When Riko sends a mail balloon to the surface in Made in Abyss‘ first season, the framing is that of a cave raider’s ascent. The balloon travels through every layer we have seen Riko delve from week-to-week. Interspersed with scenes of Riko, Nanachi, and Reg planning to go further into the Abyss and making their preparations, the balloon is buffeted by winds and monsters, repaired by Marulk on the second layer, and fortuitously discovered by Riko’s friend Nat during his daily delving on the first layer. As he returns to Orth with the balloon’s package in hand, scattered petals of eternal fortune flowers trail behind him. Riko has made her own ascent, perhaps without the pomp and circumstance of her mother Lyza’s, but no less emotionally-affecting for Nat and the viewing audience.

Riko’s second balloon mail balloon from the Abyss doesn’t go nearly as well.  

The actual mailing of the balloon is visually framed similarly to Riko’s first balloon in the first season. We see Riko and Reg’s hands on it, preparing it to launch, there’s a larger establishing shot of where they’re going to release the balloon, the music swells. For a moment, despite Reg bringing up how difficult it is to send a message from the sixth layer, it seems like the scene from the first season’s finale will repeat itself here.

However, the narrative framing and dialogue preceding both balloon launches is completely different, reflecting Riko’s growth and changing ambitions.

And the balloon immediately is skewered by a monster, never leaving the sixth layer at all.

When Riko launches her balloon from the fourth layer, it follows a line where she says that her mother is waiting for her, after all, so she must continue her adventure. She sends the balloon to let others know this, telling them how far she’s come. The journey of the balloon itself is shown between preparation scenes and its ascent is placed side-by-side with a soundtrack that swells as it breaks through to the first layer. It is Riko’s triumphant return. It is an event.

By contrast, her dispatch from the sixth layer is more matter-of-fact. She’s reminded of Nat and the orphanage through the meal she cooks for her, Reg, and Nanachi. When she grows homesick at Nanachi’s reminder that she’ll never see them again, Nanachi tells her that they’re connected via the Abyss and tells her to write a letter. Suddenly, Riko remembers where she is in the context of being an Orth cave-delver, and decides to send a report from “Team Riko.” It lacks the same sense of finality or gravity. This letter is just another report from Riko about her adventures.

“Let’s just believe that the last one made it, and this’ll definitely reach them too.”

-Nanachi, Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, Episode 2

This makes the near-instant skewering of the mail balloon by a monster not only hilarious, but also another indication of just how far they’ve come. Riko is sad but hardly despondent, and simply says she’ll sulk in her bed. She is on the sixth layer now. She cannot return.

The mention of the other mail balloon is also interesting as Nanachi and the series itself remind us that Riko has no idea whether her first letter made it to the surface (despite the fact that we know that it did). What we and Riko both do not know is the response from Nat and the rest regarding Riko’s adventures. And unless the series takes a more holistic narrative turn away from Riko’s personal journey, we never will.

Made in Abyss’ second season begins with a sort of chronological bookending, placing Riko’s imminent arrival at The Capital of the Unreturned side-by-side with the journey of Vueko arriving at the same location 2,000 years in the past. As viewers, we know that the actions of Vueko’s group were likely instrumental in what eventually became Orth, a busy city that grew up around the edge of the Abyss’ first layer. In case you didn’t get this message through the cinematography of the series itself, Made in Abyss: Golden City of the Scorching Sun‘s opening also places these two stories together, merging them as both groups make their way through the Abyss with 2,000 years between them.

In the second season’s third episode, Village of the Hollows, Made in Abyss also continues framing their journey as if someone is watching them, using several visual callbacks to the first season.

One of the most noticeable ones is this shot, which is a direct reference to the first season’s fourth episode.

In both of these scenes, Reg makes a trap with his robot arms creating a momentarily safe environment for both of them to sleep. At this point, they’ve just delved into the first layer of the Abyss. The rest of this episode is full of shots from above, reiterating that something or someone is always watching them — they’re never safe, even in these moments of respite.

When this shot is reprised in the third episode of the second season, it’s used in a near-identical way. Riko and company have just delved into the Abyss’ sixth layer: The Capital of the Unreturned. It’s the beginning of another journey and a specific threshold crossing, just like leaving Orth was for her in the first season. There’s a constant sense that someone is watching them as they make their way through this new place.

In the first season, this shot provides a small scene of comfort before Riko and Reg move forward towards the second layer, saying goodbye to the black whistle Halbog along the way. However, now in the second season, it adds to the sense of confusion and unease when the main characters realize shortly after they wake up that Riko’s white whistle (Pruschka) has been stolen and whoever stole it not only made it through Reg’s arm traps without tripping over them but also found their mail balloon note and defaced it along with cutting some of Nanachi and Riko’s hair.

