Anime-BAWklog: Finished Series A-Z (Part I)

Happy Ani-Monday, Weebotaks!

Another year has come and gone since my last Anime-related post, and much has changed in the world—to severely understate the obvious. In March of this year, I was downsized from my closing shift in the local supermarket deli because of COVID-19. In June, I was welcomed back as a full-time, opening stock clerk, and continue to endure the day-to-day rebellious stupidity of "free Americans" who refuse to socially distance themselves or wear face coverings, even as they cough and sneeze on their hands, touch everything in sight, and let their numerous, unprotected children run amok. Fortunately, I and all others there employed strike the balance between being brave and/or stupid enough to work in such an environment, and being intelligent enough to otherwise protect ourselves and our clientele by regularly sanitizing all touchable surfaces and wearing masks and, in select departments, gloves.

But you didn't come here to read my rantings about the contradictory, paradoxical, and Presidential response to one of the worst economic and viral pandemics in recorded human history. You came here to learn how to best distract yourselves from said decent facsimile of a zombie apocalypse with all manner of tropes, depravity, waifus, genre saturation, and other animated Japanese stuff.

Since COVID-19 and my own personal school road have led to a huge backlog of anime reviews, the format of the next few issues will be a bit different. Rather than choosing a theme and three anime that fall into the BAW categories, I'll just brute-force my way through everything alphabetically until I'm done.

NOTE: All of the following reviews are a year or more old, and may reference events or pieces of pop culture that are no longer relevant. I will do my best to update things if possible, but I'm just warning you ahead of time.

On with the show!

18if—Twelve girls fall into comas because of “Sleeping Beauty Syndrome” and become petulant, fairy tale-themed “Witches” who rule over their respective dream realms according to whatever extreme social stresses caused them to fall asleep. It’s up to a young man in a coma, a mysterious girl who claims to be his sister, and a dream scientist who manifests as a humanoid cat to wake them all up before the real world (or is it?) shatters from the effects of their combined dream world shenanigans. It’s anime, so prepare for blood, gore, sexual humor, ludicrous action, suggestively overdesigned magical girl costumes, morals aimed at a demographic far below that of the show itself, and every episode ending with one of the witches falling in love with the main character. Each episode has a different director, the series is written by Atsuhiro Tomioka (who also wrote the nonsensical Secret Wars knockoff companion anime to Super Dragon Ball Heroes), and the main setting is dreams, so also get ready for an almost complete lack of serialization and logic, frequent, jarring shifts in art style and plot mechanics, uninspired theme music, psychedelic everything, and “bigger questions” that either have no business being asked given the shaky foundation that the series is, are answered in ways that make no sense in any context, or don’t get answered at all because this is just a nonsensical companion anime that attempts to rustily staple a “plot” onto Japanese Candy Crush Clone #3000. With the exception of the Wizard Of Oz-themed episode “And Now There Are None…,” which distils everything wrong with the series down to a foul-smelling, decoupaged CGI soup of septic tank sediment and throws it in our faces until our eyes bleed…*DEEP BREATH*…. So, yeah. Except for that papier-Mache shit show of an episode, and the mostly incongruous nature of the rest of the series, 18if was a decent watch.

3D Kanojo: Real Girl—Your usual hair color-driven romance anime with a clueless dark-haired otaku virgin, a blonde bully-turned-best friend, an orange-haired free spirit love interest with a terrible personality and annoying voice, and two shy, extra-nerdy extra wheels who are perfect for each other. Like other romance anime, the majority of the run is devoted to getting (and in some characters' cases, forcing) the audience to know and like the cast and toying with our emotions as to who will end up with who when all the "stupid, little things" fall by the wayside. The series even goes so far as to forcibly inject amnesia and a silver-haired long-lost stepbrother into the third act as a rival for the titular real girl's affections. The series was a slog to get through and full of contrived depravity near its end that would have had me throw my viewing device against the nearest wall in the absence of a happy ending, but we eventually do get to know and like all but one of the characters—you know who you are, Incest Boy!—and begin shipping the characters like the power-mad UPS drivers that we are. I'm just as glad it ended as I am that it ended properly.

