework goes off in the distance and interrupts him. Later, when another character attempts suicide, fireworks sound in the distance.

For Neiru in Wonder Egg Priority fireworks go off every time she vanquishes someone’s wonder killer. Her otherworldly setting is the bridge where her sister killed herself (another possible visual nod to A Silent Voice or just Yamada in general from episode director Shinichirou Ushijima) and illuminate a field of funeral flowers in front of her sister’s statue.

Two specific flowers frame Neiru in the garden in this episode. First what appear to be white lilacs  behind her feet (which are also shown in the flower field with her sister) as she describes why she can’t opt out of the system to the other girls. Like many white flowers, white lilacs represent a purity or innocence but one specifically dealing with childhood. Neiru steps into her shoes with white lilacs in the background as she explains that her sister stabbed her before jumping off of a bridge.

In the second episode, Neiru tells Ai that she’s different, that she’s not doing this to absolve herself from guilt like Ai is. We don’t yet know how much to trust Neiru as a narrator to her own life — that’s not to say that she’s an untrustworthy person, but that in a series like this these girls are likely to be unreliable narrators — but she does appear to be fighting to solve the puzzle of her sister rather than the overwhelming sense of guilt that permeates the actions of the other three.

The second are lilies of the valley, which in Japanese flower language can simply mean sweet, or a promise of happiness. Due to their poisonous nature (and use as an actual poison) they can also mean sadness, pain, or loss after a death in western flower language. Both of these meanings apply here as after their heavy conversation in the garden, Neiru finds herself separated from the other three girls. Neiru likely feels the loss of their friendship (especially Ai’s friendship) wholeheartedly but this could also be seen as a promise that their bond will be mended eventually.

As for the separation itself, it’s no coincidence that Neiru is in the highest economic standing of the four and also the one least likely to opt out. Similarly, although Rika’s actions and communication skills are often suspect, it also makes sense that as the poorest member of the group, she would be the first to question the system. Again, I don’t think this is an indictment of Neiru or anyone else, but yet another nod from Wonder Egg Priority of how these things affect and influence people.

Private rooms and home decor can be used in pointed ways to tell us more about the characters they belong to and Wonder Egg Priority once again seems to be borrowing a lot from Kunihiko Ikuhara’s attention to detail in all of his series — particularly Yuri Kuma Arashi and Mawaru Penguindrum.

So, let’s overanalyze Ai Ohto’s room. Why? Because while it’s not quite Lulu Yurigasaki from Yuri Kuma Arashi level, it does say a lot about Ai, her mental state, and the concept of being safe in Wonder Egg Priority.

When Ai is first introduced to the audience, it’s outside of her home where she’s wandering around at night. We later learn that Ai is a shut-in who doesn’t attend school and stays at home all day. She’s frequently framed as someone on the outside looking in, both in shots like this above, and even as someone going through a separate routine outside of the house in the series opening.

The first time Ai is shown in her room she is in her bed, which has a blue canopy over it, giving it a more closed-off feeling. Looking at the bed from the outside, it’s completely enclosed and on the top bunk, above a bottom that we never see because it’s obscured by a curtain. Initially I thought that this was to make room for a desk underneath, but Ai’s desk is later shown next to it, so we have yet to discover what’s underneath her top bunk bed.

Ai’s room is the most colorful room in the apartment she shares with her mother. Every other space is devoid of decoration, or sparsely-decorated. As Ai goes about her routine in the first episode, it purposefully shows that she stays at home (for reasons we don’t yet know at that time) but also that her home is neat, tidy, and uncluttered, despite the fact that it’s only a few rooms in total. The fact that Ai has her own room at all when she lives with only her mother is notable. In Episode 5, Ai tells her three newfound friends that her mother is highly capable of anything she does but that’s also why her father left. It’s another example in Wonder Egg Priority‘s lengthy list of ways that women are perceived and how, no matter what they do, even a positive perception is easily poisoned. Be capable but not too capable. Don’t age.

While Ai’s mother is shown as someone who not only cares for Ai but is also overwhelmingly delighted at the idea that Ai has friends, she doesn’t ever go into Ai’s room. The series makes it a point to show that Ai’s mother and Ai’s teacher, Shuuichirou Sawaki, are firmly on the outside of Ai’s “world” by placing them outside of her room at all times. It’s purposefully a bit awkward and shows Ai as someone who is distant from her mother, despite the fact that she speaks of her highly. Ai’s mother receives people in the foyer and gives them food, but isn’t shown entering Ai’s room until this preview of the sixth episode (which likely means it’s going to focus on Ai’s relationship with her mother or at least tell us a bit more about how they interact with each other).

Even before Ai was a shut-in, the series gives us a sense that her room was her safe haven. Ai didn’t have any friends before Koito Nanase, and Koito is visually shown as the only person who dares to enter Ai’s room, going as far as to peer inside the top bunk canopy while Ai is curled up in her blankets, trying to shut out the world. Following Koito’s suicide, Ai becomes a shut-in who essentially confines herself to her room at most times, but still looks out of her balcony frequently and goes out at night when no one is watching. This clicks with the rest of Ai’s personality — she’s a sunflower, a bloodied one, but a sunflower nonetheless. She wants to have friends, even as she pushes Koito away initially.

As for Ai’s room itself, it’s decorated with colorful flags, maps, plants, and paintings. The flower on her bookcase is notably a calla lily — a common funeral flower that represents purity, holiness, and faithfulness in western flower language as well as rebirth and resurrection. In the Grecian meaning, it’s also associated with the goddess Hera.

The purple and blue flowers in one of Ai’s paintings appear to be morning glories, which are also shown beside Ai in the series’ opening sequence. In Japanese flower language, morning glories mean willful promises or a brief love (since morning glories only last a day) and have an added meaning of love in vain or unrequited love from Victorian flower language.

“You got scared and ran back home, but there was no place for you there, was there?”

-Wonder Killer in Neiru Aonuma’s world, Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 5

The girls’ meeting in Ai’s room is prefaced by this lovely gem from the fifth episode’s cold open. While Neiru fights off a wonder killer monster in her world, it talks about how one eventually returns to their toxic situation, even if they try to escape, because there’s no place in the world there for them. Episode 5 is all about finding a place, and discovering that the places provided aren’t particularly safe. Wonder Egg Priority gives the four girls Ai’s room, where they talk and bond over cake, but even this is strained with the discussion of Koito and Sawaki, who Momoe defends since he is her uncle. Coupled with Ai’s flashbacks to Sawaki painting her and Koito, everything creeps in eventually, even in spaces that were once considered if not safe than at least somewhat sheltered from the rest of the world.

Wonder Egg Priority presents the girls with other options in this episode — an abandoned arcade/bowling alley that belongs to the egg arbiters, Aca and Ura-Aca, and the garden itself where they buy eggs from the gacha machine. While both of these locations allow the girls to open up to each other, it’s the girls themselves who provide the space, not the spaces themselves. The garden in particular acts as a backdrop where the flowers can say specific things about the girls at that time, but is obviously not a safe haven because it’s the domain of Aca and Ura-Aca, arbiters of the system. The screenshot above shows the girls perfectly arranged for a portrait, but this is quickly shattered, showing the fragility of their developing relationships with each other. Again, if they’re to overcome this system, they’ll have to continue the arduous and risky task of truly getting to know one another, especially because there is no physical space for them.

Is Shuuichirou Sawaki all that bad?

I’ve seen this question asked fairly frequently as Wonder Egg Priority has continued to air. Sawaki, who is protagonist Ai Ohto’s teacher and visits her house frequently, hasn’t technically done anything wrong. Even in the series’ latest episode, his desire to date Ai’s mother (which is his most egregious action thus far) isn’t bad per se. Most of Sawaki’s actions are framed as suspect, but could still be written off as over-caution or a negative bias on Ai’s part due to his presence in Koito Nanase’s life (and, presumably, her death).

Although Kunihiko Ikuhara isn’t involved in Wonder Egg Priority‘s production, his influence is present throughout the series. I wanted to take the time to talk a bit about Ikuhara characters found at schools and how Wonder Egg Priority is framing Sawaki in a very specific way.

Spoilers for Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mawaru Penguindrum, and Yuri Kuma Arashi.

The position of a teacher, or school advisor, or someone in a position of power at a school is reserved for a certain type of individual in Ikuhara’s works: someone who is hung up on their past. More specifically, someone who has lingering childhood trauma or someone who feels the loss of something they cherished when they were young. As someone who now looks over children in a school environment, they desperately try to regain whatever or whoever they lost (often by controlling children), and all of their actions are dictated by this attachment.

They are chained to the school (childhood, children) just as they are chained to their past.

Revolutionary Girl Utena‘s Akio Ohtori is the first example of this teacher or any adult working with children at a school archetype in Ikuhara’s series, save Professor Souichi Tomoe in the Ikuhara-helmed Sailor Moon S season. As principal of Ohtori Academy, where protagonist Utena Tenjou and others attend school, Akio is directly in charge of everything that goes on at the school, and is also the person who initially inspires Utena to become “a prince” by appearing to her as his former self, Prince Dios. He exploits his younger sister, Anthy Himemiya, and leverages his power over her, perpetuating the toxic duelist system with Anthy, the Rose Bride, as the reward.

The most important thing that Utena ensures that you cannot forget is that Akio was Dios once — at one time he was seen as heroic in the same way that Utena is seen as heroic (albeit with her and our ideas of heroism challenged along the way) throughout the series. Akio’s existence as Akio in contrast to Dios is important as it shows that, like the duality of women as witch to be fought or princess to be saved, he cannot be “all good” but also is not “all bad.” There’s an idea handed down by the framing of a prince or a villain that once a prince is corrupted just a little bit, they suddenly move from good to bad. Innocence is something that is firmly lost, not slowly poisoned in grey areas. The existence of Akio as Ohtori Academy’s leader, and the leader of the cycle that Utena breaks — even after she discovers that there is no prince and even after Anthy betrays her — places him firmly in a grey area because he was Dios, despite the fact that he himself rejects anything but a strict duality.

As viewers we’re trained to see things in “good” or “bad” without exploring the nuances of why or the ways that societal mores impose their rigid value systems on us. Utena challenges all of this.

At the end of it all, Akio remains in his tower at Ohtori Academy, unaware of how Utena has broken the cycle and her impact on Anthy, as Anthy finally leaves the school. He remains imprisoned by his past.

Keiju Tabuki appears years after Utena in Ikuhara’s 2011 work, Mawaru Penguindrum as the high school teacher of leads Kanba and Shouma Takakura. He is also the love interest of Ringo Oginome, the sister of his deceased childhood friend Momoka Oginome.

Unlike Akio who is cool, distant, and presented as someone undeniably in power to the point of discomfort, Tabuki is first presented as a harmless bird-watching dork. He’s outwardly oblivious to Ringo’s machinations — which include obsessive stalking, and breaking into his home among other things — and becomes engaged to another one of Momoka’s childhood friends, Yuri Tokikago. The initial hint at Tabuki’s inner turmoil comes from his appearance in Penguindrum‘s opening sequence, where he’s presented as a caged bird.

Everything in Penguindrum comes back to the 1995 Tokyo Subway Attack which caused Momoka’s death. Momoka is a heroic figure in Tabuki’s eyes, saving him from his abusive relationship with his mother with her friendship. Tabuki becomes stuck in that moment where Momoka dies and is later inspired to harm the Takakura siblings out of spite for their parents’ involvement in the attack. Although Tabuki isn’t in charge of the cycle like Akio was in Utena, he affects an oblivious air, manipulating those around him while remaining stuck to his past. At the end of the series, both he and Yuri are shown musing about why they were left behind while Momoka moved on.

Yuriika Hakonaka’s family name means “inside a box,” already hinting at her role in Yuri Kuma Arashi. Like Akio and Tabuki, she is imprisoned by her past and placed in a position of power at school — Yurikuma‘s Arashigaoka Academy. Once close friends with Kureha Tsubaki’s mother, Reia, she grew jealous when Reia married and killed her. Yuriika is mentally and emotionally stuck in that moment.

Her office wall is made of drawers or boxes where she keeps things for herself that will never age. When she was rescued as a child, she was immediately taught to be selfish and keep the things she loves in boxes so they won’t lose their innocence. She herself is placed in a box by her savior. Yuriika uses Arashigaoka Academy to preserve what she was taught as a child, despite her obvious guilt and the pain of losing her closest friend Reia by her own hand.