When thinking within the world of Made in Abyss, the series visual framing always keeps the curse of the Abyss at the forefront of viewers’ minds. This is done not only by using top-down or off-center shots to emphasize the characters as they travel further into the Abyss, but also by emphasizing any and all ascents, keeping viewers guessing as to whether this particular ascent will harm the characters due to the curse. Village of the Hollows also uses visual cues from Riko’s arrival at the seeker camp in season one (also walking upstairs in Bondrewd’s lair in Dawn of the Deep Soul).

Majikaja acts as a similarly unrelatable guide as Ozen — they both have knowledge that Riko and company don’t, and a better understanding of the rules of the Abyss that are in effect. There’s even a similar scene between Ozen and one of the hollows. The former scratches her fingernails against Lyza’s white whistle upon meeting Riko, the latter chips away at Riko’s freshly-made-from-Pruschka white whistle with Majikaja adding that Pruschka isn’t in her true form.

Even with Nanachi saying that the curse in not in effect as they ascend, the framing of this scene adds a lot of tension due to what we know about the Abyss and how it’s been established that ascending in the sixth layer causes one to lose their humanity, becoming like the hollows that populate this city. Nanachi, Riko, and Reg walk from the light into the darkness, ascending as they follow Majikaja. We’ve been trained that walking up or ascending means bad things for our characters, and Made in Abyss plays with this visually. It’s a different, more subtle foreboding than the visceral and abject horror that occurs later in the episode, but ties both seasons together with its own specific visual language.

Kou Yoshinari’s monster designs in Made in Abyss were visibly meant to be different than the humans of Orth and the Abyss from the first moment that a crimson splitjaw chased down Riko in the series’ premiere. The splitjaw moves differently and is animated in a way that makes it seem otherworldly and bizarre. This trend continued for all monsters of the Abyss throughout Made in Abyss’ first season. In a series that plays with as many horror tropes as Made in Abyss does — delving deeper and deeper into them the further Riko and Reg travel in the Abyss — the awkwardness of the monsters only added to the unsettling menace of the Abyss itself.

One interesting animation piece of note came in Made in Abyss’ fourth episode, when Reg reaches for a silkfang monster and his robot arm is animated like that monster rather than separately and in the usual style of the rest of the series. Naturally this could simply be due to the fact that it’s easier to animate all in one style. Notably in the next shot, Reg’s robot arm is normal while the silkfang is still animated in Kou Yoshinari’s “monster” style save the point of attachment.

It’s particularly interesting that it’s Reg of all characters who is animated like this (even if it is not a purposeful choice related to his character) because of how little we know about him. Later in Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul, Reg loses his humanity or consciousness thanks to Bondrewd’s experiments and is animated in a similar fashion to one of Kou Yoshinari’s Abyss monsters (the animator himself was listed under “biological design” for the movie) as he loses control. We’ve always known that Reg is powerful, but in these scenes he is monstrous as well and is animated as such.

Reg unintentionally saves Riko from the crimson splitjaw with his cannon arm so from his very first appearance, even offscreen, we know that he is powerful. Due to memory loss he knows next to nothing about who he is or where he came from. Riko’s friend Shiggy posits that he must be an Abyss relic himself, and this is somewhat corroborated by the fact that there is a drawing of Reg in Lyza’s notes that she sends to Riko.

“Assuming that’s true, what did I come up here to do?”

-Reg on Riko’s assertion that robots aren’t affected by the curse, Made in Abyss, Episode 2

The latest episode of Made in Abyss‘ second season, The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, Reg discovers that Faputa, the Princess of the Hollows, knows him presumably from the time of his life before he met Riko that he cannot remember. More importantly, she knows him as Reg: the name of her old dog that Riko gives the robot boy when he doesn’t remember his own in the series’ first episode. The fact that Faputa — a hollow who was initially a guide for another expedition years ago and presumably has not been able to ascend past the sixth layer since — knows him by the same name is yet another puzzle piece to a greater picture of Reg that we still don’t understand. In a way, Reg is almost analogous to the compass relic: spanning two different timelines, his existence interpreted similarly but also individually by different parties while he struggles to find his own agency.

As for the manner in which Abyss monsters are animated in Golden City of the Scorching Sun, the absence of Kou Yoshinari in this season has led the series to turn to more CGI for things like the turbinid dragon pictured above, as well as characters like Majikaja and Belaf. This makes them stand out by default, due to how they move compared to other characters.