Absolute Duo--You've seen this one before: clueless virgin with plot- and theme-convenient unique power enrolls at human weapon school, meets love interest, then stumbles into a harem he “doesn't want" by being the boring, heroic protagonist from every by-the-numbers action/school/harem anime ever made. Like many series of its kind, Absolute Duo presents itself as a school-set battle anime about training genetically modified teenagers to save the world from something (usually monsters from another dimension or more human monsters with emotional baggage or a twisted inferiority complex or world domination schemes, or all of those things at once, and some kind of glowing, skin-tight “armor” with laser guns or beam swords is usually involved on one side or the other somewhere), but then infuriatingly subverts our expectations of something awesome and thought-provoking (a common theme in these things is usually some sort of dichotomy, like the battle between spirituality/religion and technology, friendship versus the solitary, work ethic versus cheating, etc.) to wrongly focus on giving us just another harem anime. Some of the relationships and characters can be interesting (the psychotic bunny-girl professor with a chain-sword, the DEFINITELY NOT UNDER-AGE LOVE INTEREST Julie Sigturna, and the DEFINITELY NOT UNFULFILLED YURI BAIT couple of Tomoe and Miyabi are really the only bright spots that come to mind), but most are just there to spout trope-related catchphrases (Miyabi as a solo character is a “notice me, Senpai!” trope who literally spends an entire episode repeating the words, “notice me.” Tor, the male lead, spends much of any given episode saying some variation of “I am weak. I must get stronger so I can protect everyone,” and doing the “John!” “Martha!” “Oh, John!” “Oh, Martha!” thing with Julie that characters in fifty-year-old romance movies used to do because the writer had to substitute increasingly dramatic line deliveries for sexual climaxes, I guess), and the one character with the most potential to be interesting (the Gothic Lolita president of the school who is pulling the strings on pretty much everything) does little more than state an unexplained goal (“to reach Absolute Duo,” she says several times) that we never see her take any definite steps toward, and introduce various unimportant and unlikable characters to the word, “no.” The harem bullshit is completely unnecessary because two episodes in, Tor and Julie pretty much exchange marriage vows while touching the physical manifestations of their souls together. Every symbolic dichotomy, villainous motivation, and trope mentioned above in generic context is smashed together in Absolute Duo without any real deep thought or effort as to a proper focus for the (so far) short-lived series. All of this is lazy and wrong-headed, but the series’ biggest offense comes at the very end of the final episode. Where well executed series in this genre (and Freezing and Maken-ki) present well-defined worlds that give their respective training academies meaning (a dystopian wasteland created by monsters, or a normal world kept in balance through the safeguarding of dangerous relics, for example) and their characters’ motivations for joining said academy, Absolute Duo spends its run saying “here are people who can do cool spiritual stuff and go to a place to learn how to do that stuff better because reasons, and over there is an insane guy with baggage who uses technology to do bad stuff to them because reasons.” But in the finale, we get a short, generic battle for the fate of a school that we haven’t been told why it matters or exists, one of the heroes going Dark God Mode to defeat crazy baggage man, a watered-down repeat of the happy ending we already got in episode two when Tor and Julie got soul-married, and a vague exposition dump about how the world works, why Julie has Dark God Mode, and what the baggage was that made generic, crazy emo baggage man so crazy and emo to begin with. A series should have viewers going “this is an interesting anime world with characters that I want to get to know. I must watch more!” But I started Absolute Duo going “huh. This again. Let’s hope it goes somewhere.” And by the end, the only feeling I had was “oh. So that’s who those people were. That’s why they did what they did. Meh. But wait, what’s the deal with this world again? You mean the series didn’t go anywhere? That sucks.” If there’s another season (which, I heard there would be), let’s hope it goes somewhere and isn’t bad. Flesh out the world more, ship Tomoe and Miyabi together, and have a final battle with that crazy swordsman that Tor kept having PTSD flashbacks about, and I’ll be happy. If the one season is all we get, then who cares what happens? The creators sure didn’t.

