Anime Spotlight #71: Tales Of Wedding Rings
a.k.a. The Animeister.
It's week three of the Month Of Love, Ticketholders!
And the anime selections this month followed a particular progression, from imperial romance in The Apothecary Diaries, to modern romance and costume design in My Dress-Up Darling, and now that the dress is made, it's time for some Tales Of Wedding Rings!
As a boy, Haruto Satou witnessed Krystal Nokonatika and her grandfather Alabaster (yes, I'm pretty sure all of the characters are named after rocks, shells, and gemstones like they're Sailor Moon villains or something) appear out of nowhere in a beam of bright light and he decides to be her friend for life. Despite calling her Hime (which means "princess" in Japanese) without a hint of irony or sarcasm, and knowing what he witnessed as a child, Satou doesn't believe Krystal's claims of being a princess from another land for some reason (maybe the dub; maybe he's dumb; maybe it's Maybe; maybe it's Maybelline?).
When they are grown up and in high school (and Hime's boobs are so big she can't wear a school uniform properly), Hime announces that she and her grandfather are returning home, and Satou follows her to confess his feelings, only to get isekai'd into the middle of a ritual wedding and wind up as Hime's husband (instead of Marse, the prince of a military empire) and "burdened" with the responsibility of saving the world from Abyssal Monsters as the new Ring King. So now, armed with a love-powered Ring Of Light Magic, Satou and Hime (accompanied by Alabaster and Marse) must travel her fantasy world home, searching for the other four Planeteers so Satou can marry a harem of demi-humans and draw on the elemental powers of their Rings to become Captain Planet and lead the Five Armies to defeat Sauron and his Ring Wraiths.
The pacing is such that Season One is barely half over before Satou has Hime, a shut-in elven child-bride with wind magic named Nephrites (but it's "okay" because she's forty, because elf), a frisky cat-girl warrior named Granart, and a lazy, water-shifting dragon-kin named Saphir (voiced by Brittany Karbowski in the dub) complicating his life in predictable, NC-17 harem trash ways on a more-than-episodic basis, and by the end of the season (when Sauron finally decides to get off his ass and overwhelm Satou's party into retreating to Earth to move on with their lives, but they decide to do a runback instead), he can add the Dwarf-manufactured love-slave golem Amber to the mix (but it's "okay" because Satou has a monogamous libido for Hime, and Stockholm Syndrome makes everything better, just like my sarcasm). In Season Two, the pacing grinds (feel free to interpret that metaphorically and sexually) to an ecchi- and dialogue-heavy, repetitive slog as the party re-visit the cat-people, elven, dragon-kin, human, and dwarven kingdoms from the first season because half of them can't use magic and they haven't fucked enough for Satou to be able to do more than cut the regenerating Lord Of the Rings villain in half. We get a few laughs and emotional moments out of the Ring Princesses reuniting with their families out of this, but the second season is pretty much just "go to place because we're not strong enough and train offscreen to save the whisper-thin animation budget for orgasm sparkles and jiggle physics while we have sex, go on dates, and most often, suggestively blush and stammer our way around physical intimacy, repeat four more times," followed by Hime getting corrupted into a dark form by her ancestor (how a shadow elemental can survive having a Bride with Light Magic is one of those things you just have to ignore how little sense it makes, and Light Magic can essentially control minds and warp reality in this series, so the other Ring Princesses are Coughing Baby Yamcha by comparison) and a six-way same vs same final battle that would look cool if it was better animated, Hime wasn't reduced to a spectating fangirl, and Satou's victory wasn't the only one that mattered.
Going back to the first season for a moment, the angle the series takes on the isekai part of the formula is pretty unique (the hero not being stranded in the fantasy world by death, and the harem being able to come and go back with him if the right spellcaster is available on both sides), but it also introduces a plot-convenient lack of stakes to what would otherwise be a powerful, all-is-lost moment (don't worry if the Dwarves are all dead and the heroes can't get back to save the world; the Dwarves put a sexaroid on Earth in Sleep Mode who has built-in isekai magic and the last set of Rings they need to win the first final battle! Don't worry if the entire fantasy world looked like The Rumbling from Attack On Titan before the heroes were sent away last year; Gandalf called the Eagles offscreen to save all of the important supporting characters, and the JSDF from Godzilla rebuilt all of the damaged infrastructure while Satou and his harem were doing menial chores, school work, and hitting on stray cats!). And if you didn't see a Dark Wind Ring in the fourth episode and immediately figure out the "twist" that Sauron was the original Captain Planet before the burden of fighting conceptual Darkness itself turned him into Harvey Weinstein (which isn't stated in detail until twenty episodes later, when the second season is almost over), your brain probably isn't mature enough to be processing this many erect nipples and shots of glow-censored reproductive anatomy. I'm probably spoiled by better-written and better-animated ecchi harem trash like Mushoku Tensei, High School D×D, and Date A Live, but Shakespeare, this is not.
While I hold out hope that next week's anime about a badass princess punching her asshole suitors in the face (and/or into space and/or paste) will be a better use of my time, please share the love by Staying Tuned for that and remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have feelings about, helping out my ad revenue as you read because real women don't come pre-accessorized, and following me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
100
Animeister,
Out Of the Ring.
Comments
Post a Comment