Faputa’s introduction is also interesting within this framework, given how quickly she moves when seeing Reg again for the first time. She moves so fast that she’s a blur and out-of-focus at times. This visually reinforces the rumors we heard about her being able to move undetected. However, she isn’t always animated like this and, more often than not, is in the same clarity and style as most other characters in the series.

I’ll be the first person to admit that all of this could be unrelated to Reg’s mystery and more of a device to showcase characters and creatures differences by animating them differently. The gawky way that the silkfang and crimson splitjaw move compared to the characters in the first season is meant to further separate the characters from the monstrous in the Abyss. Similarly, Reg moves differently when he loses control over his mind in Dawn of the Deep Soul, and Faputa moves more quickly that Reg can keep track of in her introduction to further separate her abilities as well as to make her a threat. Animation is another tool to showcase the hazards of the Abyss that are looming around every corner. With this in mind, Mitty, who we and Nanachi discover is alive, as well as other hollows in the village have never been animated this way.

As a final aside, another interesting visual happens after Reg tells off Faputa, asserting his own wishes in the process. He walks outside to fallen signboards with names on them and eternal fortune petals. The flowers are not only a consistent visual motif for Riko’s mother Lyza, but could be seen as a direct reference to flashbacks that Reg had in the first season where he tells Lyza that “he’ll be going now” in the field of flowers on the fourth layer. This scene occurs directly after Reg hears Faputa calling him by the same name that Riko gave him, making Lyza a potential bridge between whatever happened with Reg and Faputa in the past, and his current adventures with Riko and Nanachi.

“Unlike us, you’re a hollow from the old ritual site, aren’t you? You have a real life. You must have been protected by a very powerful desire.”

-Majikaja to Nanachi, Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, Episode 3

When Majikaja loosely explains the rules of the hollows’ village, Iruburu, he also speaks of individuals’ desires and how their transformed bodies reflect those. He then turns to Nanachi and says the above, reminding Nanachi of Mitty. The more that’s uncovered of Iruburu’s rules, especially its value system and concept of what “value” means to different occupants, the more Made in Abyss‘ second season turns the lens back on its three main characters and shows their own desires and reasons for traveling.

Against the backdrop of Vueko’s words that, “longing sometimes gets the better of instinct,” it’s a good time to revisit those desires of Reg, Nanachi, and Riko. Desires and wants seem to be the deciding factor of value in Iruburu.

Reg is the easiest member of the group to begin with, because his desires (like Riko’s) have been at the forefront of Made in Abyss‘ story since he saves Riko in the series’ first episode. His arrival in Orth is what begins the story and Riko’s own hero’s journey. She’s always had the desire to travel into the Abyss both for her own insatiable curiosity and to search for her mother. She’s also always broken the rules, to the chagrin of her friends Shiggy and Nat. But, she never fully delved into the Abyss past the first layer (under supervision) until she discovers Reg and decides to travel to see her mother.

By contrast, Reg has no deep lifetime desires because he cannot remember his own past. His wishes are immediate. He wants to know who or what he is. 

One key point that Faputa’s robot friend and self-proclaimed Interference Unit reiterates is that Reg is different. The Interference Unit cannot tell Reg who he is, but knows that Reg is different because Reg can cross layers. This brings to mind something Ozen said back in the first season upon meeting Reg: that Reg is a god compared to even the white whistles of Orth. His existence and ability to travel upwards without taking on the Abyss’ curse fundamentally breaks the one rule of the Abyss. If the Abyss is a deity, even to white whistles, then Reg calls the nature of it into question simply by existing. The series plays with this idea through his animation style.

Another interesting facet of Reg is how his own desires have changed. Based on his parting words to Faputa, who questions why he would want to spend time with humans who will age, Reg says that he’ll stay with them until the end and think about what comes after when the time comes. Although it won’t be reflected by physical changes like a hollow — unless Bondrewd shows up for some more horrific experiments that disassemble him — Reg’s desires have already transformed internally due to his journey with Riko and Nanachi. He still wants to know who he is, as shown by his conversation with Faputa’s robot, but more importantly, he wants to stay by Riko and Nanachi’s sides.

From the moment that Mitty introduces herself and says “I’m Mitty! A future white whistle!” we can see how deeply-connected the two are. No one else had presumably bothered to reach out to Nanachi like that before. After Mitty breaks through Nanachi’s prickly exterior, the two are inseparable and Nanachi begins to open up about the things that they care about, showing a surprising understanding of the Abyss due to rooting through the trash bins of Orth and collecting a variety of reading materials. In a way, they initially fill similar roles as Riko and Reg, with Mitty having an innate overwhelming ambition to become a white whistle and delve into the Abyss, and Nanachi searching for something meaningful — their treasure, as Nanachi says.

