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Review contains SPOILERS. (This is more an analysis and an argument for the manga than a review, per se.)

I read all this shit in 3 days, so maybe my judgment is different, somehow, from the people who stuck with the series for all 6 years. Maybe I, too, would've been bitterly disappointed by the ending, had I been reading the whole time. But I was emotionally invested by the end regardless, so I'm going to offer my opinion: anyone who truly dislikes this work for the ending should probably work on their reading comprehension skills, because the ending really contained the soul of this work, ... boiled it down to its central elements. Prison School was never a feel-good manga. From the very beginning, it was horrible, it treated its characters like shit, exploited them, embarrassed them, broke their spirits, made them slaves to the ever-inching-forward raunchy comedy that was central to the story. If the manga really gave its characters absolution, what was all the rest for?

Put simply, Prison School is a series of four stories that each come together at a single point in time, where all the narrative threads that have been building previously are swiftly and decisively tied up at a single, triumphant point. Three of these stories "work." All of the narrative trickery before comes together in a single, glorious point of narrative revelation. In my opinion, the first of these works well, the second of these works masterfully, and the third one works somewhat well, but the third story arc is clearly the worst, and it gets pretty old and stale over its 40 chapters of focus on a singular story. But to read most of these reviews, they'd like to focus on the one that doesn't work. I'm sure all of these people were hoping that the manga was headed to that point where maybe Chiyo's confession works, or maybe Kiyoshi realizes that there was something more to the feeling of having "gotten used" to Hana's panties, or maybe Kate's feelings for Mari finally sublimate, or maybe the same happens to Meiko. Instead, Akira Hiramoto - no, Akira Hiramoto-SENSEI - spits in our face. If you have a problem with that, you weren't paying attention.

Prison School is all about sadism and masochism, and nowhere is the relationship between sadism and masochism more evident than in the relationship between an author and their characters. In fact, it's the entire point of storytelling for an author in more traditional modes of storytelling to torture their characters, to put their characters in losing circumstances, so that they are forced to act. In fact, that's the starting premise of Prison School. It's all about narrative mechanics, and about people being trapped by those mechanics. The first story arc introduces two conflicting scenarios: imprisonment, and a romance narrative between Kiyoshi and Chiyo; or, in other words, the protagonist is caught in a dialectical net between sexual hedonism and puritanism. He wants to be with Chiyo in a pure sense; AND he wants to look at Chiyo's boobs.

We can skip through most of the rest of the manga. I don't need to explain this; what Hiramoto is doing here is pretty masterful at times, though it can get old. I enjoy the constant revivification of previously dormant running gags, but at times, it can get a bit blech. I enjoy how shamelessly Hiramoto manipulates the mechanics of voyeurism, even bringing the mechanics of voyeurism by the reader directly into the story as Mari and Kate's sexual unification is literally put on tape. (In fact, I'd love to go back and analyze this section as well, and maybe I'll do it in an edit later).

We get to the end. Everything has gone awry. The characters are spread halfway across the city, each of them having been entirely robbed of their direction. This is the point where we expect everything to come together. The main story - the dialectical romance between Chiyo and Kiyoshi - is rapidly barreling towards a conclusion. Chiyo has said she will accept all of Kiyoshi. What does she mean by that? She means that underlying Kiyoshi's sexual urges, there must be a purity, the superego must be doing its job, Kiyoshi MUST not be a degenerate; that even though the machinery of his sexuality has gotten him into trouble, it is just machinery, it is not what Kiyoshi IS. The ending is a simultaneous revelation, spurred on by Hana's unrelenting insistence, that Kiyoshi is a degenerate. And as Kiyoshi realizes, she is right. The male psyche as embodied by Kiyoshi is dominated by sexuality. His relationship was Chiyo was "built upon a lie," a fantasy, a pure Chiyo constructed by Kiyoshi as a defensive mechanism against his sexual self (do we want to get Freudian? but it's unavoidable that we will). Perhaps the symbolism of Hana's panties isn't the clearest way to represent his desire, but we're practically beyond symbolism at this point. As Hana finally gets her wish and sees Kiyoshi peeing, Chiyo is scarred by her final confrontation with the world of the flesh, and Kiyoshi realizes that it was never about Chiyo, it was always about the wet T-shirt party. After seeing only the exterior, Chiyo is finally granted a peek under Kiyoshi's clothes to realize that he was always the pervert that only he, Chiyo, and the rest of the boys refused to perceive. (Interestingly, the only relationship that truly blossoms was the one that was the most overtly sexual. Right, only Andre, who has actually embraced his sexuality, finds actual romance.)