Looking back on it now, Yuriika is one of the more fascinating characters in Yurikuma because of how she’s so forwardly presented as someone who is undeniably a victim of the system while also an active participant in charge of — as much as any woman in Yurikuma can be in charge of anything within it’s toxic cycle — perpetuating it and ensuring that it continues. In a world where women’s relationships with other women are so obviously policed by men (the three Judgmens specifically) Yuriika does all she can without ever realizing any sort of life outside of the system.

On the surface, Shuuichirou Sawaki hasn’t done anything technically wrong. He encourages Ai to feel better about her heterochromia — the primary reason why she’s bullied at school. He shows up at her house to drop off printouts and see how she’s doing after Koito’s death which is a little invasive but helpful for a house-bound student trying to recover from a traumatic experience. He adopts cats according to his niece, Momoe. And if he wants to enter a relationship with Ai’s mother, sure it’s a little weird because she’s the mother of one of his students but they’re both consenting adults and he hasn’t been shown doing anything untoward.

However, as with most things in Wonder Egg Priority, it’s all about the framing, especially when considering what else this series is attempting to tackle: suicide, bullying, and societal stereotypes all as they related to young women. It’s no coincidence that Sawaki is one of the few men in this series outside of the wonder killers that the girls fight and Aca and Ura-Aca (who are arbiters of this toxic system in the first place). Everything Sawaki does can be initially presented as innocuous, but with further examination is all suspect. Hugging a student in an empty classroom as he does with Koito is weird. Drawing one of his students (Ai) for an art competition while bringing up the very thing she’s self-conscious about in the process is manipulative. And there’s no reason why he couldn’t drop off the printouts with another student or, if he was that personally concerned, do it in a way that’s less invasive. Sawaki frames his actions by saying he’s doing these things for Ai, but the actions themselves are manipulative in a way that places the burden of forgiveness unfairly on Ai herself.

We don’t see (or haven’t seen yet) whether Sawaki is hung up on some event in his past, but the fact that he’s in a position of authority at a school could hint to that. His treatment of Ai is suspicious especially after the fifth episode where he’s shown sketching her in preparation for a painting. He effectively pins her to the sketchbook both literally and figuratively, by capturing her likeness. Others have pointed out obvious parallels to the René Magritte episode of Penguindrum where Yuri Tokikago’s childhood trauma comes at the hands of her artist father.

When I see people fervently hoping that Sawaki is somehow a good person — or at least not a completely awful and exploitative person — I’m reminded of myself when I first watched Utena. Until the final episode, I kept wishing that Akio would become that true prince — that instead of perpetuating the cycle, he would somehow end it as Dios. Obviously this is not the point of Utena, and Utena taught me so much about my own preconceived ideas of what a story or fairytale should be by showing me what it could be. I hope that Wonder Egg Priority continues to excel and ends in a way that causes a similar revelation for those rooting for Sawaki to be “a good guy.” Again, Wonder Egg Priority can still stumble in a lot of ways, but like many pieces of the series, this particular framing of Sawaki is reminiscent of — and arguably more heavy-handed than — Ikuhara’s works.

A/N: As for Ikuhara’s latest work, Sarazanmai, the two similar characters to this archetype actually end up being policemen for very specific and obvious reasons. I’m not going to mention them here since, while they have some similarities, there are slight differences and this is more about adults that work at schools.

While the garden of Aca and Ura-Aca places the four leads of Wonder Egg Priority against various floral backdrops to hint at their moods and personalities, Rika Kawai’s otherworldly flower field changes depending on her emotional state.

The idea that Rika’s field reflects her feelings or situation at that time was established back in Rika’s introduction episode, which opens with an orange lily and then transitions to the entire field of now white lilies surrounding Rika’s fan, Chiemi, who she’s trying to save. Orange lilies (especially in Japanese flower language) represent revenge, pride, or hatred. By contrast, white lilies represent purity, innocence, and chastity in addition to being a common funeral flower and a visual shortcut for girls’ love. Rika’s flower field is shown to swap between the two fairly frequently as a reflection of how Rika is feeling in that moment. Sometimes she hates Chiemi. Sometimes she loves Chiemi. Sometimes she hates herself. The color of the lilies change based on Rika’s mood, and this line is further blurred by how Wonder Egg Priority uses the sunset and natural lighting over the field to change their color and the tone of a scene.

In this same episode, the field presents itself as full of evening primroses or anemones when Ai first arrives in Rika’s world. If these flowers are evening primroses (which is the more likely option in my opinion), they’re also a callback to the primroses at Koito Nanase’s feet following her suicide. This would make the most sense as a reflection of Ai in Rika’s world, but also applies to Rika herself. Evening primroses mean desperation in Japanese flower language, with added meanings of a young, volatile or inconsistent love from Victorian flower language. Ai’s relationship with and to Koito remains a mystery even now with the series in its seventh episode, but these flowers point to a charged relationship between the two despite their obvious friendship. As for Rika, she’s presented as prideful and capricious due to her background not only as a junior idol but as a product of a disruptive home environment.

As Rika grapples with her relationship with her mother in this episode, her flower field is full of pink thistles. Most thistle meanings come from western flower language and many of them conflict with each other, which makes it the perfect choice for Rika here.

The most common meanings of a thistle include aggression, toughness, pain, weakness, or inconvenience due to it’s prickly physical nature and the fact that it’s both a flower and a weed. Victorian-era gifts of thistles meant a warning to someone not to interfere or the act of interference and intrusion. Rika is outwardly prickly and here we see her easily fall into the idea that this cult leader or teacher of her egg world charge can solve her problems, similarly to how she’s shown as believing that knowing which of the five men her mother showed her is her father will somehow solve her self-loathing. The idea of Rika as “weak” is a particularly pointed message in this episode as she struggles with physical self-harm as an outlet for her emotional pain. She knows it’s wrong but she does it anyway.

Thistles are also a symbol of a resilient nature and of overcoming adversity. In parts of France they’re seen as a flower or symbol of protection and in Celtic lore they’re a sign of determination and strength as well as bravery. These attributes are also shown in Rika’s turtle partner, Mannen, who protects her from what would be a deadly blow from the wonder killer of the day. Rika overcomes a massive amount of adversity in this episode and although she continues to grapple with her own self-hatred and anger at her mother, she also reaches a state of acceptance that’s similar to Ai’s acceptance in the previous episode.

Moving on to some other flower language that Wonder Egg Priority has thrown at us over the past few weeks, Ai’s acceptance of Koito’s death and promise to return to school is accompanied by marigold flowers in the series’ sixth episode.

Marigolds meant an ill-treatment of a loved one in Victorian flower language as well as grief, despair, and mourning. They are also associated as a flower of the dead — particularly in Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration where marigolds are used to honor the dead. In Buddhism, marigolds are used as flowers of offerings to deities and along with lotus flowers are one of the more sacred flowers in the religion. Just as the thistles in Rika’s field show her slowly overcoming and coping with her existing trauma, Ai’s marigolds come at a time where she’s shown as finally accepting Koito’s death with a renewed focus to discover what happened to her closest friend. Previously, Ai was too scared to find out what really happened to Koito, but here the marigolds symbolize her acceptance and honor of Koito’s life as she moves forward.

Wisteria (immortality, longevity, a lasting and devoted love) in the garden became an important framing device over the past two episodes as well. I particularly loved how it was used to frame all four girls at the end of the latest episode as a nod to their growing friendship and strengthening of their bond.

Momoe Sawaki’s addition to the Wonder Egg Priority cast in the series’ fourth episode also introduces two major hiccups to the series’ narrative. The first — and seemingly at the time, more pressing one — is that of Ai Ohto’s teacher Shuuichirou Sawaki and the fact that he is framed as predatory by the series itself, is linked to the death of Ai’s friend Koito Nanase, and just so happens to be Momoe’s uncle.

The second is of Momoe’s gender presentation.

It’s no coincidence that in the series’ tenth episode, Momoe’s focus episode, Wonder Egg Priority returns to both of these plot threads.

When Momoe is first introduced to the rest of the cast, it’s framed very specifically through visual and flower language. First Wonder Egg Priority shows Momoe walking by herself at night and then Rika Kawai walking into the flower garden owned by Aca and Ura-Aca in the opposite direction during the day. When Rika walks in, she’s framed by the typical wisteria but also by what are most likely hibiscus flowers in the background. These hibiscus flowers continue to frame both Neiru Aonuma and Rika as they sit on a park bench together when Momoe arrives.

Hibiscus flowers are tied to femininity, specifically that of young women. In Victorian flower language, a hibiscus flower meant that the giver was specifically recognizing delicate feminine beauty. In Japanese flower language, hibiscus flowers typically mean a gentle nature. Here, Wonder Egg Priority first gives us someone who — despite the fact that she noticeably dresses in a more “sporty” way with a varsity jacket and jeans — is expressly feminine in Rika and then contrasting that with Momoe’s boyish appearance all against the backdrop of hibiscus flowers. Momoe is shown as taller than both of them, with her head out of the frame while the two sit on opposite sides of the bench, and initially they mistake her for a boy. This leads to a rigid (and controversial) conversation between the two Acas regarding women and men.

After this exchange, Momoe is shown crying at her masculine-presenting reflection until Ai shows up and immediately recognizes her as a woman. This foreshadows events in Episode 10, aptly titled “Confession.”

When looking at a feminine-presenting version of herself in the train window, Momoe smiles and looks proud. This is how she’s introduced in the cold open before we find out that she goes on an awful date with one of her Instagram followers: a gay man who thought she was a boy. This immediately re-orients the conversation around Momoe, how she presents herself, and how others perceive her due to that presentation. Although she’s not physically present in the garden scene, Momoe’s visual transformation is juxtaposed with a small change that Neiru makes to her hair — all done against the backdrop of hibiscus flowers once again.

Momoe’s charge in this episode is Kaoru Kurita, a trans boy who was abused by his teacher. Kaoru is framed by the colors of the trans pride flag and a Rubin’s vase on accompanying advertisements. These are two clear nods to the fact that Kaoru is a trans boy. The flag is self-explanatory. The Rubin’s vase is an ambiguous psychological test by Edgar Rubin which presents an image (typically of a vase in the center and/or the profiles of two people facing each other) where you can only perceive one image at once.

Kaoru immediately sees through Momoe’s typical Momotaro bluster — Momoe’s way of presenting herself as a masculine hero to her charges that plays into her physical presentation — and identifies Momoe’s actual name by guessing. He’s so secure in his gender, even with the disgusting abuse he had to go through, that his bravery leads to Momoe’s own confession: she’s a girl and she wants to be recognized as one.

Their post-Wonder Killer chat in the train terminal is poignant and affecting. Momoe recognizes Kaoru’s bravery and receives what is presumably her first kiss from a boy because of it. Her blushing reaction and “shhhhh” sign to her pet is telling, especially given how hesitant she was in all of her other interactions either a masculine hero to her charges or someone that girls at her school “didn’t mind” was a girl.

The most contentious character in Wonder Egg Priority continues to be Ai Ohto’s teacher, Shuuichirou Sawaki. Outside of what exactly is going on with Aca and Ura-Aca’s seeming quest for immortality, who is on what side, and (in my opinion the most and only important part of this) how young women’s pain is exploited by a variety of people in powerful positions, the most spirited discussion of the series has revolved around Sawaki. More specifically, whether Sawaki is a benevolent, perhaps a bit too-involved but still well-meaning teacher. Or if he’s predatory and trying to forcibly insert himself into Ai’s life.

In my other post on the series’ tenth episode, I mention that Momoe Sawaki’s induction into the group of egg fighting girls introduced two specific wrinkles to the series. The first was a discussion of gender, which Episode 10 — pointedly titled “Confession” — returned to as a framing device for Momoe in her own focus episode. The second was that of Sawaki and the fact that she’s his niece and therefore has a positive opinion of him, going as far to vehemently defend him to Rika Kawai when Rika insinuates that he could have taken advantage of Koito Nanase by potentially impregnating her, indirectly leading to her suicide.

Despite being firmly on the side that Sawaki is, at best, someone who is unintentionally predatory due to his place in society relative to the young women he teaches and at worst, a legitimate predator, it’s important that he remains ambiguous, especially if the truth trends more towards the worst. After all, most predators aren’t always bad, even to their victims, during every moment of the day. In most cases, part of the manipulation is that they will express genuine concern or love, casting doubt over any overtly predatory actions that they take.