Air—a traveling street performer with telekinetic abilities comes to a small town in search of an ancient “girl with wings who lives in the sky.” He slowly comes to care for a young girl whose physical well-being is affected by her dreams of the girl in the sky, and occasionally helps solve supernatural mysteries around town that are somehow also caused by the girl in the sky. But once those mysteries are solved, the characters involved drop out of the series altogether, there’s a bunch of metaphysical nonsense involving time travel, past lives, and the main character losing his memory, getting trapped inside the body of a crow and fusing with the soul of his ancestor, possibly time-travel/split-reincarnating into a boy he waved at in one of the earlier episodes, and watching the love of his life die without even knowing who she is. There is a two-episode prequel that takes place in the ancestor’s time as he helps the girl in the sky find her mother, and a movie that reimagines the events of the first series in a much clearer context, but still basically has the same sad, unfulfilling ending. A beautiful show to look at, but don’t expect to like it (or yourself for investing any time in it) when it’s over.

Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor—Another so-far-short-lived anime about a dark-haired protagonist at a magic school who has no likable traits until it turns out he’s stupidly good at the one thing everyone else in the main cast is smartly terrible at: he has an obsessively creative and in-depth knowledge of basic magic, and he can kick more ass than a conga line of donkeys. To top it all off, he literally keeps a power-nullifying trope in his pocket that gives him an excuse to just punch people really hard. For no good reason, the male students at the magic school dress like Fullmetal Alchemist extras, and the female uniform is basically just lingerie and a cape. WatchMojo recently voted Akashic Records one of the twenty most underrated anime of all time, but with its reliance on harem filler, empty cliffhangers, and a "read the manga" ending, I think it was rated just right.

Angels Of Death—Throw Maze Runner, Saw, Identity, and Deadman Wonderland into a blender, and you get Angels Of Death, a horror series about a young girl who wakes up in a mysterious building after her parents are murdered, and finds herself at the mercy of floor after floor of homicidal maniacs looking to sacrifice her as part of some kind of game, test, or experiment. I watch a ton of horror movies, so I think I can see every twist coming a mile away. But I also watch horror movies (and shows like Angels Of Death and Deadman Wonderland) in the hopes of being pleasantly surprised. The atmosphere, voice acting, and animation worked together perfectly to tighten my tension strings to the breaking point, and I loved it! Speaking of love, I’d love to not spoil the ending for you. I’d love to tell you that I even figured out what the ending meant, but I can’t. I’m saying “love” a lot for a reason, so go watch this anime and figure out what it is for yourself.

Aokana: Four Rhythm Across the Blue—a female-centric sports anime about an annoying underdog trying to get good at tag. The twist: just about everyone in the show wears Hermes-inspired (the Greek messenger god, not the fashion designer) winged shoes that let them defy gravity and fly. The real twist: Even though the female cast is flying around in form-fitting “sports wear” (like in almost every other science fiction all-girls school anime ever made), it’s still about an annoying girl trying to get good at tag.

Armitage III—read as “Armitage, the Third,” this is a short series of four OVAs (Original Video Animations) set in a Total Recall-inspired world (at least, as far as it’s the future and there’s a human colony living on Mars) where robots of varying levels and quality of humanoid appearance and behavior are used as labor and…for other things. When it appears that a serial killer is targeting robots (especially the highly advanced, nigh human Third models), the robophobic Detective Sylibus must team up with Armitage (who, in case you missed the title and the earlier terminology drops, turns out to be a Third herself) to investigate the murders. While it’s nothing the average science fiction geek hasn’t seen before, the developing partnership between Armitage and Sylibus is a joy to watch. The dark, cyber-noir atmosphere is perfectly balanced, the action and dramatic moments weave seamlessly between one another without feeling rushed or tonally inconsistent, and the story is easy enough to follow. There are also two feature-length movies based on the series. The first, titled Poly Matrix, is an edited re-cut of the series proper that removes all of the nuance that made the OVAs interesting, and features butchered line delivery by stars Kiefer Sutherland and Bernadette Peters. The second, Dual Matrix, serves as a direct sequel to both the series and its Poly Matrix cut. The series vocal cast returns, lending some sense of continuity to the film, which is superior to Poly Matrix in every conceivable way. Although it didn’t capitalize much on threat escalation (ie: like bringing back Armitage’s Cyber Angel form at some point), Dual Matrix was a suitable follow-up to one of the best anime series out there.