“Nanachi, it’s alright. I’ll endure this. So, if I end up not being human anymore, please…let my soul return to you Nanachi!”

-Mitty to Nanachi in a flashback scene at Idofront, Made in Abyss, Episode 13

When the two are subjected to Bondrewd’s experimentation, plunged down into the Abyss and then brought back up, both are transformed into hollows. Mitty becomes a pink blobby creature that resembles the other creatures they briefly saw from the elevators (the other children brought to Idofront with them) and Nanachi becomes the Nanachi we as viewers are familiar with.

Majikaja tells Nanachi that Nanachi must have been protected by a powerful desire. That desire is twofold. It’s not just Nanachi’s but Mitty’s as well. Mitty asks for her soul to return to Nanachi and Nanachi asks from Mitty to not be taken from them. Later, under extreme duress and pain, she asks Nanachi to kill her. Bondrewd tells Nanachi that the curse Mitty received was twofold in that she lost her humanity but also is immortal. That result of the curse came about from Mitty and Nanachi’s desires to remain together and is later confirmed by Belaf who calls Mitty someone with a signal of love, a true immortal, and in a way, the incarnation of the Abyss itself.

Nanachi goes through a similar reaction when Reg asks them to come along with him and Riko — Nanachi has found another group with which they can form meaningful relationships. Yet, nothing can (or should, relationships with people aren’t replaceable) replace Mitty in Nanachi’s heart. It makes sense as to why, upon seeing Mitty in Belaf’s lair, that Nanachi would immediately want to lessen Mitty’s suffering in any way possible.

Vueko’s cautionary words to Riko about instinct and desire are said almost offhandedly. They’re less about Riko and more self-reflection on Vueko’s part, but they frame Riko’s entire journey perfectly.

It’s always worth returning to the beginning to see how far our characters, Riko in particular, have come. Riko in the opening scenes of the first episode is ambitious, curious, physically weak, and consistently getting into trouble. We learn quickly that she’s performed questionable experiments before and hoarded artifacts for herself. There’s a sense that even though she has close friends in Shiggy and Nat, that she’s somewhat of an outcast in Orth due to her ambitious nature and willingness to skirt the rules. At the very least, she’s certainly overshadowed by the presence and achievements of her mother, one of the greatest white whistles that Orth has ever seen.

It’s a message from her mother, Lyza the Annihilator, that sets Riko’s journey in motion. At a variety of stopping points on her descent, Riko finds out more about her own existence. According to one of Lyza’s closest companions and mentor, Ozen, Riko was a stillborn child delivered in the Abyss whose corpse was reanimated by a curse-repelling vessel. Ozen says that as soon as Riko was alive, she tried to crawl immediately towards the center of the Abyss.

Made in Abyss has always made the case that Riko’s desire to travel into the Abyss is twofold: to find or learn more about her mother, and something innate to Riko herself. A large part of Riko’s narrative in Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul, is Riko acknowledging that it isn’t just finding Lyza, but her own agency and path she is choosing for herself. She chooses to continue past the point where she can return with her humanity intact.

Now in Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, there are immediate comparisons between Riko and Vueko with their respective groups of ragtag misfit delvers — hardly the people that one would expect to make it to the sixth layer and the Abyss netherworld. When Riko tells Vueko that she doesn’t care if Vueko is a good person, it’s reminiscent of Bondrewd’s words to Riko — Riko’s own mindset isn’t all that far off from the warped and twisted world of a white whistle. It’s always worth reiterating that Riko would not have chosen Pruschka’s sacrifice in order to descend past Idofront, but at the same time the events of Dawn of Deep Soul and actions of Bondrewd himself made it so she didn’t have to make that choice herself.

All of this is fascinating buildup for Riko now, faced with the choice of what she can sacrifice of herself to pay for Mitty and Nanachi’s value.

Take my revolution.

There are a few specific things you can say to me that will make me check out an anime faster than “This draws from Kunihiko Ikuhara’s Revolutionary Girl Utena.” Utena is a series that I hold close to my heart in a way that has actually been detrimental to doing any sort of public analysis. I’ve avoided writing about Utena directly many times for fear of not having something “good enough to say” given how many wonderful analyses there are of its characters, visuals, and thematic elements. The excellent Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight helmed by Tomohiro Furukawa was pitched to me this way and deftly managed to be a love letter to and incisive criticism towards the Takarazuka Revue. (Not-so-coincidentally, the Revue is a major influence on a lot of other media properties in Japan and an obvious visual and structural inspiration for Ikuhara as a director.) Last year there was Shin Wakabayashi’s Wonder Egg Priority which started well and ended catastrophically.