Observing Sawaki’s actions in a vacuum, without paying attention to any floral language, body language, or Wonder Egg Priority‘s cinematography, he hasn’t done anything technically wrong. The most overtly off-putting thing without considering context would be the fact that he draws her after school in an art studio where the two of them are presumably alone.

However, the visual framing of Sawaki is specific and sinister. He’s initially presented as an outsider, in tandem with Ai’s mother. The series makes it a point to present them as a unified front, even while he insists that he’s only dropping off print-outs in Episode 1. He goes as far to show up and comfort Ai’s mother when Ai is in the hospital at the end of the same episode, and by Episode 2, the two are united, as pictured above. Many of his shots include him looming over Ai, presented in sections not entirely within the frame or as specific body parts, often through something like a doorway or window.

(As an aside, others in various community discussions have mentioned that his broach is a bird of prey, which could be another visual nod towards him being a predator.)

In addition to the visual framing and his actions against a very specific backdrop of a young woman having committed suicide — a young women whom he embraced in a classroom which is wildly inappropriate even if he had the best intentions — there is also the flowers that the series specifically chooses for Sawaki in Episode 10.

The first is a vase of daisies on his desk when Ai goes to see him. Purple daisies in western flower languages can mean pride, beauty, or fascination. Daisies typically represent a return to innocence or childhood and in Japanese flower language symbolize faith. I’ve already spoken at length about how Sawaki follows the Kunihiko Ikuhara mold set by men like Revolutionary Girl Utena‘s Akio Ohtori of characters who work in a school being trapped by some (usually traumatic) event in their childhood, or a longing to return to their own childhood. The daisies on Sawaki’s desk support this theory.

Yet, the coup de grace is Sawaki’s painting, which Ai goes to see at the end of Episode 10. It features an aged-up Ai surrounded by red and white camellia flowers.

Sawaki has never been subtle in his pursuit of Ai. Even if his end goal was only an innocent model for his painting, he purposefully sought her out and drew her while commenting on how he wants her to embrace her beauty — particularly her heterochromia for which she was bullied in school.

First, there’s the fact that he aged her up in the painting all while making comparisons between Ai and her mother and speaking about how much he loves Ai’s mother. It’s no coincidence that in these shots, Ai looks more like her mother than ever with her hair pulled back in a similar way and a longer dress rather than her tomboyish sunflower hoodie or school uniform. Coupled with his pursuit of Ai as a model, this scene is remarkably uncomfortable to watch. It grows even more so with knowledge of what camellia flowers mean.

White camellia flowers were featured prominently in Violet Evergarden by another Wonder Egg Priority directorial inspiration, Naoko Yamada. There they painted a backdrop for the love story between a fourteen year-old princess who is being married off to an older man that she met when she was a child. In Japanese flower language, white camellias carry a message of waiting or divinity. Like many white flowers they can also mean purity and additionally have symbolism around the love between a mother and child. By contrast, red camellia flowers represent romantic or passionate love and desire. The combination of the two, against the backdrop of the older Ai in the painting and Ai’s dress could easily carry the meaning that Sawaki is waiting for Ai to become of age to pursue her romantically. He tells her specifically that it’s her when she grows up and even draws the comparison between Ai and her mother for Ai, telling Ai that soon she’ll be a strong and beautiful woman like her mother.

Even if Sawaki isn’t waiting for Ai in that way, his actions as framed by the series are at best, ambiguously inappropriate.

Wonder Egg Priority has always paid specific attention to lighting when Rika Kawai is onscreen.

In the midst of her many quips about how she would look beautiful in a flower field but others wouldn’t, Rika’s flowers reflect her state of mind and most importantly, change color based on the lighting. Sometimes the lilies in her field appear white — purity, innocence, potentially a funeral flower for the girl she is trying to save, Chiemi — and sometimes they appear orange, reflecting hatred (both towards herself for treating Chiemi the way she did among other bouts of self-loathing and towards Chiemi for the girl’s persistence).

This same technique is used several times in the series’ eleventh episode, which also brings in myriad flowers and related flower language that Wonder Egg Priority has been using since its debut.

Leading off with Rika hints that the series will be using lighting to transform the colors and/or patterns of flowers that appear in this episode. Immediately following the cold open, Ai Ohto is wandering around the Acas’ flower garden at night and is introduced by the above shot: blue hydrangeas. Hydrangeas also have ties to Rika — purple and pink hydrangeas introduced her initially in the garden — reflecting her pride but also her desire to understand others and heartfelt emotions towards others.

While hydrangeas generally in Japanese flower language mean pride, blue hydrangeas specifically represent an apology or coldness. Despite knowing that the true colors of these hydrangeas (pink/purple) they’re definitively blue thanks to the lighting here and act as a transition from Rika to Ai in the garden as a precursor to the introduction of Frill.

Frill is later shown walking around the garden after this shot of the same hydrangeas that introduced Rika to Ai in the series’ third episode. Pink hydrangeas specifically symbolize a heartfelt emotion towards others and purple hydrangeas can mean a desire to understand others (or someone specific if given as a gift.)

These flowers are particularly interesting in relation to Frill who is a rather callous creation of the Acas. They brought her into the world without much thought or consideration as to what having a young woman just entering adolescence would entail. As anime blogging friend Steve Jones pointed out in his post, it’s telling that even in their own narration (which probably isn’t to be trusted as the whole truth) the Acas still come off badly.

The hydrangeas aren’t the only flowers to frame frill. The Acas’ garden has always acted as a revolving backdrop where the flowers rotate behind the young women who visit to pick up eggs depending on their current mood. Wonder Egg Priority draws several visual parallels between Frill in the garden during flashbacks and various shots of Ai in the garden.

First up is wisteria, which Ai walks underneath before going inside the Acas’ house. Wisteria later appears when Frill walks through the same garden in a flashback and more generally, Wonder Egg Priority uses wisteria very frequently to frame the girls while also using it as their entry point to the garden itself. With its meaning of immortality and long-lasting love, it could be seen as a transition. Additionally, Victorian flower language gives wisteria the meaning of a warning against being overly-passionate in love or over-eager. Given that Frill is seemingly immortal and frozen in a volatile period of adolescence, it’s also effective as an (unheeded) warning to the Acas’ callousness in creating her in the first place.

Frill also appears where Ai initially appeared in the garden at the end of the series’ first episode next to a purple blazing star (liatris) flower. These flowers can mean a desire to restart or redo something as well as an apology in addition to happiness or joy. With these conflicting meanings it’s appropriate for Ai during her first entry to the Acas’ world in Episode 1 and also for Frill in the garden — either as a message that the Acas regret their decision or that Frill herself (a confused adolescent AI) desires a fresh start.

Another instance of lighting changing what a flower looks like thereby changing its meaning, occurs in Azusa’s wedding flashbacks. The flowers used at the wedding are white roses, but when they appear in a pew next to frill they look yellow. IN Japanese flower language white roses represent innocence (like many white flowers) as well as devotion and silence whereas yellow roses represent jealousy (by contrast, in western flower language yellow roses mean friendship). Frill’s jealousy and misunderstanding of her relationship with the two Acas is a major plot point and what ultimately drives her to kill Azusa.

Azusa herself is framed by specific flowers that reappear around her daughter Himari. The white anemones represent sincerity in Japanese flower language although anemones more generally can mean fragility or forsaken love in western flower language. The prickly pink flowers I’m less certain about but most resemble a protea flower which carries a meaning of uniqueness, transformation, and courage. Both women died as a result of Frill’s jealousy and both women were held in high esteem by the Acas.

As an aside, the fact that the flowers appear in a near-identical position and frame mother and daughter similarly, it could showcase how the Acas saw them similarly.

White orchids appear in both the Acas house next to the board of egg girls and again in a flashback on a counter where the Acas worked when they were human. Again, like many white flowers, white orchids carry a meaning of innocence and purity but also reverence or refinement. In Japan specifically they’re seen as a luxury and were favored by royalty.

Finally, white lilies once again frame the entirety of the episode from their first appearance in Rika’s flower field in the cold open to a funeral flower for Azusa as shown above. White lilies carry a meaning of purity and chastity in Japanese flower language (which is why they also became a symbol for girls’ love although that meaning doesn’t apply to this episode) and are a common funeral flower. They’ve appeared in relation to Ai as early as the series’ first episode.

The opening shot of SSSS.Dynazenon is purposefully reminiscent of its predecessor, SSSS.Gridman. Anyone who has watched Gridman immediately will recognize the sequence of shots. This time, these snapshots begin with a nod to students’ various backpacks, which were used to define and color-coordinate characters by their tokusatsu archetypes (or defy them) in Gridman.

With that visual language brought over from Gridman, Dynazenon and director Akira Amemiya and staff are moving beyond an homage to kaiju and tokusatsu series past and looping in their own universe and visual language established in Gridman.

(major spoilers for SSSS.Gridman)

From its opening sequence, Gridman is defined by an oppressive summer atmosphere. The air feels heavy and humid thanks to choice shots and wide blue skies pressing down on the city and ground. The heat affects the main characters’ emotional states. Power lines box both characters and the city itself in a bubble, which visually nods to the fact that everything in Gridman is a creation of Akane Shinjou.

By contrast, the atmosphere of SSSS.Dynazenon is not tied to a season — if anything it would be tied to twilight or the liminal space between day and nighttime — but is no less oppressive.

Fences and various bridges or railings take center stage in Dynazenon. Most shots of the city focus on the city itself being fenced in. Rather than a sunny blue sky pressing down onto the city, it’s a web of fences and structures that keep the city separated in its own bubble and characters separated from each other. Yomogi Asanaka is introduced while being visually boxed in by his own classmates, and this motif of him being surrounded appears multiple times throughout the episode.

Even when parts of the city or whole buildings are floating in the sky due to an unseen, kaiju-related force, they’re introduced in a way that makes them look like fences. In the next scene, a suspension bridge keeps this same floating skyscraper visually at bay.

In this way, Dynazenon plays with our expectations as sage viewers of Gridman. One of the hallmark shots of Gridman was that of the aforementioned summer sky. Here, Dynazenon inverts that by placing a twilight evening sky beneath the floating skyscraper reflecting the city, disorienting us as much as possible both due to the circumstance of a skyscraper floating and the established visual language from Gridman.

It’s telling when the series does decide to open itself up visually, most notably with the introduction of one of its main cast members: Yume Minami. Yume is obscured by fences and an umbrella for a large portion of the episode, but her introduction is nerve-wracking and precarious — immediately establishing her internal confusion and loneliness.

She is seated on top of a building, isolated from Yomogi and his classmates who are gossiping about her. The first shot of Yume is of her feet, dangling over the edge. Unlike the fenced-in portions of the episode, Yume is almost floating above everything, her path to the ground unobstructed.

This shot and introduction becomes more incisive when Dynazenon hints later in the episode that Yume’s sister killed herself and it’s one of the reasons why Yume carries her sister’s ankhs — as a related aside, ankhs are the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for life — and stands others up constantly. Her sister stood her up once and Yume still isn’t over it.

Dynazenon also builds on what Gridman established by using tokusatsu color-coding for its characters (the red ranger, the blue ranger, the yellow ranger, et. cetera). The backpacks introduced in the very first sequence of Dynazenon establish a visual through-line. Gridman itself was building on age-old color archetypes from tokusatsu series past by coding Yuuta Hibiki as the red ranger, Rikka Takarada as the blue ranger, and Shou Utsumi as the yellow ranger. With Gridman and pre-established tokusatsu archetypes already a part of viewers’ visual understanding, Dynazenon keeps us guessing with Yomogi, Yume, and Gauma’s eye and hair colors as well as the way they’re dressed. Every one of them has elements of red, blue, and yellow.

One doesn’t have to have watched SSSS.Gridman to understand SSSS.Dynazenon, just as one doesn’t have to have watched older tokusatsu or kaiju series to understand Gridman. It simply brings another visual language based on that knowledge as a parallel narrative running alongside the protagonists’ actions. Dynazenon is building on what Gridman began visually in its various homages to past series while also creating a visual language of its own.