If you're upset by the ending, it might be a useful exercise to confront what you're really upset by. Despite the constant, real voyeurism, the disgusting objectification, the fanservice ramped up to above an 11 - really the endpoint of fanservice - I think the readers who are now upset really wanted to view this manga the same way Chiyo really wanted to view Kiyoshi. I think they wanted to see that beyond the perversion and beyond the sadism, Hiramoto really did have a "heart of gold," really did understand romance, that the fantasy romantic comedy formulation would eventually come together and we would see the conflicted Kiyoshi, the self-insert, the one we all hope to succeed, overcome his baseness and ascend into a purer, more celibate dimension. And like Chiyo, we're scarred to find that such an absolution is impossible. To read some of these reviews is to confront real, pure rage, the same kind of rage that Chiyo seems to feel in her final onscreen moments. "At the last moment, resistance is futile." It really is. It's time that you stop pinning your hopes for a pure romance on ecchi manga and grow the fuck up.

I haven't been watching new anime much in the recent years as most of the shows I see are soul-crushingly bad corporate garbage with no sense of authorship or purpose. Luckily, I stumbled haphazardly upon Asobi Asobase when it was recommended to me by YouTube algorithms, probably because of the precipitous amounts of unsubbed Nichijou clips I was watching immediately prior to improve my Japanese. And that's the first comparison I'm going to make to start out this interview (that is, between Asobi Asobase and Nichijou). For me, it's a flattering comparison, as Nichijou is practically unparalleled among school comedy slice-of-life anime – technically near-perfect, ... with brilliant characters that manage to be both subtle and over-the-top. That's a show that moves quickly between polar opposites, ultimately delivering strikingly funny comedy alongside a deep undercurrent of struggle for identity and joie-de-vivre. It fully deserves its status as a classic.

Asobi Asobase shares an anarchic, sharp and frequently jaded sense of humor with Nichijou. Its humor is entirely self-conscious; like the best comedies, it knows when to simply revel in immaturity and when to suddenly push the humor to a higher level of meta-comedic understanding. Asobi Asobase is funny, often very funny, and for that it deserves serious praise. Unfortunately, when compared to the heights reached by Nichijou, it falls a bit short. My list of issues with Asobi Asobase is short, but it's enough to push me significantly out of the show's universe; it doesn't immerse me as an environment, and it doesn't enthrall me as a media artifact. So here are some of my gripes.

First of all, the sound. The show itself is sound directed pretty decently, with well-placed sound effects, voice acting that ranges from pretty good to godly, and a generally self-consistent palette of sounds that give the show a distinct character (especially notable: that trumpet squeal that accompanies moments of shock and/or a quick change in atmosphere). Unfortunately, I am much, much less enthusiastic about the music and the music direction. The music itself only serves as a prop, lending the show a temporary nature of the “technical explanation” mood or zaniness or whatever. The director, Seiji Kishi (I'll get back to him, I guess) relies on that joke where music is suddenly yanked away during an abrupt mood shift far, far too heavily, to the point where it can be predicted from a mile away, and it reduces the value of the music itself as well.