This time it’s Hiroshi Kobayashi and his take on the Gundam franchise, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. Although there’s a more obvious and direct through line from The Witch From Mercury to Utena in series composer Ichiro Okouchi, who wrote the Utena light novels, whether The Witch From Mercury will deliver something anywhere near as incisive or fun as Utena, will rely on Kobayashi’s direction.

Kobayashi also, interestingly enough, has had a direct influence on this particular anime blog’s direction. It was Kobayashi’s Kiznaiver and specifically Mai Yoneyama’s ending sequence that inspired me to write my first flower language post on this blog, despite having seen flower language used in other anime properties. This also caused me to go back and look at its usage in other works again, and thoroughly prepped me for Naoko Yamada — who many credit for a recent crop of directors using flowers as a secondary visual language in their works — and her direction of A Silent Voice. The rest, as they say, is history. Naturally, there’s flower language used in The Witch From Mercury as well. Diving a bit deeper into it reveals some similarities and major differences between Miorine Rembran — ostensibly Witch From Mercury‘s “Rose Bride” — and her Utena counterpart in Anthy Himemiya.

From her first introduction where she is trying to escape to Earth and Suletta Mercury unintentionally thwarts her attempt, Miorine is shown as someone who is not only actively rattling her figurative chains but is very well aware of how others see her position. She’s outwardly more defiant than Anthy at the outset where Anthy is initially presented as meek and helpless with small hints that she’s anything but revealed episode by episode.

Anthy herself is a character of contradictions by design and who she is for most of the series depends on who you talk to. She is simultaneously a witch, a victim, a master manipulator, a lamb to the slaughter, a loving sister, and myriad other facets of what others believe a woman to be.

There are many similarities between Miorine and Anthy in the first episode of The Witch From Mercury, but a unifying visual is that of the garden.

When Utena Tenjou sees Anthy in the garden for the first time, they’re visually separated. Anthy is in the glass greenhouse and Utena sees her through the windowpanes. Visual paneling is implemented to purposefully separate them while establishing the garden in that moment as both a place of respite and a cage in and of itself. As the Rose Bride, Anthy is tasked with caring for the roses. That’s part of her duty. However, there’s also a sense that she genuinely enjoys gardening, feels a kinship to the roses themselves, and more generally throughout the series is shown to love all manners of flora and fauna. Tending to the roses as a duty and enjoying it aren’t mutually exclusive and are part of Anthy’s contradictory nature.

When Miorine first enters her garden, she says a small, “I’m back/home,” as she walks in. Suletta follows her and the series quickly makes a point to divide them visually. Miorine, for all of the bluster we’ve already seen from her at this point, knows her role in The Witch From Mercury‘s space. (You can even see bodyguards in the distance.) Suletta does not. Miorine’s words to Suletta reinforce this and it’s further evidenced by how confused Suletta is at how harshly Miorine is treated by other students. By contrast Miorine, while visibly upset by it and bristling in defense, accepts it.

Even when Miorine reaches out and shares a tomato with Suletta in an adorable scene where I couldn’t help but be reminded of Ikuhara’s Mawaru Penguindrum, Miorine is on the inside of the garden, Suletta remains firmly out.

This changes when Saionji, I mean, Guel Jeturk starts smashing plants in the garden and raises his hand to slap Miorine. Before he can do this, Suletta slaps him on the butt in a scene that’s no less emotionally-affecting for how hilarious it is. Suletta crosses the threshold of the garden and becomes an active participant. Like Utena Tenjou before her — despite having a significantly more anxious personality — Suletta cannot stand idly by and watch Miorine be abused. This is the act that makes her a duelist.

And in taking action, Suletta’s character is more firmly established as well. She is not Utena Tenjou, openly flaunting disregard for school rules and generally having a more outgoing and cool personality. Suletta is a nervous wreck who visibly shakes as she stands up for Miorine and seems to second-guess herself frequently. The only thing she doesn’t back down from is her conviction that she was right in defending Miorine. It is here, and her dramatically more confident attitude once she steps onto the dueling field in her robot, is where she finds common ground with Utena.

As for the flowers that surround Miorine in the garden, the flowers that she’s touching in the picture above reminded me a lot of angel-wing begonias. Red and pink begonias are used to represent romance and love, although begonias can also mean a warning of caution towards future situations or a harbinger of dark thoughts. If they are begonias, this wouldn’t be the first time an anime has featured these prominently to frame a relationship between two women, as they were used prominently in Flip Flappers with the character of Yayaka. The leaf structure seems a bit off, so I’m not certain as to whether they’re begonias or not.