Following a three-month wait for a finale that was half-recap and half-nonsense, Wonder Egg Priority will go down in anime history as yet another promising passion project that was stymied by poor planning — exacerbated by the general state of the industry. Wonder Egg Priority‘s production woes have been thoroughly documented and were especially apparent in the twelfth and thirteenth episodes of the series. The thirteenth episode is particularly egregious given how it not only fails to make important emotional narratives of the four main characters resonate but how it inexplicably introduces even more details about in-universe mechanics that few asked for and were not tied whatsoever to any of the aforementioned emotional narratives.

What was most noticeable to me in these two episodes was the lack of flower language which, until that point, had become a visual story that ran parallel to the girls’ own individual character arcs. The use of both Victorian and Japanese flower language was so consistent — even in the expository Episode 11 that I personally disliked — that the absence of it in the final two episodes is jarring.

I’m still trying to work out my own feelings and disappointment regarding Wonder Egg Priority, but wanted to revisit flower language in the series one last time, through the opening animation sequence.

The most noticeable flowers in the opening sequence are narcissus or daffodils, which have a variety of meanings — including their mythological tie-in with their vain Greek namesake. Due to the story of Narcissus, these flowers can be seen as representations of vanity or unrequited love. Since they’re one of the first flowers to bloom in spring, they are also seen as signs of rebirth or new beginnings. More specifically in Japanese flower language, they mean respect.

In addition to daffodils, there is a small dandelion that appears on the pavement. It’s at the point in its lifespan where it’s putting out seeds. Like many yellow flowers, dandelions can represent happiness. They are also said to represent absolute faithfulness to a partner if given as a gift. It can also mean perseverance or overcoming challenges, and the seed state specifically is said to grant wishes if you blow on the dandelion puff to scatter the seeds.

As Ai is walking along a dirt path, we see baskets of morning glories in the foreground. Morning glories are specific flowers with many power meanings, most revolving around the fact that the flowers individually only last for a day before wilting. In Victorian flower language, morning glories were given as gifts of never-ending love, but also as reminders of mortality or unrequited love, especially if laid at someone’s grave. Due to a Chinese myth, morning glories also carry a strong meaning of both unrequited love and a never-ending desire for someone else.

In Japanese flower language, morning glories represent a willful promise to someone or a bond of love between people. As a framing device for Ai, this could hint at her devotion to others (she’s shown as someone who will do anything for not only her friends, but even people she’s just met) but also her unrequited feelings.

Yasuhiro Takemoto left behind a legacy.

There isn’t an artist in the world who doesn’t think about how people will view their art. If they say that they’ve never thought about this, then they’re lying. Once you release something into the ether, it’s no longer wholly yours, but yours and others. And the other people who experience your art may find it deeply personal to them — just as personal as it was for you to create it. Kobayashi-san chi no Maid Dragon (Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid), wasn’t the only work that Takemoto left behind but it will likely be the series for which he’s most remembered. It was what he was working on before he died, along with at least 35 other people, in the July 2019 Kyoto Animation Arson Attack.

I wasn’t prepared to see Takemoto’s name as a co-storyboarder in the credits today of Maid Dragon S (the second season of the series). I didn’t think I’d tear up when watching this first episode, but I did. I had returned to Kyoto Animation’s works last year through Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto-Memory Doll — and that, in and of itself, was affecting — but the first episode of Maid Dragon S was an entirely different flood of emotions.

The acrid bitterness of loss mixed with the genuine sweetness of the series itself (even amidst some hilarious jokes and also some potentially problematic bits that also plagued the first season).

There was no better person to pick up where Takemoto left off with Maid Dragon S than Tatsuya Ishihara. The two worked together closely for years, with Takemoto studying under Ishihara for some of it before emerging alongside his peers as yet another important figure at Kyoto Animation with directorial credits on Lucky Star (after Yutaka Yamamoto was taken off the project after four episodes), The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, High Speed! ~Free Starting Days~, Amagi Brilliant Park, Hyouka (a personal favorite), and of course, Maid Dragon. Ishihara’s initial foray into Maid Dragon is a transition. It’s not exactly the same but it’s familiar, comfortable, and most importantly, moving forward.

I didn’t know Takemoto personally. Yet, it feels like I did know him in a way.  

I wonder a lot about how people will remember me.

Most days I wake up and think about how little I’ve accomplished in life. I don’t yet have a body of work I can point to and say, “I’m proud of this. This is me.” Becoming a broadcaster has only exacerbated my anxiety about what little I’ll leave behind. If I died tomorrow, I’d likely be remembered for a few days before inevitably fading into the background. There are better broadcasters. There are better interviewers. There are better writers. Esports would remember be for about a week before moving forward and I’d slowly disappear to time.

The answer to my worries about having a legacy at all can not-so-coincidentally be found in Maid Dragon itself.

At its emotional core, Maid Dragon tells the story of an immigrant family navigating the pitfalls of their new home and a found family for lonely office drone Kobayashi. Kobayashi’s subway conversation with Ilulu about their differences hits particularly hard in the wake of the arson attack, Takemoto’s death, and Ishihara continuing this project. At the same time, it’s a logical path for Maid Dragon S to explore and something the series has been touching upon the entire time: finding common ground and making lasting connections.

Because the people that would remember me would be the people I’m closest with and this is something that is really difficult for me to accept. Like Kobayashi, I’m prickly and standoffish. I don’t allow myself to truly grow close to many people and when I do, I’m bad at showing how much I care about them. And I do care about them deeply.

The complexity and occasional simplicity of these emotions was what made the first season so poignant and that continues in this first episode of Maid Dragon S. It’s a world where the most important thing that someone can say after a beautifully-animated fight between two chaos dragons is, “Shall we go home?”

The opening sequence to the original Love Live! School Idol Project still charms me to this day. It was made back when Love Live! was a budding multimedia adventure and not the successful franchise it is today, the time period of its latest iteration, Love Live! Superstar!!. It features a shot that’s actually rotated in a spinning motion like you would rotate a photograph in photoshop. It comparatively janky, clunky, and sets an odd tone of fourth-wall-breaking stage musical style that the series continues for the entire season, despite the fact that it never returns to this Episode 1 moment where protagonist Honoka Kousaka breaks out into song like a musical.

It’s perfect. Director Takahiko Kyougoku knows how staging works, which isn’t something every idol show gets. He’s aware not only of how to use the figurative camera to give idols a better stage that even the most competent music show wouldn’t be able to do. And most importantly, he intimately knows the liminal space between the reality of a stage show and what it’s trying to project onto an audience, something that myriad accomplished movie directors have failed at miserably when turning musicals into movies. The first episode of the original Love Live! not only features Honoka’s movie musical moment, but a fantastic sequence featuring established idol group A-Rise as they perform on a dark stage that quickly becomes a pocket space that they own before cutting back to a stunned audience, watching them on a large screen.

You can see similar attention to the grandeur of Kyougoku’s panning shots in the opening sequences of Land of the Lustrous, which has a similar staged quality that draws the audience in immediately, and even his work on Korean pop-idol group TWICE’s music video for “Candy Pop.”

In the first episode of Love Live! Superstar!! we see this same exact understanding of staging. Kyougoku revisits his own franchise and uses similar staging to give Kanon Shibuya her own movie musical moment, all while presenting a world that’s both completely different from Love Live! School Idol Project and wholly familiar.

Kanon receive a similar panning up shot to introduce her singing, like Honoka does when she opens the first episode of Love Live! by singing “Susume→Tomorrow.” Unlike Honoka, Kanon isn’t in a bid to save her school (it already was saved and reopened). Instead, she’s dealing with being rejected from her school’s music program due to her own stage fright. Where Honoka’s sequence introduces her and the school in tandem before her “record scratch, you may be wondering how I got here” jump, Kanon is noticeably separate and has her moment while walking to school.

Kanon puts on her headphones and just starts singing in the street. Her feet hit the ground as a transition for her spin, which involves her animated as spinning rather than Honoka’s hilarious picture rotation in the first series. This entire sequence is a nice call-out to the first series while making it Kanon’s own as she gets more and more into her singing to the exclusion of all else. Superstar!! even pulls off the gag of how odd it would actually be for a girl to burst into song in the streets before using two passerby’s legs as the closing curtains for Kanon’s stage. It then hilariously transitions to the title of the series as Kanon joins the masses walking to school in the morning, and shows the episode title on a bus as she walks by.

The visual message is clear. Everything is Kanon’s stage if she wants it to be. Now it’s about adopting that same fearlessness that allows her to loose herself in the music while on an official stage.

With Keke’s help and encouragement, it’s obvious that she’ll get there. This is bookended by the end of the series, with a transition from Kanon yelling that she still loves singing, to singing the song that’s already begun to play (with her on vocals) and transitioning to the first episode’s ending sequence with the rest of her future idol group.

Was this post inspired solely by the fact that Tuxedo Mask has an attack in the manga called “la smoking bomber” and reading way too far into that?

You decide.

A brief history of Naoko Takeuchi and her relationship with fashion

Sailor Moon‘s creator, Naoko Takeuchi, drew inspiration from high fashion advertising and runway shows — as well as movie advertisements, figure skating and figure skating costumes, the Takurazuka Revue, and myriad other pieces of art or marketing like any artist — for costuming the Sailor Scouts. There are entire posts that source her fashion inspirations, as well as other specific influences.

In the Sailor Moon manga, there are several full recreations of prominent fashion pieces from the early-to-mid 1990s that showcase her love of high fashion and, more specifically, French fashion designers. These include but are not limited to: Hotaru Tomoe/Sailor Saturn and Koan in 1992 Thierry Mugler, Setsuna Miou/Sailor Pluto in 1992 Chanel, Calaveras in in Christian LeCroix, the Amazoness Quartet in 1991 Yves Saint Laurent, and most famously Christian Dior’s 1992 Palladino dress as Princess Serenity’s signature look. Not only was Takeuchi aware of fashion, but she enjoyed it so much that she used it in her own art frequently and paid attention to visible trends in high fashion.

French singer and Yves Saint Laurent muse Françoise Hardy in the Le Smoking tuxedo

The Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking tuxedo suit and 1960s fashion

Many fashion historians point to the 1960s as a transformative decade in women’s fashion, especially in the United States and England. Mass production of garments combined with easier access to media (the rise of television) developed in an environment of social change, technological discoveries, child labor laws*, and second-wave feminism. The decade also marks a shift in marketing for women’s fashion, especially as ready-to-wear lines and department stores allowed for a relative flattening of socio-economic status regarding new or on-trend clothing. Where previously, girls and young women would have worn more childish versions of adult trends and adults were the ones with buying power, teenaged girls became the more sought-after market. Women’s fashion evolved from the late 1950s-style mid-calf, full-skirt silhouette that was still popular in the early 1960s to a dramatic rise in hemlines with the introduction of the miniskirt by the mid-to-late 1960s.

British designer Mary Quant introduced and popularized it in the mid-1960s although French designer André Courrèges (credited with the go-go boot) was also experimenting with this hemline and shorter, miniskirt-style hemlines had also appeared in 1950s science fiction films. The 1960s look that’s often presented in films or characterized as “60s” is often the mod look (complete with go-go boots or slim and short vinyl dresses in bold, geometric prints) or a more stereotypically “hippie” look that was actually more on trend towards the late-1960s/early 1970s.

What’s most important to know about the fashion of the 1960s is that it was a time of experimentation where what would have previously been considered high-fashion styles only, more easily trickled down to women of varying socio-economic statuses due to multiple factors including streamlined mass production methods and the rise of children and young women as valuable advertisees.

From a 1969 copy of the Japanese magazine, Young Woman (source)

In Japan specifically, post-World War II fashion was heavily-influenced both during the time of the American occupation until 1952, and in the years that followed as a steady pipeline of American and western movies were made more readily-available in Japan, surpassing pre-war popularity as fashion trend-setters***. The film The Red Shoes caused a red shoe trend following its 1950 Japanese screening and Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina (shown in Japan in 1954) caused a trend of “Sabrina pants and shoes” (form-fitting capris and flats). This was hardly the first time American or European media had influence on Japanese women’s fashion, but accessibility due to mass production and a similar shift to ready-to-wear as a focus meant that these trends could be adopted more quickly by more people**. A 1967 visit from Twiggy to Japan also had major influence on Japanese women adopting shorter hemlines and other British or American trends.