Then, there's the OP and the ED. Okay, I have complicated feelings regarding the OP. Musically, the opening, where the rhythm slowly grinds from a slightly-too-slow tempo at the beginning to a reasonable clip, is fantastic – I mean, not awe-inspiring, but the way it brings the soundtrack to life slowly is certainly nice for an intro. Then, the words start. Have you looked up the lyrics to this? I would, if I were you. This falls under the category of theme songs that are directly about the show itself, rather than those that are only loosely related or borrowed from somewhere else. The speakers are the characters themselves, and the lyrics... Is this familiar to you? To me, the “classic trio” was a particularly characterized social unit, especially throughout high school, so I recognize some of what the theme song talks about. I'm not sure if it doesn't try a bit too hard to introduce some deeper dimension of nostalgia to the show, though. Asobi Asobase works hard to build a very convincing interpersonal dynamic between its principal characters through humor; the theme song, by comparison, comes off as a blunt attempt to invoke some nostalgia for our own innocent friendships of days past. Simply put, the characters that speak in the theme song don't seem like the characters that speak in the show. As intentional as this might be, the theme song seems forced, like a push a bit too hard from the director. This is one directorial choice that I question, but it doesn't reflect at all on the author of the manga, Rin Suzukawa. The ED, on the other hand, is pretty good, a lot better than the OP, and doesn't try to do that much or overstay its welcome.

About Suzukawa's writing, it's, simply put, pretty damn good, a lot of the time. For the most part, this is expertly-crafted comedy with few pretensions of any kind. The characters are funny, yet retain distinctive, but not gimmicky, personalities. Sure, they act ridiculously, and sometimes outside the bounds of realism, but their tendencies are all recognizably human, even recognizably ordinary. The show doesn't exactly reach any higher planes of existence like Nichijou, which just surpasses it in mechanical quality and far surpasses it in self-awareness, or a very different show like Niea Under 7, which does a much better and more convincing job of probing the nature of human relationships, albeit with lower quality in the comedic department. Instead, though, it comes with a very crisp and refreshing aftertaste of unpretentiousness.

However, there are certainly weaker bits, and they often undermine the stronger bits in a sort of disappointing way. By episode 12, the show kind of just tapers off into a circular pattern of making similarly-styled jokes. I understand the theoretical point of the lack of evolution across the length of Asobi Asobase (season 2, perhaps?) but I would more appreciate a show that allows itself to change and evolve. There are no “storylines” in Asobi Asobase; past events are referenced, but very little energy is carried from bit to bit, even sometimes within episodes. There are plenty of things I would've liked to have seen continued – the film for the culture festival, or whatever ended up happening between Aozora and Kasumi – and the lack of continuity ultimately builds to what ends up seeming like a lack of maturity. Again, to point to other examples, Nichijou had a subtle but ever-present overarching narrative that builds up to the meeting between Yuuko's and the professor's little social groups; Azumanga Daioh cyclically traversed the pace of life up to graduation, with graduation proving an ultimate end. In comparison, Asobi Asobase occupies a narrative wilderness, where nothing really builds into anything else.

Another bit of the aftertaste that is refreshing, and this is where I veer a bit into controversial territory: there is something a bit odd about idealizing the lives of schoolkids, especially young girls, that often comes off (whether intended or not) as fetishistic. The presence of the school environment is often integral to the nostalgia of school slice-of-life media, and the alienness of female social groups allows a male viewer (not that these are the only viewers, though! but feel free to read up on the male gaze; many of these shows are primarily male-created, after all) to maintain his distance from the material depicted. As with the better comedy slice-of-life shows, there is nothing fetishistic about the characters in Asobi Asobase; as I said previous, they are all ridiculous and heavily-flawed, but recognizably human. Perhaps they align at least slightly with stereotypes, but they aren't in any way defined by them. This is something that is also true of Nichijou, and one of the reasons that show is so great; it is something that is not so true of something like Azumanga Daioh. To round out the gender discussion, Asobi Asobase also contains a character who, it is implied, is trans; her depiction is sympathetic, but not at all patronizing. Olivia's older brother at one point launches into a long-winded speech about film theory that recognizably hits many of the points the show itself does. In this speech, he describes the student's film as a pastiche of pop culture icons, sort of (but “in Benjaminian terms”). Is he talking about the show itself? Well, yes and no: I think the show deviates quite severely from many the established pop culture tropes (a true pastiche would be something more along the lines of Azumanga), but it is certainly aware of its status as a pop culture icon, and attempts to reconstruct the purpose of such – to entertain – without falling into many of the pitfalls modern comedies fall into with regard to making meaning.