Miorine’s garden was actually fairly difficult for me to identify (I might be out of practice a bit) but reminded me a lot of flowers I had seen growing up in family gardens. For example, the bright white and fuchsia flowers near Miorine’s hair resemble impatiens which, as their name suggests, can mean impatient. They also can symbolize motherly love. Next to them in the same pot are flowers that look like primroses which, in Japanese flower language, can mean desperation, but in Victorian flower language carry a message of young love as well as renewal and optimism. Pink primroses specifically represent femininity, grace, and renewal. By Miorine’s forehead, the pot of white and purple flowers resemble petunias, which carry a variety of conflicting meanings including anger, resentment, and comfort. White petunias are said to send a message of purity and innocence (like many white flowers), where purple petunias are a symbol of mystery, fantasy, and enchantment.

My history with the Gundam anime franchise is surprisingly lengthy for someone who doesn’t consider themselves a Gundam fan. I was first recommended the original Mobile Suit Gundam movie trilogy in a list of anime one should watch as an anime fan (enjoyed it a lot), and then watched Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (loved it). This inspired me to try and create one of those high-concept tumblr blogs that was just Bright Noa eating hamburgers as a joke (unsurprisingly, it didn’t take off). I have also seen Gundam 00 (enh), one episode of Reconguista in G (what?), Gundam AGE (got bored in the second arc), Iron-Blooded Orphans (liked but grew busy with work and did not finish), Gundam Build Fighters (fun), and Gundam Wing (unintentionally hilarious). This makes UC a third of the Gundam series I’ve watched and AU two-thirds (I’m not including Reconguista in G it was only one episode). I’m not sure if that’s sacrilegious or not according to Gundam fans.

Key takeaways from the franchise include the quintessential Gundam statement that war is hell, and a fun addendum that a friend and I made while making our way through Wing: you can never escape your past which we yelled at each other constantly throughout our watch.

All of this is a precursor to looking at The Witch From Mercury not through the framework of something with which I am intimately familiar, Revolutionary Girl Utena, but instead through its references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and relationship with classic Gundam thematic elements.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury could be closer to the prototypical war is hell Mobile Suit Gundam than one might assume at first glance.

Names like Aerial (Ariel) for Ericht Samaya/Suletta Mercury’s gundam, and the mysterious Lady Prospera (Prospero), are direct references to characters in The Tempest. While there’s little thus far to suggest that The Witch From Mercury is going to follow The Tempest specifically — in the first two episodes, it has followed key Utena scenes with more specificity than anything else — but there are similarities that go beyond name references. One of the more obvious is structural.

Both begin in media res to the overarching narrative with their own “tempests” of sorts. The Tempest starts with a storm designed to set an audience off-kilter and keep them believing that anything, including magic, can happen. And The Witch From Mercury begins with Suletta Mercury’s confusing arrival and complete lack of knowledge regarding her new school’s social hierarchy. She doesn’t understand exactly what is happening and ends up in a duel for Miorine Rembran’s hand in the process. The first episode doesn’t establish magic but it does establish a school setting that feels outside enough that anything can happen.

As an aside, admittedly this only works with a certain watch order. For me personally — and likely many others — The Witch From Mercury only starts in media res because I watched the first episode, “The Witch and the Bride,” and then went back to the prologue episode afterwards. In fact, I watched the first two episodes and then the prologue third, which is a particularly interesting watch order due to the character of Elnora Samaya/Lady Prospera.

One of the main thematic elements of The Tempest is the exiled Prospero’s desire to regain his title after being usurped by his brother Antonio twelve years prior to the events of the play. To do this he uses magic and manipulates many other people in the play including his own daughter Miranda. As the story moves forward and Prospero becomes more and more convincing to the audience in his quest for justice, he also becomes a more sympathetic character to them despite his methods. This calls into question the subjective nature of justice itself.

Prospero’s machinations are awful but he also was wrongfully deposed. These two facts can coexist and whichever way you lean likely depends not on the written end of the play, but on how convincing your Prospero is and how willing you are to forgive or condemn his actions. Due to Prospero’s role not just as a character but as a creator and a loose stand-in for an artist or playwright, The Tempest also asks its audience to think about the nature of art and theatre. Regardless, at the end of the play he asks the audience to set him free with applause.

Gundam is no stranger to characters like this. One of the franchise’s most popular characters is Char Aznable who is actually Casval Rem Deikun, son of the late Zeon Zum Deikun who was assassinated by the Zabi family. Disguised as Char (Lady Prospera’s mask is a visual reference to him) after Casval is mistakenly pronounced dead, he seeks revenge against the entirety of the Zabi family and makes a name for himself as a mobile suit pilot. This is an oversimplification of his character (to do a proper character analysis would take several posts by someone who is not me) but the narrative similarities are obvious.