Along with the modernist shift dress — which presented a more androgynous silhouette — menswear and pants became more popular in the west. (This isn’t to say that 1950s and earlier women didn’t wear pants, I just mentioned Sabrina‘s influence in the previous paragraph, after all.) In 1966, French designer Yves Saint Laurent created the Le Smoking tuxedo for women, giving a high-profile, high fashion version of a powerful garment for men, and making it fit a women’s silhouette and body better. Le Smoking was controversial at the time and panned by many critics, but it helped further blur the line between masculine and feminine silhouettes while using a significant garment (the tuxedo) which was already seen as a signal of style (and class) for men. It became a pioneer garment that helped inspire the women’s pantsuit and statement suits for women.

“La Smoking Bomber,” Tuxedo Mask, and Mamoru Chiba

The tuxedo is a key part of Mamoru Chiba’s costume and identity in the Sailor Moon manga. It’s also just something that Takeuchi thought would look cool on a good-looking guy (looking attractive and feeling good is the impetus for most fashion choices, let’s be real here).

It’s important to note that the television version of Mamoru is either cold and stoic beyond belief or incapacitated in some way (captured by the enemy, possessed by the enemy, dead). Kunihiko Ikuhara, director of the Sailor Moon television series from the R through SuperS seasons, famously stated that if he could remove Mamoru/Tuxedo Mask from the series entirely, he would.

By contrast, his manga persona (Takeuchi’s version of him) was a cool, smart guy in a tuxedo. This may have backfired as Takeuchi herself said in the manga notes that her friends teased her about his costume and personality, calling him a “useless guy.” Mamoru is someone who is aloof and doesn’t have any (okay, I suppose Motoki counts as a friend) friends. He’s understandably hesitant to let others in, but not nearly as standoffish as his television counterpart. Mamoru’s powers revolve around psychometry and it’s revealed that he can feel or see the thoughts of others and heal others by touching them. He’s studying to become a doctor, another nod to his caring personality and a way to help children in the way that he would have wanted to be helped after his parents died in a car crash. His name means “protector” and he’s an interesting counterpart to Usagi in that he is a healing support and facilitator for her while she is the primary fighter. As an aside, this is actually why one of my high school friends loved Mamoru, while I always fought with her that Seiya was the better romantic option for Usagi, but that’s a story for another time.

In the second major narrative arc of Sailor Moon, the Black Moon arc (or the R season if you’re thinking of narratives in terms of the television series) Usagi’s inner circle is being targeted by members of the Black Moon Clan. One-by-one, Usagi’s friends are abducted. Mamoru laments that this would be a time where he should be able to step in and help Usagi, but he feels powerless to protect her. When they’re later attacked by the Black Moon Clan again, Mamoru receives instruction from his future self (King Endymion) to unleash an attack called “Tuxedo La Smoking Bomber.” Outside of the difference in pronouns (the feminine “la” instead of the masculine “le”) this seems to be a direct reference to Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking tuxedo for women. Bomber could be a reference to a bomber jacket, just as Smoking could simply be a reference to a smoking jacket, or the action of the attack.

Given the way that Takeuchi liked to play with gender in the manga through fashion — there will be an entire post dedicated to the traditionally masculine stylings of Haruka paired with the traditionally feminine styles of her partner Michiru among many other things — and how much fashion inspired her, it’s not inconceivable that she named this attack after Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking tuxedo.

What’s particularly interesting about this is how Mamoru is already playing a supportive/healing role (traditionally reserved for women) for Usagi, the one who ultimately delivers the finishing blow (even if that blow is a healing/restorative one). The Le Smoking tuxedo was revolutionary for the time because of how it took a traditionally masculine signature garment and turned it into a powerful fashion item specifically tailored for women. Mamoru himself transforms into a tuxedoed man named Tuxedo Mask as a way of hiding his true identity while presenting a traditional image of power and influence. The context in which Mamoru uses this La Smoking Bomber attack is at point where he feels powerless. It’s one of his most offensive-based attacks and it comes from his own hand, not his cane or from throwing a rose. Reading far too much into this (as I am wont to do) it could be another way that Takeuchi is playing with traditional ideas of gender through fashion. This could also be a complete stretch and over-analysis.

Le Smoking is still influential and well-known to this day, and maybe Takeuchi just thought it looked and sounded cool (again, the impetus for fashion and many other things in life) for Mamoru, who is supposed to be a cool, hot guy. Either way, it’s still a neat coincidence that was fun to write about.

*This was important to fashion’s evolution and the shift towards marketing to young people because suddenly they were not expected to be tiny adults until a coming-of-age, and were given more room to grow as people (and, through their parents, more purchasing power). There was also a new emphasis on enjoying one’s youth to the fullest, being free-spirited, and thinking of fashion as something playful.

**Japan was still slightly behind trends in the west, but the spread was more rapid than in previous decades thanks to technological advancements in media. It also wasn’t a 1:1 pickup of western trends and, although hemlines were raised, Japanese fashion companies often had their own spin on styling these trends while keeping to the fashionable silhouette of the time. One major difference I noticed is that the Japanese garments lacked the vinyl “space-age” trappings of some of the British modernist creations and focused on using more acceptable and traditional fabrics.

***It’s worth noting that the first major influx of western fashion in Japan happened during the Meiji period following Commodore Perry’s forced opening of Japanese ports to trade and commerce with the United States in 1854. This rapidly transformed business attire for men, particularly the adoption of western-style military uniforms for public servants as the Japanese government required works to wear western clothing at work. In the emperor’s court, a mandate for western attire was passed in 1872 for men and in 1886 for women.

Finally, I am a fashion hobbyist and enthusiast but by no means am I a fashion historian. If I get anything wrong in this post or subsequent posts, please let me know so I can make a correction. Special thanks to my friend Keung Yoon Bae helped me with some of the film influences and context. 

There are myriad reasons why I feel unqualified to talk about anything related to the Evangelion franchise, but the primary one is that it’s not my thing. It’s a lot of other people’s thing, but not mine. Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, is the first time I felt myself so deeply affected by an Evangelion product.

My thing is the much less acclaimed ending of Sailor Moon Sailor Stars where Usagi Tsukino tells us that the proper place for chaos or evil is in the hearts of everyone — a shared burden for humanity that can only be mitigated (not defeated) by love. This is hardly a new concept but I’d not seen it done at a time where I could understand the message in anything close to its simultaneous simplicity and depth. You cannot defeat your darker impulses, only mitigate them with genuine connection. The message of Sailor Stars was accompanied by another major influence my obnoxious and precocious high school self was obsessed with, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit). Combined, this meant that the mantra of my younger self was that even if I could never understand others and building relationships with them would sometimes make it more difficult to understand myself, seeking genuine relationships with them would provide profound answers to the many questions I had about the value of my own existence or why I existed at all.

Despite thinking I understood this on an intellectual level (I didn’t), I certainly didn’t follow this example on a practical level. I still don’t always follow this on a practical level.

Relationships are difficult. I seek them out despite this.

(Spoilers for all of the Evangelion franchise below.)

I watched the entirety of the Neon Genesis Evangelion television series at an older age rather than when it was airing. It was recommended to me as a must-watch in 2009, the same year that the first Rebuild movie, Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, was released in North America. This immediately placed me as someone on the outside looking in at a piece of art that was already lionized by large portions of the anime community. By virtue of listening to certain anime podcasts, visiting anime forums, and watching currently-airing anime at around the same time, I was more familiar with Evangelion as a nebulous concept and source of fandom wank than I was familiar with the series itself.

Neon Genesis Evangelion didn’t resonate like Usagi-as-Sailor-Moon embracing Galaxia in space while telling her that chaos belongs in the hearts of everyone, but it did affect me and I did enjoy it both on an emotional level and an artistic one. Evangelion‘s use of the Hedgehog’s Dilemma as a framing advice was simple and emotionally resonant. It (like many other works) reminded me of Huis Clos and the desperate struggle we all have while trying to connect with others.

“Hell is other people.” Joseph Garcin famously exclaims towards the end of Huis Clos. At face value this seems to be an indictment of relationships and connections in their entirety, but Sartre later clarified that it’s the nature of those relationships that can make them hellish. The most frustrating part is how we as humans are unable to detach ourselves from how others perceive us. If those relationships are bad, and that perception is bad, then we’ll truly be in a hell due to our connections to others. By logical extension, relationships can be heaven as well, but only if you love yourself. All of the characters in Evangelion struggle with this because the closer you allow yourself to be to someone, the more likely you are to cause pain. The most basic example of this is Shinji’s fractured relationship with his father, Gendo Ikari, which affects the way Shinji sees himself.

Shinji is manic in the original series and comparatively mature in the first two Rebuild films. Director and creator Hideaki Anno visibly and audibly plays with audience expectations in Rebuild and the changes made both expedite certain things for an uninformed viewer (for better and worse at different times throughout the films) and lull Evangelion faithful into a false sense of security before figuratively punching them in the face with the final two Rebuild films. There’s an added complexity to Rebuild that isn’t present in the original by virtue of what Evangelion became (a cultural touchstone and eventual worldwide phenomenon) and also who Hideaki Anno became. Like Shinji himself, Anno’s Rebuild is punchier and less frenzied than the original, but loses none of its emotional core and desperate quest to connect with people.

Both versions of Shinji (original television series and Rebuild) yearn for human connection and both struggle mightily with it in a variety of different ways.

Anyone who has watched End of Evangelion distinctly remembers how it ends: ambiguously, with choking turning into a caress and Asuka Langley Sohru’s “Disgusting.” An act of violence — one of the only ways that Shinji knows how to make close connections with others — met with the gentleness of her hand on his cheek. Between the two, only Shinji sounds like he’s choking as he gasps for air.

On rewatching the Rebuild films prior to seeing 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time, it’s interesting that one of, if not the, first physical interaction with any amount of intimacy that Shinji has with another person is when classmate Toji Suzuhara punches him in the face while Kensuke Aida looks on and apologizes. Shinji returns the favor at Toji’s request later on after Toji apologizes for his actions. Again, it’s one of the only expressions of outward physical intimacy that Shinji has in the first Rebuild film. It distills the violence Shinji deals with as an Eva pilot tasked with saving the world as something personal, tangible, and grounded — from a nebulous concept into something real. Physical intimacy for Shinji only happens two other times in this film: once in a stereotypical fanservice moment with Rei that’s subverted by her non-reaction, and another surprisingly emotional moment where Misato Katsuragi takes his hand and holds it through an elevator ride down to the center of NERV and Lilith. (Hand-holding is an important expression of intimacy in Evangelion that’s expanded in Rebuild and bookended visually with Mari Illustrious Makinami and Shinji in the finale of 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time.)

Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone moves quickly along familiar story beats with only a few deviations. This means that Toji’s turn around after seeing the pain that Shinji has to deal with as an Eva pilot comes quickly, as does Shinji’s first few interactions with Rei Ayanami.

Shinji doesn’t know much about what saving the world means to him, but he does hear Toji and Kensuke cheering him on and that means something. Shinji doesn’t think much of himself at all and wonders why he’s doing this, but sees Rei take the hit for him and that means something too. In a world where so much strife comes from trying to make others understand nebulous societal concepts, the answer to this struggle in Evangelion is there from the beginning: genuine relationships with others, even if those connections are painful. The moment that Shinji fires on the fourth angel, he’s not thinking of saving the world, he’s remembers Toji and Kensuke. He sees Rei in pain and wants to stop her from being hurt.

This sequence of events (and their subsequent iterations) hit me harder in Rebuild than they did watching the original. Despite knowing that they were coming, Rebuild is a lot more concise in its first two films because it cuts out a lot of wallowing that permeated the series (again, for better and worse situationally). Perhaps it was because both Hideaki Anno and I had matured since the series initially aired — and even though I had watched it later in my early twenties — since I had watched it.

It made me hurt for the person I used to be.

In Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, Shinji is far less outwardly self-pitying than his television counterpart. Instead Shinji is still whiny but nearly heroic in a way that frustrated television audiences wanted him to be when they screamed at him and told him to get in the fucking robot already and start kicking some ass. He has actual friends! He cooks! He shows genuine interest in others and it’s reciprocated! Like You Are (Not) Alone, You Can (Not) Advance is punchy with it’s important emotional beats while “fixing” complaints fans had about the first film being too close to the original source material (but shinier!) all while making Shinji who people wanted him to be, in a way. Both Rei and Asuka Shikinami Langley (née Asuka Langley Soryu) receive similar treatments. All three characters learn by the end of the film that they unsubtly cannot advance.