Still, Asobi Asobase possesses some flaws, and they are flaws that void the show overall of much of its significance and importance. I wish I could like Asobi Asobase more. For most of the duration of the show, I did like it more. But at the end I was left disappointed – the show was still relying on all of its gags and funny things, and I was conscious of the fact that it was about to end, and the show seemed not to care. This is television; it is a thing people get attached to, and it should acknowledge that at least somehow. So despite its style, wit, humor, and understatedness, I can't get fully behind Asobi Asobase just yet. Hopefully there's a season 2, and hopefully if it continues, the show's staff will find a way to allow the show the expressiveness that the ensemble cast they've compiled are so able to give us.

*I will edit this to update, but this might be AOTY 2018 for me.

Story: 5 / Art: 7 / Sound: 6 / Character: 7 / Enjoyment: 7 / Overall: 6

Obviously I watched this because of the fact that I had just watched Serial Experiments Lain and was made so emotionally vulnerable by it that I just had to go and consume every other related show that exists, and one of the few I haven't already watched was this one. I didn't even remember it existed, but I'm glad I found it. I was pretty surprised to find that it had a rating of “under 7” (on MAL, I guess that means a show is pretty much terrible, given the tendency towards rating inflation of MAL users), but of course I was going to watch ... it anyway. I thought it would be interesting how a team that had just gotten out of the creative world of SEL would ease themselves into a lighter show. Of ABe's four late-90s/early 00s anime (SEL, this, Haibane, and Texhnolyze), this is certainly the least well-known and least well-liked. And it's true that it's weaker than the masterpiece Serial Experiments Lain, and fails in a lot of the ways Haibane Renmei succeeds. Texhnolyze spirals off into a completely different direction, but for me is about on equal footing with Niea Under 7.

Niea Under 7 is no masterpiece, but it is good, and criminally underrated. It's mostly a comedy/slice-of-life deal, and the premise should be familiar to anyone who watched Gintama (hold on, was this an influence?): aliens have come to Earth, but life continues relatively unchanged (much less in this than in Gintama). The premise and the fact that both are comedies are pretty much the end of the similarities, though, as the cast, general atmosphere, and comedic style are much different in this. Niea Under 7 is slow and sleepy and imbued with all the sluggishness of a hot summer, and it's all the better for it, as this atmosphere is a major contributor to some pretty genuinely emotionally affecting moments, which I will get back to.

But first, the comedy. Of course, the central duo is comprised of Mayuko, an exaggeratedly poor college student, as the straight man, and Niea, an unemployed freeloading alien, as the funny man. It's pretty standard stuff, but certainly better than more typical incarnations. Mayu is tired, overworked, and filled with a world-weariness and cynicism that feels very real – she is as lost as any of us, a good person without any real means of applying her virtues. A particularly telling sign of her character comes in the first episode, where Niea crashes a spaceship through the roof of her apartment; Mayu simply accepts the blame without even trying to explain that she's not at fault. Niea comes with a stock defect, the absence of an antenna and a lower-class status. Neither of these are really all that convincing (I mean, we believe them, but sometimes they do seem “stock”), but I'm not sure if it really matters – the sadness that causes Niea to act out also feels genuine, regardless of whatever contrivances cause her grief.

There is a lot of humor in Niea Under 7, but it's not exactly refined or witty; the funniest bits come from the editing, the voice acting, the visual choices, the sounds. It's not situational humor, particularly, but instead based on the characters or director behaving outlandishly against the more subdued tone that otherwise pervades. However, comedy is not necessarily the defining feature of Niea Under 7; it vanishes for extended periods, and when it returns, it really possesses a kind of emotionality unto itself, a revelry in the idea of comedy itself, rather than proper comedy. In essence, the main duo isn't that funny to the viewer, necessarily - they enact comedic routines more as a materialization of their bond as friends than as entertainment for the viewer. Because of this, there's a genuine pathos that undergirds (and sometimes undercuts) many of the comedic moments, especially later in the series.