The Witch From Mercury‘s Lady Prospera was originally Elnora Samaya, the mother of Ericht Samaya (now known as Suletta Mercury) whose work with the Ochs Earth company in designing a gundam called Lfrith was wrongfully stopped by the regulatory body of the Mobile Suit Development Council. Years before the events of The Witch From Mercury’s first episode, Delling Rembran (Miorine’s father) creates a task force called Cathedra to suppress the development of gundam machines, citing that GUND technology mentally harms and sometimes even kills their pilots. Delling uses Cathedra to wipe out Ochs Earth, killing many people in the process. It’s implied that only Elnora and her four year-old daughter Ericht survive.

Years later, Ericht (now named Suletta Mercury), travels to the Asticassia School of Technology, which is controlled by Delling Rembran and his conglomerate of corporations called the Benerit Group. On her first day at school she stands up for Miorine Rembran without knowing who she is, gets involved in the school’s dueling system, and accidentally wins Miorine’s hand in marriage as a result.

“During the proposal stages, the reason we chose corporations as one of the factors is because of the happenings in the world, as I mentioned earlier, and reaching a younger generation. We felt that a major war between major powers, something like nations pitted against nations, wouldn’t seem that realistic and would be difficult to connect with. Smartphones and online shopping are pretty easy to navigate, but most of what we own and use today is dominated by specific corporations. So I figured that a world everyone might connect with more today, one divorced from war, would be a society dominated by such corporations.”

Takuya Okamoto, producer of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury (Zeonic)

This is all done purposefully against the backdrop of a world controlled by private companies and capital.

To be fair, I don’t think we’re going to see the prototypical “war is hell” Gundam in the sense of seeing a lot of standard warfare, nor will we have scenes like Amuro Ray burying his gundam in the sand in Mobile Suit Gundam, or Kamille Bidan’s horrifying comatose state at the end of Zeta Gundam.

However, I’d argue that The Witch From Mercury has already had a few interesting scenes, especially in its prologue, that comment on the nature of a war controlled not as much by standard governments than private companies. There’s nothing more unintentionally hilarious and uniquely horrifying than watching four year-old Ericht Mercury shooting Cathedra mobile suits out of the sky with the touch of her finger, thinking that it’s some sort of game while Elnora watches her in terror.

In his takeover of Ochs Earth, Delling Rembran rightfully cites the use of GUND technology in mobile suits as a curse that kills its operators. Yet, this is very obviously not the only reason he’s deploying Cathedra to raze the company to the ground. Their technology is a threat to his company’s technology and therefore must be eliminated. There is also the added facet of GUND technology was initially designed for medical use, as seen in Elnora’s prosthetic arm. They needed funding to continue their research, and therefore had to accept an offer from mobile suit company Ochs Earth.

In the time since his military assault on Ericht Samaya’s fourth birthday and the start of her first day at the Asticassia School of Technology, Delling Rembran has become one of the wealthiest and powerful men alive. In the series’ second episode, he berates his own daughter for being powerless in front of his entire boardroom and calls himself a king. It’s unsurprising only acquiesces to her demand for a duel — notably, using the rules that Delling himself established at the school for the winning duelist to become his daughter’s fiancé — when Vim Jeturk, another CEO in his boardroom, notes that they’ve been losing lately in the mobile suit futures market.

Naturally, Lady Prospera immediately agrees to this, saying that she’ll share the data from Aerial with the group. As the series’ Prospero, we have to wonder about her own machinations. She’s not cartoonishly evil like Delling, and the prologue is designed to make her sympathetic to viewers, but she also has more of a hand in what is happening than she lets on, as evidenced by her visit to Jeturk for support before the meeting took place.

The other day, one of my coworkers posited that one’s favorite moment or piece of media is almost always going to be one of your first big experience — something that ties you emotionally to that particular property. This isn’t a revolutionary statement by any means, and while it didn’t apply to me in that moment I do agree with it more generally. Singin’ in the Rain is my favorite movie because I was struck by how Gene Kelly moved through space as a sick kid with pneumonia and nothing else to watch but old movies. I revisit things seasonally when they affected me first, which is why I’ve had the itch to rewatch Flip Flappers, Yuri!!! On Ice, and Arcane lately.

Similarly, there’s the urge to view other pieces of media through that same frame of reference that affected you emotionally or stood out to you in that moment (for better or for worse). Although I wouldn’t consider Durarara!! one of my favorite anime, there is one particular scene that has always stood out to me due to its visual and narrative execution. Since the moment I saw it back in March 2010, it has become a point of comparison to any anime attempting to do a similar narrative reveal. Now a very different but equally important reveal joins it as a relative of sorts in Odd Taxi.