Assassin's Pride—This wish-fulfillment, magic school anime asks "what if Akashic Records and RWBY had a mutant baby that was also a flaming pile of garbage and its main character was a Super Saiyan vampire?" The world building, though it serves as effective bait, is disrespected in favor of yet more harem filler and cliffhanger endings that do little to hide the fact that all of Kufa Van Pyr's (yes, that is his actual name--like that one Saturday Night Live skit where Clark Kent's original civilian identity was Supe R. Mann) potential love interests are either his literal blood relatives or vampires he sired himself, then hypnotized into forgetting that they are his children so the viewing public have "no problem" with their respective romantic relationships. Gross.

Astra Lost In Space—A group of trust fund teenagers on their way to space camp (in a fictionalized future where space camp is literally on another planet) find themselves sucked through a wormhole into the vacuum of space, where they survive by making their way to a nearby abandoned ship. Lightyears from home and short on supplies, the impromptu crew of the newly dubbed "Astra" must jump their way back, planet by planet, scavenging what they can and surviving a variety of hostile environments as they go. But sci-fi and political thriller twists abound to make the journey even more complicated. It's Orphan Black meets The Twilight Zone meets Planet Of the Apes meets soap operas meets everything else, but in space. And despite the main character adopting his girlfriend's much younger twin sister, it's the best anime of its kind.

BEM—In a dystopian city divided by class and plagued by genetically enhanced supervillain serial killers, a female police officer, recently transferred to a morally gray "lower side" precinct, must fight against social injustice and attempt to solve the ever-growing number of unusual homicides. In the process, she crosses paths with the titular "humanoid monster," one of three mysterious shapeshifting creatures with special abilities who must contend with the city's dangers, the possibility of their own humanity and/or lack thereof, trust, friendship, the histories of those whose faces they wear, the consequences of immortality, and their place in the world at large. As is the case with many short, single-season anime, the draw of a grandiose premise and the exploration of a larger world and story are sacrificed to fit the series' runtime and force a conclusion. The story, as much as could be explored, serves its purpose and says all that it needs to say, and the character development is strong despite the outlandish character designs of the main villains (who often look more like Super Sentai monsters of the week or obscure Spider-Man villains than one might expect of an anime of this caliber). Like Bem himself, this series will sneak up on you.

Bloom Into You—While Citrus took a sensationalist, deviant approach to teenage, yuri romance by making rape the mechanism by which the main characters express their feelings for one another, Bloom Into You took a much tamer approach to the same subject matter. As in Citrus, an outgoing but romantically repressed new girl with short, orange hair attracts the attention of an uptight but romantically aggressive class representative with long, dark hair. But the people behind Bloom Into You know better than to confuse romance with sex or rape. Every piece of background and atmosphere in every shot makes Bloom Into You a work of art in motion, spotlighting the beauty of what is already beautiful, rather than trying to literally gloss over something ugly, as was the case in Citrus. Instead of such a vulgar plot device, the series’ characters are cast in a stage play that closely mirrors the main duo’s feelings for one another (unbeknownst to the playwright, thanks to some often heavy-handed propriety). It’s hard to describe the show’s main relationship without being confusing, wordy, or spoiling the magic of it, so just take my word for it that said relationship is magical, romantic, age-appropriate, sweet, dramatic without being sad or violent, business-like when a scene calls for it, and—though I have no positive experiences of my own to back this up—has a feeling of reality about it. To be honest, knowing that Bloom was a twelve-episode anime going into it, I expected something happier and more final out of it by the end, and was a little disappointed that I as a viewer didn’t get what I wanted out of the series. But getting exactly what you want is boring.

BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, So I Maxed Out My Defense—Just a note: When you see a title this long on an anime, that means it's a light novel adaptation (manga with more reading, basically). They also usually tell the plot of the anime, and BOFURI: I Watched Another Sword Art Online Clone And All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt is no exception. It's about a girl who starts playing a VRMMO and is scared of taking damage and sucking at the game, so she starts her character build with all of her stat points applied to defense. She's slow and has low attack as a result, but dumbs her way into becoming super-broken and overpowered almost immediately. As the series moves along, she makes friends, fights monsters and other players, gets even more overpowered, and...that's it, unfortunately. There is an attempt at making the developers some kind of antagonist group, but they're really just your typical developers who made something overly ambitious and extremely flawed, but are too incompetent to properly cover their own asses. There's no isekai element or major in-game threat, either. It's just a slice-of-life, clubhouse anime with a fantasy-RPG "twist." Don't get me wrong; it's an entertaining anime with good comedy, action, and animation. It just doesn't go anywhere and feels like a waste of time when it's over.

Conception—an almost-hentai JRPG adapted into a barely-animated isekai anime (so does that just make it an “isekai, eh”?) about a generic protagonist who must save the fantasy world by having sex with a harem of zodiac girls so they can give birth to magical Pokemon MacGuffin babies. If that sounds like the worst thing mainstream anime has ever pooped onto any given screen since time immemorial, it’s pretty close to that, and the effort and production value (if the first and only episode I tolerated less than half of is any indication) are somewhere below those of the five-cent, unfinished hand-job you got from the fingerless prostitute who lives in that rusty dumpster behind the other, other, other condemned motel that the Podunkville Department of Sanitation hasn’t bothered to pick up for the last year and a half. And that, like paying five cents for said act, is being generous.

Cop Craft—This series came out about the time that Bright was crashing and burning on Netflix, and has the same premise but does it so much better. A grizzled, veteran cop must learn to work with an aristocratic warrior-priestess from a neighboring fantasy realm to solve supernaturally-committed crimes on Earth, including theft, fraud, murder, and a political assassination. The developing chemistry between the two leads, the suspenseful action sequences, and the effortless blend of episodic police procedural and ongoing narrative make Cop Craft a must-watch, whether it turns out to be a self-contained story or the first season of an ongoing series. But for now there is no sign of it continuing.

Cutie Honey (New/Flash/RE/Universe)—The OG adult-oriented magical girl anime. A scientist is murdered by the evil organization, Panther Claw, leaving behind his fembot "daughter," Honey, who has an overpowered McGuffin inside her called the Airborne Element Fixing Device, which lets her transform into an endless array of disguises, including her unoriginally named magical girl persona, Cutie Honey. In this form, she is able to ass-pull whatever context-specific weapon she needs to defeat the monster of the week. The early incarnations of this franchise follow an episodic format typical of the genre, occasionally attempting a short-lived and unfinished story arc. There is even an alternate, post-apocalyptic future timeline where Honey has been in sleep mode for a hundred years and her perverted adoptive grandfather is a cyborg. Also, the main villain is a genetically modified/alien/demon/something dominatrix named Sister Jill, who turns her female subordinates into animal hybrids by stabbing them with roses. Yeah, it's that kind of anime. The modern, Universe incarnation of the series was not well received, but tries some interesting things, including having an actual overarching story. In the Universe version, Honey Kisaragi is a student at a...shall we say, repressed...religious all-girls' school, and frequently has to elaborately escape the campus to help the local police (one of whom is a special detective who looks suspiciously like the main villainess) foil Panther Claw's crimes. The fight scenes look heavily inspired by studios Gainax and Trigger, which is not a bad thing, and the monster-girl subordinates are given a surprising amount of depth as the twelve episode run progresses (especially Brittany Karbowski's gripping performance as Tarantula Panther in the dub). But Sister Jill's motivations are inconsistent, with her trying to remove the AEFD from Honey one minute, then trying to orchestrate an unbearable amount of tragedy for Honey in an effort to trigger her "dark mode" because she has a crush on Honey the next, only to drop that plot in favor of generic world domination as a means of forcing Honey's call to action and accelerating the story into a trope-heavy final battle against the power of friendship, because scientifically magic cyborg MacGuffin girl can pull the impossible from ass-space, remember? Whether you watch this or not is up to you.

Well. that's all the internet space I've decided to fill for today, so stay tuned for the next bowl of alphabet soup, going from D to whatever letter feels right in the moment.