In other words, while Niea Under 7 could technically be classified as a slice-of-life comedy, it is really much better at being serious than comedic. All of the characters are deeper than they might be in an ordinary comedy; their motivations are subtle, fickle, and altogether human in a way that separates itself from the show's comedic elements (even with the “comedy relief” characters). Hell, Chie shows up in episode 4, and 5 minutes later, she's already more well-developed than most characters in the last 5 years' worth of anime history. Even Karna, who just abruptly drops out about halfway through the series, manages to have her moments of character development (where does she go, though?). The issue is, and others have pointed this out, that characters sometimes do drop out, and their presence is missed. But the characters that stick around explore facets of life that feel very authentic.

In many ways, the concepts Niea Under 7 explores are relatively basic. We all know about family, personal pride, being ashamed, finding the courage to speak, and being tired. Niea Under 7 explores those concepts without what I would call sophistication – its successor, Haibane Renmei, was more sophisticated – but it remains grounded as a result of its lack of sophistication. More importantly, the show's lessons are delivered with a remarkable gentleness. Unlike in many comedies, these characters are not idiots – they have real motivations that supply humor when they are meant to but still remain legitimate, understandable, and fresh, if not entirely organic. For the kind of show that it is, the mechanisms of it are perhaps a bit too visible. (In Serial Experiments Lain, the mechanisms were more visible, but the constructedness was always essential to those characters; in Haibane Renmei, ABe finally achieves what he didn't in Niea Under 7 as the storycrafting completely disappears into the organic cast of characters.) Occasionally, this constructedness is put to good use, when, for example, all the characters happen to gather in the same place, or whatever. And later in the series, character development happens more and more naturally, although the sense that some elements of the show are intended to drive that character development never completely vanishes. But I can forgive ABe that, since the ways that the characters react to these events are so novel and so achingly subtle. Often while watching the show, I felt like ABe and co., after contributing to one of the coldest, darkest shows of the 90s, wanted to do something that's just warm. And this one is so warm and also so bittersweet, it has so much of the bittersweetness of stasis.

On some technical aspects: there's not much music during the show, and the sound effects come straight from Hanna-Barbera's playbook in a curious reference to cartoon history – perhaps to demonstrate the poverty of the characters (even their sound effects are public domain!). It is a “domestic poor animation,” after all. The opening and closing songs, however, are both brilliant. On the OP, “Come Here,” and the subdued mood of the instrumental and creaking voice of SION himself portray a kind of weariness that persists throughout. And the ED is stunningly beautiful, especially paired with the montage of pictures from Mayuko's past; the line “Everybody will grow up and pass away eventually, but they will be born again here so it will be merry” is an emotional wellspring that tints every episode with bittersweetness, even right through the slapstick comedy. (Anybody who enjoyed the show would do well to look up the full-length song, which makes me choke up every time I listen to it.) Here the OP and ED really work with the show to build something bigger. What music is featured throughout the episodes is good at buttressing the sort of listless mood of the show overall.

The animation certainly has its issues, but it's not particularly bothersome or important: it's good enough. The character design is, characteristically for ABe, fantastic, and the sets are also well-designed to contribute to the aura of quiet decrepitness that is so important to Niea Under 7.

Some have pointed out that Niea Under 7 is perhaps too arbitrary and too incomplete, and it is so. For a show 13 episodes long, it tells a story that could've just as easily been told in maybe 7 or 8 – even less; this really could've been a feature-length film and hit all the major plot points, introduced all the major characters. So it seems bloated, right? Not exactly. Characters come in and out, and when we expect it all to build to something or to go somewhere, it stubbornly doesn't. Drama happens and it doesn't happen. Niea Under 7 imitates slow processes of life, where things don't quite happen as they do in the movies, where people take months to learn that they care about each other, where sudden tearfulness is a powerful emotional climax. More modern slice-of-life shows could learn a lot from NieA's subtlety.