This is all a setup for the latter part of You Can (Not) Advance, and the entirety of Evangelion 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo.

Because Shinji hasn’t yet changed in a way that truly matters. He’s been given a glow-up by the powers that be, but hasn’t actually learned how to love himself — or, at the very least, not hate himself. He doesn’t know that there’s a difference between caring for someone else and wanting to sacrifice yourself because you don’t value your own life. He doesn’t recognize that in hating himself so openly, he invalidates the feelings of others who care about him. Shinji makes strides towards forming genuine connections, but in a return to “hell is other people” he still cannot see himself reflected in the perception of others as anything but worthless.

Hideaki Anno confidently guides the audience with the steady hand of someone who has already lived through all of this and more into the third Rebuild film, You Can (Not) Redo.

You Can (Not) Redo is a divisive and disjointed movie. It’s Rebuild and Evangelion at its most frustrated and angry. It’s also Evangelion at its most gentle and loving in its study of Kaworu and Shinji’s burgeoning relationship. If you’re a viewer paying particular attention to the latter, you already have a roadmap for where Rebuild will end.

Towards the beginning of this rambling essay, I touched upon how the phrase “Hell is other people” applies to Shinji in that his lack of self-worth comes back to the fractured relationship he has with his father. He cannot view himself as anything but worthless as long as his relationship with Gendo remains as it is. When Shinji unwittingly triggers the Third Impact to save Rei, he still doesn’t recognize the value of his own existence and says as much to Misato — he doesn’t care if he dies, only that Rei lives. This sentiment is repeated throughout You Can (Not) Redo. When you think that Shinji has finally learned to accept his own existence through his relationship with Kaworu, You Can (Not) Redo makes it abundantly clear that he’s leaning on Kaworu for strength in a toxic way without any meaningful self-acceptance. Similarly, Kaworu is trying to find happiness for Shinji by only thinking of Shinji. You can’t find yourself in other people like this, but it’s so close to real self-actualization that seeing them grow close before Kaworu sacrifices himself hurts.

Or in the words of Sartre himself, clarifying the meaning and philosophy behind Garcin’s line:

“If my relations are bad, I am situating myself in a total dependence on someone else. And then I am indeed in hell. And there are a vast number of people in the world who are in hell because they are too dependent on the judgment of other people. But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.”

Shinji spends most of Rebuild, and even most of the final movie, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time still stuck in hell.

More importantly, Gendo Ikari is also in hell.

The shadow cast by Gendo in particular is a lengthy one in and outside of the series and Rebuild movies. Where Shinji is known even outside the Evangelion fandom as “that whiny kid,” Gendo is known as the absolute worst anime father. If a father figure in anime is terrible or absent or any combination of other bad traits, he’ll inevitably be compared to Gendo and found lacking in a certain single-minded devotion to destroying all of humanity just to be able to reunite with his dead wife, Yui Ikari.

Gendo is the platonic ideal of horrid anime dads.

In End of Evangelion, Gendo realizes (to some extent) how his narrow-mindedness hurt him and Shinji both. And that it’s the last thing that Yui would have wanted for either of them. At that point, it’s too late for him to change the trajectory of the entire world ending, so he asks Shinji for forgiveness before he dies.

Thrice Upon A Time expands on this with a more mature mindset. It leads to a reunion between father and son where they both reconcile their perception of each other. Shinji finds his own self-loathing and loss in his father that he should have recognized ages ago while throwing a temper tantrum and yelling that he hoped that Gendo would lose someone close to him so he could, “Know how it feels.” Gendo always knew how it felt considering every action within the scope of the series has been to fill the void that Yui left in his life. After Yui, Gendo says, he didn’t know how to be lonely (see: live with himself) anymore. This was obvious to viewers from the start, but only in Thrice Upon A Time does Shinji understand what this means.

Meanwhile Gendo, who had purposely been keeping Shinji at a distance, finally realizes that the love he had for Yui has always been there in Shinji. Instead of asking for forgiveness, he realizes that his fear of getting close to Shinji — the thought that Shinji would be better off without him — made everything worse and apologizes. It’s effectively Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse” only with a genuine apology at the end, and a surprising amount of hope to follow.

As a child, being on the receiving end of your parent telling you that they were terrified of you is a uniquely surreal experience. When my mother told me something similar, I didn’t know what to say. We had never understood each other, and did not get along until I was much older. I always recognized my part in how bad our relationship was and felt horrifically guilty about it. Like Shinji, I hated myself and therefore couldn’t see why or how they could love me, especially when they appeared to reciprocate that hatred by being distant and stoic. Yet, I never realized that every time my mother said, “Yeah, your mom does actually know something, you know?” she was questioning her own knowledge and looking for reassurance.

I never realized despite automatically doing the exact same self-deprecating thing in my own speech.

At then end of Thrice Upon A Time, Shinji has finally begun aging and meets Mari Illustrious Makinami or, as Thrice Upon A Time reveals, Mary (as in Virgin or Magdalene, you decide!) Iscariot (as in Judas) on a train platform. Mari who in her initial arrival is the one who causes Shinji’s tape to finally skip ahead in You Can (Not) Advance. Mari who said that she would find Shinji no matter what. Mari who ultimately ends up with Shinji.

Mari who, arguably, was never in hell like Shinji or Asuka or Rei or Kaworu, or Gendo.

At the very least, Mari was never a part of Shinji’s particular hell and this is incredibly important when you think about why they end up together. When people consider the characters of Evangelion, they see them as facets of Anno’s own personality. He’s Shinji, but he’s also Asuka and Rei and Kaworu.

And in Rebuild, Hideaki Anno is also Mari. Mari, the one cog that fans were constantly scrambling for a place to fit into the overarching Evangelion machine. (At one point they thought that she was his wife, Moyoco Anno, but he refuted this directly.) She kicks off the part where Rebuild truly diverges from the original series and appears more self-actualized than any other Eva pilot we see. If anything, she’s the facet of the mature, adult Anno, revisiting the series to give it a much-needed kick forward to reflect who Hideaki Anno has become in the years of and at the end of Rebuild. After screaming at his fanbase for the entirety of You Can (Not) Redo, Anno tells him that he’ll find them, no matter what.

After accepting and reconciling with Gendo, Shinji visits the minds of his friends in fourth-wall-breaking but no less trippy alternative to End of Evangelion. Rather than remaining relatively detached with the allure of Human Instrumentality and a loss of self looming as he did in End of Evangelion, Shinji reconciles with Asuka, Kaworu, and Rei.

He tells Asuka that he returned her feelings all those years ago, and shows Kaworu how much he’s grown. This leads Kaworu to admit that it wasn’t Shinji’s happiness he had been seeking, but his own, bringing the emotional narrative of You Can (Not) Redo to a beautiful end. One version of “Rei Ayanami” already found her self once she was told that she didn’t have to be the Rei that Shinji knew. Shinji talks to “his” Rei, telling her that he wants a world (Neon Genesis) without Evas so she can find her own self. (As an aside this is all wonderfully done against the backdrop of an Evangelion highlight reel, and ends with Rei and Shinji leaving an empty lot that Anno actually used to shoot certain live-action shots.) At the end of this, Shinji finds love he didn’t even realize he was missing: the love from his mother Yui.

Shinji is able to form a stronger connection with everyone in his past where previously, his self-loathing kept them at a distance, just as Gendo kept Shinji at a distance. Only then is Shinji able to form his connection to Mari, after finally making peace with himself, his own existence, and his previous relationships.

Love is, in myriad ways, timing.

It’s both obvious and also too simple to say that Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time is a love letter from Hideaki Anno to his wife, Moyoco Anno. But the love and gratitude that Hideaki Anno feels towards Moyoco Anno is palpable all the same.

The Neon Genesis Evangelion television series is frequently summarized as a furious and confused indictment of Hideaki Anno and the audience of otaku he’s writing for as he screams at both to grow up all while creating a messy guidepost for doing exactly this. If this is the case, then the Rebuild films and in particular, Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time, are still an indictment of people who refuse to grow up while also managing to be an even more loving advisor. These films escort their audience to a world with an adult Shinji and an adult Mari take each other by the hand confidently and run up the stairs, ready to live. The film ends with a live-action shot of Ube, Anno’s hometown.

It’s a love letter from Hideaki Anno to Moyoco Anno that says not only that he loves her, but thanks her for loving him, as messy and awful as he can be. It’s a love letter from Hideaki Anno to himself. And it’s a love letter from Hideaki Anno to anime or Evangelion fans in whom he sees his old self. It tells them “If I did it, you can do it too.” Thrice Upon A Time reiterates the message spelled out in You Can (Not) Redo: it’s not someone else’s love that makes you a worthy of being valuable human. You have value all your own and that makes you worthy of being loved.

“The color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline.”

-The Tale of the Heike

During her time at Kyoto Animation it was a truth universally acknowledged that any Naoko Yamada work must use flower language in some capacity. This remains true in her first work with Science Saru, an anime adaptation of the Japanese epic, Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike).

In its opening sequence, Yamada’s Heike Monogatari already uses flowers in a different manner than her previous works. The flowers of the sal tree are a more actualized physical and spiritual object in the world of Heike Monogatari than a concurrent visual language as seen in Yamada’s A Silent Voice, Liz and the Blue Bird, or even her one-off episode of Violet Evergarden.

The sal tree flowers (which I erroneously identified in the preview that aired a while ago as camellia flowers since Yamada had previously used them so frequently) appear normally. Then there’s a flash of a distorted red filter over them. This visual filter is also done to the butterfly that appears in the opening scenes as well.

The colors of the butterfly then immediately appear in the series in the form of Biwa and her father. They’re interrupted by the red of the kaburo who kill Biwa’s father. The red blood that splashes across Biwa’s face and her father’s death was mirrored by the red filter over the sal tree flowers and butterfly.

In Heike Monogatari, the sal tree is present in its opening lines, foreshadowing the fall of the Heike themselves. The sal tree is a sacred tree in Buddhism, symbolizing the impermanence of life due to how quickly the flowers bloom and fall. Heike Monogatari is an epic that follows the rise and eventual fall of the Heike, and these flowers frame their entire story along with the line, “The color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline.” This line in and of itself paraphrases a line in the Buddhist Humane King Sutra: “The prosperous inevitably decline, the full inevitably empty.”

Yamada’s natural tendency to use flowers as a secondary visual language is also present in the first episode of Heike Monogatari. Above are red camellia flowers, shown briefly as Shigemori is recalling a story of Taira no Tadamori and how, despite being a warrior, he was accepted in the palace and intimidated naysayers with a silver-lined bamboo sword. Red camellia flowers were popular among Japanese nobility, especially during the Edo period, and additionally in Japanese hanakotoba mean dying with grace or being in love. The former meaning applies to warriors in particular, symbolizing a noble death. Some say it’s because of the way the flowers “behead themselves” as they fall to the ground. Red camellias appear again several times in the episode, often covered with snow or as decorations inside the home.

White daffodils or narcissus appear when Biwa meets Shigemori for the first time and Shigemori sees what his family did to her father. Generally daffodils are seen as a symbol of renewal because of how they’re one of the first flowers to grow in spring while there’s still snow on the ground, a sign that spring is coming. In Japan, daffodils are known as “friends of the snow” along with other flowers like camellias and plum blossoms, heralding spring’s arrival. Above all else, daffodils in Japanese hanakotoba mean respect, which is an interesting flower to place between Biwa and Shigemori during their first meeting.

Later, Biwa and Koremori sit beneath the cherry blossoms together. It serves as a transition of time from Biwa’s arrival and the next scene where Biwa and Shigemori sit and watch the fireflies at night, presumably in summer. Cherry blossoms, like the sal tree blossoms, represent the transience and impermanent nature of life for a similar reason: they bloom quickly, are beautiful, and die quickly.

Two specific points struck me as I was watching the first three episodes of Arcane.

The first was the series’ use of a “camera.” Animation, by nature, unchains the camera view or perspective from having to be anything grounded by reality. Arcane deliberately chose to use shots that could only be achieved by an actual camera following the characters (to a point where, in the first episode, mud spatter appears on the camera “lens” and obstructs the shot as characters are sliding down a dirty metal tube.)

The second was the use of art nouveau trappings specifically for Zaun and art deco trappings for the architecture and design of Piltover. These appear to be very deliberate choices due to how consistent they are and also, the few times that these unspoken design “rules” are broken.