Spoilers for the first season of Durarara!! and all of Odd Taxi.

There are so many things to love about Durarara!!‘s Dollars reveal, beginning with how the climactic moment starts with Mikado Ryuugamine holding his cell phone above his head like a dork as Namie Yagiri looks at him with bemused disgust.

The real brilliance of the Dollars unveiling is not that it’s the mild-mannered Mikado Ryuugamine at the helm of the largest gang in Ikebukuro, the so-called “colorless” — in comparison to the color gangs listed in the series like the Yellow Scarves or Blue Squares — but that it uses a visual conceit that most viewers will not have given any particular thought or notice. In Durarara!! background characters are grey blobs. Set in busy Ikebukuro, Durarara!! has to animate a large amount of background characters simply as part of the setting. While watching, I had assumed that the grey crowds were simple cost-cutting measures, designed to make things easier on the animators by not having to give passers-by all that much detail.

And, this is probably also true. Some of the best cost-cutting measures — look at any Kunihiko Ikuhara work — are also part of the story itself and this is where, in its eleventh episode, Durarara!! shines.

Seemingly cornered by Namie and her hired henchmen, Mikado sends out an admin message to the Dollars, a faceless and anonymous but wildly-popular online group. Prior to the message, Namie, Mikado, and Namie’s bodyguards are the only characters in these scenes who aren’t greyed-out. As phones begin to go off in the crowd, people are brought into the foreground with more distinct features and colorful outfits. They are still the colorless but they are a part of the Dollars, who now surround Namie, giving Mikado the upper hand.

It’s difficult to describe in writing the experience of watching this for the first time. I remember being awed at the execution more than I was interested in the concrete reveal of Mikado’s online self. The transformation of background characters into Mikado’s own, admittedly chaotic, Ikebukuro gang became a framework through which I viewed similar attempts at large unveilings in other media properties.

By contrast, Hiroshi Odokawa’s visual agnosia is treated less as a big reveal but more of a soft and meaningful part of his character. Odd Taxi hints several times throughout the series that it’s only Odokawa who sees everyone as animals — either through throwaway lines from Odokawa himself, or clever visual nods to the audience — but doesn’t concretely say as much until the final episode, when Odokawa’s doctor and friend, Ayumu Gouriki tells Miho Shirakawa when she asks.

Unlike Durarara!!, Odd Taxi‘s execution tells us that it’s less about what Odokawa has been seeing, but the effect that his childhood trauma has had on his life. The “big reveal” in the final episode isn’t that Odokawa had seen everyone as animals, but that this was specifically to overcome a traumatic and awful childhood.

When Odokawa’s mother plunges their car into the water, Odokawa not only survives, but begins to see people as animals instead. In his own words, “My relatives and teachers showed up and had serious conversations and told me all kinds of stuff, but I didn’t really mind. I met patients and nurses but it didn’t bother me at all. After all, they were pandas and beavers and tortoises and llamas and stuff.” Seeing other people as animals allowed Odokawa to actually talk to others without fear for the first time in his life.

Throughout Odd Taxi‘s run, we see Odokawa forming meaningful relationships, particularly with Shirakawa and Gouriki. When Odokawa is fished out of the water for a second time, he begins to see the world populated by humans again, no longer needing the aid of visual agnosia to connect with other people. Again, the important thing isn’t that Odokawa was seeing others as animals, but why. And when he finally sees the world as it is, what that says about how far he has come emotionally and mentally.

Both Odd Taxi and Durarara!! use the way in which an audience naturally views background characters to become part of the visual storytelling. When everyone in Ikebukuro is greyed-out save the main characters, it’s shocking when they all appear in vibrant colors in a crucial climax of the season. When everyone is an animal in Odd Taxi, characters fade into the background and then are pulled forward when needed. Odd Taxi also does this aurally, by weaving in the stories of Mystery Kiss and the Homosapiens manzai duo, both of whom are first heard in Odokawa’s taxi cab as background noise.

Odd Taxi‘s finesse in how it slowly ties up some (but importantly not all) of its loose ends is also exemplified by how it reveals every character that we’ve come to view as animals in their human forms, now that Odokawa sees the world differently. We see exactly how Odokawa characterized Yano as a porcupine or Gouriki as a gorilla or Shirakawa as an alpaca. It’s like an odd puzzle game where we finally see the answer and realize that Odd Taxi had also given us information that Odokawa or other characters didn’t have, allowing us to piece together some of that puzzle ourselves if we kept track of the animals presented.

While I’ll likely always use Durarara!!‘s Dollars reveal as a point of reference, now it has a softer, even more meaningful sibling in Odd Taxi‘s final episode.