Full disclosure, I am contracted by Riot Games for their League Championship Series esports broadcast as an analyst. I had no idea as to what Arcane would be about, saw no preview material that wasn’t publicly available to all, and was not told to write this; however, in the interest of disclosing any and all biases, I felt this necessary information.

Also, there will be spoilers for Arcane‘s first act.

Art Nouveau and Art Deco: What is the Difference and Why Care?

These two art styles are often incorrectly identified as one due to their closeness in history and the fact that a lot of their lasting effects are seen in architecture more than anything else — people often identify ostentatious buildings from the late 19th-early 20th century as “art deco” and move on. Arcane uses both styles purposefully which brings their differences (and art deco as a reaction to art nouveau along with additional historical context) into relief and makes them powerful framing devices.

In 1893, Belgian architect Victor Horta completed the Hotel Tassel in Brussels. This hotel is identified as one of the first art nouveau buildings due to curvature and flowing lines in both the outer façade of the building and the interior, especially the stairwell and rug patterns. The rug pattern at the Hotel Tassel in particular is a lasting example of whiplash lines — sweeping curves that were modeled after flowers, birds, and insects to create a harmonious aesthetic — which became a defining characteristic of art nouveau architecture.

A direct response to academism and historicism (revival) styles that preceded it, art nouveau (new art) marked a return to nature in form and style. One of the goals of art nouveau as opposed the aforementioned prior movements was to break down barriers between fine arts (painting, sculpture, etc.) and applied arts (architecture, furniture). Art nouveau made the most of modern materials, especially iron, steel, glass, and textiles. Tiffany lamps, Hector Guimard’s Paris Metro stations (of which there are only two originals left but other stations have been redesigned to look like the originals), and Alphonse Mucha’s graphic prints (more on this later in relation to Arcane and Jayce Talis) are all enduring examples of art nouveau styles today.

By contrast, art deco is characterized by a celebration of modern technology. It immediately followed art nouveau, replacing the curved natural whiplash lines with repeating geometric patterns. Art deco wouldn’t exist without art nouveau and most importantly, continued with art nouveau’s trend of unifying applied and fine arts with an overarching style. Cubism was a large influence on art deco architectural works as was fauvism in drawing a distinction not only between the bolder patterns of art deco but also brighter and louder colors than the muted and “dirtier” color palette of art nouveau works. At the time, art deco was purposefully ostentatious and honored the then-current excess of wealth (at least, at the top) and unbridled optimism in recent technological advancements.

Sound familiar?

Art Deco: Piltover

From Riot Games’ own website:

Piltover is a thriving, progressive city whose power and influence is on the rise. It is Valoran’s cultural center, where art, craftsmanship, trade and innovation walk hand in hand. Its power comes not through military might, but the engines of commerce and forward thinking.

It should come as no surprise that art deco is the defining architectural style of Piltover. Bold geometric designs and bright colors pop from the moment Arcane introduces the viewer to the city. Even a throwaway moment where Claggor peers down at the city below showcases repeating, bold, angular tile patterns on the streets and neatly-designed intersections.

Above all else, the motto of Piltover as the City of Progress goes hand-in-hand with the art deco movement. The design of Piltover in Arcane from buildings to the setup of the city’s hierarchy speaks to an overwhelming optimism around technology and belief that said technology’s advancement will always mean good things for Piltover’s future (spoilers, it doesn’t always and this becomes a main conflict in the narrative.)

Art Nouveau: Zaun

Zaun is a city beneath Piltover in status, wealth, and geography. It is the undercity to Piltover and is treated as such despite its own technological advancements and industry.

(As someone admittedly and woefully unfamiliar with League of Legends game lore, I immediately thought of Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar undercity-to-plate relationship so if you, like me, are not as up-to-date on game lore perhaps this helps contextualize Zaun-Piltover although it’s not an exact 1:1.)

Arcane viewers’ first introduction to Zaun happens not with sweeping shots of the city, but as Vi, Powder, Claggor, and Mylo board an elevator in what looks like an abandoned home or hotel to return to Zaun from Piltover. The building’s exterior and interior are both done in an art nouveau style from the spiraled window over the doorway to what appear to be curved whiplash lines on the carpet and at the elevator entrance. For good measure, Arcane also throws in a Tiffany lamp on the table and shows nature itself taking back the building with vines growing over a furnace and creeping around the floor.

Art nouveau as the predecessor to art deco naturally positions it as a bit darker and grittier and Arcane runs with this in shots of Zaun buildings, especially Silco’s laboratory (exterior pictured above). To reiterate, the splendor of art deco — including its celebration of industry — wouldn’t have been possible without art nouveau unifying fine and applied arts. Just as art deco grew from art nouveau and further defined the two outlooks and styles in relief, so does Zaun to Piltover.

The two together: Jayce Talis (and Alphonse Mucha)

The Jayce Talis of Arcane specifically is someone who has nothing but optimism for progress and the future. He is also someone who believes that magic (or the arcane) can be studied and developed in tandem with burgeoning technological advancements in Piltover, despite magic’s status as a taboo subject. He is thrown out of the Academy for this and sent back to his home. After his sentencing, geometric shades open in the Piltover council building where he was tried. The pattern only serves to box him in (despite the shades opening and allowing more light in, not less).

This happens again when Jayce visits Caitlyn Kiramman’s home. The distinct and harsh lines of the art-deco-inspired iron fence separate him from his former patron family now that he is disgraced.

Czech artist Alphonse Mucha is known for his art nouveau graphic prints, especially theatre posters featuring popular actress of the time, Sarah Bernhardt. His influences are seen elsewhere in Arcane from the opening moments of the series, where a Mucha-inspired record of Jinx and Vi is the lead-in for every episode.

A Mucha-inspired print also appears behind Jayce at his home where he talks with his mother after his sentencing. The comparatively “older” or “dirtier” style of art nouveau creeping into Jayce’s art deco world is a nod to his persistent belief in the taboo subject of magic as something that can be a part of Piltover’s much-lauded progress.

Jayce ends up teaming up with Viktor, someone of lower social status from the undercity. Their success is characterized with an influx of sweeping curved lines on the ceiling of an art deco room.

Arcane is impressively consistent in separating the two styles and using them to draw a definitive line between the sister cities. This consistency makes any sort of visual rule-breaking within this framework both striking and purposeful.

Arcane immediately had my attention due to the way in which it used its own “camera” to frame its first act, in addition to other visual languages used in tandem with the series’ emotional narratives. In its second act, Arcane completely changes the framework that it set in its first act with poise and purpose.

Years ago in my anime blogging infancy, a friend wrote a blog post titled The Ani(ca)me(ra) and Lensing a Critical Lens. They opened my eyes to a lot of things that I had either taken for granted while watching both anime and live-action films, or internalized without giving much thought. The latter is likely because, at least in the United States, animation is typically reserved for children’s cartoons or specific comedy shows for teens and adults. There are exceptions to this and people have become a bit more open-minded towards animation in recent years, yet societally this is still the general mindset and animation is still frequently othered in a way that pits it against live-action as an inferior medium when it really doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ll summarize their work here, but I highly suggest you also read their post. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re interested in animation generally and it’s a great (and quick) read.

Spoilers for Arcane and League of Legends lore below.

In their post, my friend introduces the idea of the virtual camera, or the anicamera for animated works to concisely make a case for cinematography being as crucial of a critical (figurative) lens for animation.

Animation is not bound by the same logistical challenges that limit live-action cameras and film because there isn’t a physical camera that exists. Similarly, the scenes or things that an actual camera captures exist; however, in animation, those same scenes are drawn. Both a camera and the anicamera have similar aims, but the latter is not a physical camera but a concept. Not only is the anicamera itself conceptual, but the things it is filming don’t exist in the same way that live action people and places do, unbinding both the “lens” and the “subject” from reality if the creator so chooses.

The concept of the anicamera also implies that the anicamera itself is the frame because everything within the scope of the animated shot is conceived inside of it.

(As a related aside, the language we use to talk about animation, even from creators themselves, is almost indistinguishable from the way we talk about live-action cinematography. An example that my friend brought up is that in storyboarding for animation, they use camera terms like pan up, etc.)

The camera as something that could exist as a physical thing is something that Arcane dabbles in during its first episode. Nearly all of the shots are taken from vantage points or in situations where a real-life camera could access. There aren’t a lot of fanciful cuts, just purposeful ones that you would see in any prestige television series that would be used to add to an emotional narrative: like the one pictured above where Viktor is underlining and punctuating Jayce’s existing work. The camera focuses on his hand underlining and drawing firmly across the blackboard. Or Jayce being visually jailed by the geometric, art deco patterns in the council hall (foreshadowing!). The fact that the shades are letting in more light, not less — he’ll eventually be trapped by becoming a councilor — is of particular note.

When Vi, Powder, Mylo, and Claggor have to escape from Piltover after their botched heist, they slide down a large pipe. The camera becomes a physical object in theory, since Arcane decides to have mud spatter the “lens” as it shows close-ups of the kids sliding down. Again, this creates the illusion that there is a physical camera and gives weight to these shots that animation doesn’t always provide. All of Arcane‘s first act generally follows this visual rule of sticking with shots that could be filmed by an actual camera. Visually-important transitions are done by quick cuts that compare and contrast the emotional narratives of various characters in the show and tie them to the central conflict of Piltover and Zaun.

The opening moments of Arcane‘s second act immediately let us know that we are some number of years in the future due to the advancement of hextech technology alongside Jayce and Caitlyn’s appearances.

Then Powder, now Jinx, appears.

Powder’s creations in Act 1 already had a bright, sketchy, graffiti-like quality to them, but in Act 2 her scribbles are superimposed over certain scenes to showcase her fragile mental state. This is the first clue that the visual language of Arcane has changed.

Now for the scene that everyone is talking about: Jayce having sex with Councilor Mel Medarda while Viktor is dying in their laboratory and coughs blood into their hextech core. Arcane could have easily grounded this entire scene in reality with quick cuts between realistic shots of Viktor dying while Jayce is getting some. In fact, it begins this way, with Jayce and Mel kissing each other interspersed with scenes of Viktor, hyper-focused on the core in their laboratory.

Once Viktor collapses, it shifts into something far less grounded in reality, with the two scenes merging together as Jayce and Mel reach their climax and Viktor’s blood is absorbed into the hexcore. It marks their diverging paths, and the end of their partnership. Jayce has, quite literally, bedded Piltover. In that same moment, Viktor’s blood is taken in by and transforms their machinery. The fact that this is specifically done without a grounded camera, and uses the unique advantages that animation specifically gives creators, makes the scene remarkably intimate (and heartbreaking if you know anything about the future Defender of Tomorrow and Machine Herald).

Another scene that uses advantages animation can more easily give over an actual camera is when Jinx calls out for Vi with her blue torch. As the “camera” pans around her in a circle, her dead friends Mylo and Claggor appear at her back and by her side. Powder (as Jinx) feels utterly and profoundly alone, has never come to terms with their deaths or forgiven herself for her (albeit accidental) role in them. It’s another scene that is more intimate, not less, for how it utilizes animation specifically.

Am I interrupting?

Spoilers for all of Arcane and some League of Legends game lore/backstory below.

Tw: suicidal ideation

Sometimes, when people speak of anime or animated works (especially the former) they separate the technical quality of animation or storyboarding from the plot or emotional narrative of the series. More specifically, this is typical of long-running shounen series where animators are brought in specifically for certain episodes and more savvy viewers will be able to pick out their cuts on technical prowess alone.

While I see the reasoning behind this, and can appreciate animation in a vacuum, it’s a special series that can combine all three (technical animation quality, plot, and emotional narrative). There is a lot to love visually about Arcane. It also combines all three of these things really well.

One of the techniques Arcane uses well is visual mirroring or bookending where one scene that occurs in an earlier episode returns in a slightly-different but still recognizable manner in a later episode to punctuate or underline an emotional narrative.

I’ll be looking at two scenes that frame Viktor and Jayce’s partnership in all aspects (their roles in the plot of the series and their respective emotional narratives) because it’s the most obvious example of this type of storyboarding, but this isn’t the only time the series uses visual mirroring.

When Jayce Talis returns to his ruined study in Arcane’s second episode, the series starts with an establishing shot of him framed by ruin with the city of Piltover in front of him. Although he’s allowed to stay in the city itself (in the distance) he’s been expelled from the academy and his research halted (the ruined study).

The next sequence makes it abundantly clear that Jayce has come here with at least some intent to kill himself. It establishes the height from which he fell metaphorically and would fall in actuality. This is his lowest point as a character. There’s an important close-up of his personal affects: the Talis hammer logo of his family and the hexcrystal that a mage gave him when he was young. The former is a symbol of who he is in the eyes of a stratified society like Piltover, the latter is where he wants to go. These are two very important items that he wouldn’t leave behind if he wasn’t planning to die.

I love the first shot above in the next sequence (which actually starts with Jayce clenching his fists and steeling himself for what he’s about to do) because of the way it establishes the boundary between Jayce and the ground (and between life and death.) The next shot shows him taking a deep breath and then Viktor appears behind him with the line, “Am I interrupting?”

Two really interesting things happen visually in Jayce’s response. The first is how Viktor’s cane (an essential part of his body and mobility) and his hand are shown in the foreground as he arrives, stopping Jayce from committing suicide. Then there’s Jayce’s facial reaction, which shows him almost snapping out of a trance and fully realizing what he was about to do.

Viktor leads, and captures Jayce’s attention, with Jayce’s own research. There are a few ways to interpret this but the easiest is that Viktor is an intelligent person who saw Jayce’s trial and realizes that the easiest way to goad Jayce into doing anything is to reference or push him on his work, like Mel did at the trial. This is Jayce’s life’s work on hextech which is the reason behind his recent expulsion (and the reason why Jayce is on this particular ledge). This happens time and again throughout the series, where Viktor is laser (pun intended, I’m so sorry) focused on their research, their “hextech dream” and uses it to try to keep Jayce’s attention.

He tells his own journey — “A poor cripple from the undercity, I was an outsider the moment I stepped foot in Piltover. I didn’t have the benefits of a patron, or a name. I simply believed in myself which is why I’m here.” — so Jayce can compare the two. This is also a major plot point and is visually shown with Viktor standing slightly behind Jayce. Viktor grew up poor in the undercity and is already living the bootstrap story (by working his way up to becoming the Dean’s assistant, never mind what he does with hextech in the future) that Piltover’s elite is about to assign to Jayce once hextech takes off.

Their stances, Jayce stepping in front of Viktor to be the “face” of their operation, speaking for the both of them, becomes a common visual throughout the rest of the series. Viktor consistently at Jayce’s right and slightly behind him literally makes him Jayce’s “right-hand man” and secondary. This only changes at the very end, when Jayce gives him his council seat and the floor to announce his own city’s proposal for independence. 

Interestingly enough, in this particular context, Viktor is standing at a safer distance from the edge, while Jayce being in front of him means that he’s closer to danger or death.

Viktor then effectively cements their partnership by offering Jayce his own hexcrystal which Jayce had left behind.

This entire scene of Viktor stopping Jayce and saving his life is lit very darkly, which I’ll return to later after looking at Viktor’s mirrored scene.

By contrast, Viktor’s suicide attempt starts as a small funeral for Sky, who Viktor unintentionally killed due to his experiments with shimmer and the hexcore. Rather than brandishing a journal, as he did when he was trying to reach out to Jayce, we see Sky’s leftover journal, her ruined glasses, and a canister of her ashes to start. Her personal effects mirror Jayce’s Talis insignia and hexcrystal.

Viktor is framed similarly to how Jayce was in his study. According to Heimerdinger, this is a similar place for Viktor, a place where he goes to think or be alone. There’s another similar shot to Jayce’s attempt with Sky’s scattered ashes mirroring the dust and rubble that fell as Jayce approached his own ledge.

Unlike Jayce, who went to his own study with intent, the thought of suicide occurs to Viktor as almost an afterthought. He turns back towards the ledge after scattering Sky’s ashes and turning around to leave. The shot of his foot inching towards the boundary between the ledge and death is not only another nod to how footing is so important to Viktor (the accident that caused Sky’s death comes after an incredibly emotional scene of Viktor running with help from the hexcore) but is also similar to this shot separating Jayce from his study and death. Rather than Jayce’s deep breath while shutting his eyes determinedly, Viktor’s step forward is a quiet acceptance of what is to come.

And then Jayce interrupts by mirroring Viktor’s line that saved his life years ago, “Am I interrupting?”

There’s a shot mirroring Viktor’s appearance, with Jayce in an unfocused foreground as Viktor looks back at him, guilty and shocked at his arrival. Rather than leading with research or their shared dream, Jayce leads with, well, his face. Or rather, the show deliberately chooses to highlight Jayce’s face in this particular scene where it chose to highlight the journal in Viktor’s hands in the scene that it’s mirroring.

Closing out this scene, Jayce clasps Viktor on the shoulder. We’ve seen him do this many times — he seems like a touchy-feely kind of guy generally — but here it’s mirroring Viktor reaching out with Jayce’s own hexcrystal in Jayce’s near-suicide.

These two scenes are made all the more powerful for the way that they mirror each other. I’d encourage anyone who has watched all of the series to watch them back-to-back and see how much care and attention was placed into storyboarding here.

Lastly, it caught my attention that Viktor’s entire sequence is in the light while Jayce’s is in the dark when their characters occupy the opposite roles in their partnership. Jayce is in the light, the “face,” the person who instinctively stands in front of Viktor while Viktor stays in the shadows behind him.

“About 1,900 years ago, a huge pit was discovered on a remote island in the southern sea of Beoluska. With a diameter of around 1,000 meters and a depth that is still unknown to this day, the mysterious formation mesmerized people. Valuable and dangerous primeval creatures and bewildering relics that are beyond comprehension beckoned adventurers looking to strike it rich, which in time gave rise to a giant city. Over the span of many years, with a spirit of adventure for the unknown and countless legends luring them in, the world’s only remaining unexplored chasm has swallowed up a great many people. It is known as the Abyss.”

–Made in Abyss, Episode 1

When we first are introduced to the city of Orth in Made in Abyss‘ initial season, there is already a well-established social hierarchy with its own societal norms. All of it involves the Abyss, around which the entire city functions. Riko and her friends are cave divers in training, and through them we learn the rules of the Abyss as well as Riko’s own personal connection to it as the season continues.

For the opening of its second broadcast season, Made in Abyss chooses to return to the initial discovery of the Abyss itself, effectively bookending the entire story while also making it abundantly clear that whatever comes next is uncharted territory not only for our protagonists in Riko, Reg, and Nanachi, but even the city of Orth itself.

The City of Orth

One of the more impressive but less-talked about aspects of Made in Abyss is how it makes you care about the characters first and uses them as lenses through which to view the world of Orth and the Abyss. Even as someone who loves anime series where characters essentially talk at me about philosophical concepts or are mouthpieces for the director’s view on life, the best anime series deftly balance both good characterization that makes you feel something for the characters and the central philosophy or other overarching narrative of the series. Made in Abyss uses both Riko and Reg as our frames of reference, with Riko being the character for which everything in Orth is normal and Reg as someone who knows nothing about the Abyss and this city that has grown up around it, despite coming from the Abyss itself.

Made in Abyss: The Golden City of Scorching Sun begins approximately 2,000 years prior to the events of Made in Abyss with a look into the first inhabitants of Orth (who of course aren’t actually the first inhabitants of the island, which is something that should absolutely be kept in mind), led to the Abyss by the same compass that Riko shows off in the first season’s second episode. Then, it’s part of an impassioned speech that Riko is giving to her friends, which is met with eye-rolly and fond “here she goes again” responses, hinting at just how many times she’s extolled the virtues of being a cave diver like her mother, and exploring the treasures of the Abyss. By contrast Vueko, who is one of three sages at the forefront of the discovery group 2,000 years ago is uncertain at every turn, but similarly guided by the compass.

It’s easy to see how the color-coded whistle system, the turning in and cataloging of relics, and the rigid societal systems of Orth evolved from this group of explorers. What’s even more interesting is how the specific group that made it to the island while other ships capsized around them is a group of seeming rejects. As Vueko says in her monologue, they were forsaken by the people of their homes and people in general. Much like Riko herself was never expected to surpass the pillar of strength that was Lyza the Annihilator, Vueko was never expected to survive her horrific circumstances, never mid find the Golden City.

Riko, Lyza, and the Abyss

At the end of Made in Abyss‘ first season, Riko makes her figurative ascent. The visuals mirror the ascent of her mother Lyza, framed with eternal fortune flowers that follow the balloon she releases up to the surface. Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul is crucial not only for overarching plot and world building, but for Riko’s emotional narrative. It’s in Dawn of the Deep Soul that Riko admits that she’s not only looking for her mother, nor is her journey simply because she wants to be more like Lyza, but that the very existence of the Abyss and the thrill of adventure calls to her.

This thirst for discovery, like the Cosmic Compass tying Vueko and Riko together across a 2,000-year timespan, is echoed by Vueko when she speaks of her time in the Abyss. We see Vueko traversing the same locations (some calling back to emotional heights of the first season), fighting the same monsters, and looking at the Golden City with the same awe. Made in Abyss is so careful to tie in its overarching themes to Riko’s individual emotional narrative. If Vueko had been part of a chronological exposition about the Abyss, it wouldn’t have had nearly the same impact. Now, coming after Riko’s renewed thrill of adventure and determination, knowing that she’ll never be able to return to the surface, Vueko’s story hits that much harder and reminds us of seemingly throwaway bits of background information (the praying skeletons, the timing of 2,000 years) that are woven into the fabric of the Abyss and its many mysteries.

“I feel like I’ve always been searching for something. At the same time, my life has always been lacking something. And desperately acquiring that something yields only a moment of pleasure.”

-Tanaka, Odd Taxi, Episode 4

Flower language? In my Odd Taxi? It’s more likely than you think.

All of the characters in Odd Taxi save curmudgeonly protagonist Odokawa are introduced as part of the background before being brought into the foreground of the series. Tanaka’s first appearance occurs when Odokawa is speeding off to visit Shirakawa and Odokawa nearly runs him over. At the time, we don’t know who he is, only that he’s celebrating something on his brightly-lit cell phone screen before Odokawa barrels through the alley where he’s standing and causes him to throw his phone into the air. His screen shows a dodo bird.

In the next episode, which is entirely Tanaka-focused, we discover that he’s addicted to gacha games. The dodo on his screen was his figurative white whale in a game called Zoological Garden which was not-so-coincidentally introduced in the previous episode through a different character playing it. Odokawa’s actions accidentally cause Tanaka to briefly experience the glory of his fabled pull before wiping it completely from his phone’s memory.

Through Tanaka’s story, the fourth episode of Odd Taxi describes the pitfalls of gacha games in the best way I’ve seen in media to date. It’s incisive in its takedown of them through the self-deprecating and self-aware lens of Tanaka while also having a healthy dose of empathy. It sympathizes with Tanaka the person without condoning his actions, all while recognizing the predatory nature of the gambling that these types of games provide.

The most affecting scene is an internal monologue from Tanaka post-dodopocalypse. He muses on how he feels like he’s always been searching for something but even when he feels like he’s found it, the pleasure from acquiring it is always fleeting. In this moment, he picks up a red camellia flower that floats by in the water. It turns white in his hands and crumbles to dust.

In Japanese flower language, red camellia flowers can mean romantic love, but they were also used to symbolize a noble warrior’s death, or perishing with nobility and grace. For a moment, Tanaka fancies himself having found what he’s looking for. He can figuratively die having concluded his search. Yet, his search isn’t over and as soon as the emptiness creeps in, the flower turns white, representing waiting.

I’d argue that while Tanaka’s search hardly seems noble — the dodo won’t fill his emptiness and he knows this — it’s only the avenue through which he’s directed his search, not the search itself. A quest for meaning in one’s life is the ultimate quest for most people. Inherent in that red camellia’s nobility that Tanaka first picks up is the fact that Tanaka is searching at all.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned the idea of a “white whale” from Earnest Hemingway’s Moby Dick, a novel so well-known that the idea of a white whale is part of popular lexicon. While it seems ludicrous to ask what the difference is between a book touted as the greatest novel ever written and a fictional gacha game the answer is in the framing of both properties. The latter is out to fill that very human vacuum with momentary thrills that inevitably fade without a human connection (and line the company’s pockets in the process). This is what Tanaka misses in his elementary school quest for a specific eraser to one-up his classmate. In his pursuit of the thing, he lost sight of why he wanted the thing in the first place: to make connections with other people.