Of course it never exactly goes anywhere. One could never call Yoshitoshi ABe a genius specifically for having thought of this; the incredible depth, complexity, and philosophical deftness with which the team navigated a world like Serial Experiments Lain is gone here. But as if everything has to be the work of a genius. NieA Under 7 instead demonstrates that it's the work of people who have experienced happiness and sadness, comfort and unease, who have seen the cycles of the world fold over onto themselves, that everything is here and not. It is a celebration of ephemerality that is decidedly unprofound, and proud of that fact. Is that in itself profound? No, and to think it was would be to misunderstand the point. Here we have a warm, enveloping show that reminds us that the powerful messages driven home by other, more pointed, and often better shows aren't really the basis of life. NieA is a show about the seasons changing, and about saying goodbye to the moment that is now even when another one will surely come. Everything that is said is pregnant with emotion, and yet nothing is ever said; and yet, isn't that life? And just like that, NieA Under 7 is swept away by the wind.

EDIT: Despite its technical deficiencies, I can tell this show is going to stay with me for a long, long time, so I'm going to bump it to an 8, which puts it cleanly in masterpiece territory. Yeah, you absolutely should watch this show, especially if you're a fan of ABe's. Reviewing it solely on its own merits, I'd probably keep it at a 7, but where's the fun in reviewing if you can't get emotional about it?

Story: 7 / Art: 6 / Sound: 6 / Character: 9 / Enjoyment: 8 / Overall: 8

This is a short review, and it's not really a review at all, more a discussion of some of the things I found beautiful about Serial Experiments Lain. For a review, all I would write is some expansion of "There were significant flaws in SEL, which have been noted - the reuse of shots, the disjointedness of the narrative early in the story, things that were meant to be understood that ended up being unintelligible to most everybody - but especially at the end it overcomes this and transforms itself into an absolute masterpiece." Anyway, here are my thoughts. They contain spoilers (not specific things ... that happen so much as taking into account the place the show ends, which isn't exactly where the show begins).

First thought: this is why when you read a book like Hayy ibn Yaqzan (look it up - a book of Islamic philosophy) you can't think it's a dry manual of how the world works, because when ibn Tufail wrote that he thought it was a conversation with God, and that's what other people thought, too. This is like that: when the author (as I conceive of them) creates Lain, they are bringing into being their impression of a God. Where SEL is prescient isn't in the way it forecast later developments in technology - by the time of the show, most of them had already happened. It was prescient neither forwards nor backwards, which I guess means it's just insightful.

But it's not about the role of technology or really necessarily about society at all, even if it has some things to say about those. It's a little bit about the idea of a pop culture figure or icon, maybe in the age of the digital, something that wills itself into being by being seen: Lain could've been designed with the same word "designed" you would use to refer to a character like Hello Kitty or Hatsune Miku, and was. Even God as traditionally conceived is a character, or at least people have made him into one (white beard, white robe, etc.).

Or if one wants to align oneself with Lain rather than with the author, it's about loving the whole world and wanting to grant them their reprieve from your presence. My kneejerk reaction to Lain talking to the viewer at the end was that it might be gimmicky. Obviously it isn't - maybe the truth it confers is a little bit if you look from a certain angle - but of course we all have to know that Present Day, Present Time is referring to the moment of viewing, and then Lain emerges ever so slightly from the static because she - the character her - is being brought into existence by being seen. She moves into a higher existence by being remembered by us. That much may be obvious - I don't think I got it on the first viewing, but, you know, all the clues are inside the text. But the ultimate effect is that her presence on your screen gives you that bit of optimism that she, you know, "lives on" - by being the basis of a mythology Lain could easily live on, i guess, because she was mythology literalized from the beginning.

But, you know, doing that kind of analysis predates your awareness of the boundary between you and fiction, i.e., that Lain dies at the edges of our understanding of her. Yeah, SEL is aware of its nature as a TV show, more than I necessarily would've given it credit for from watching the first 11 episodes. I believe that the author(s) is a character in their own story always, so if you squint (you don't have to squint, it's ok, you've already aligned the rest of you to the squint) it really does seem like a conversation between an author and god. And then to think: this is what I (they) think God is like? or looks like? A small very beautiful brown-haired girl with piercing brown eyes. But given our media, or given what we see, one could easily come to understand that as God, or, you know, whatever. Would you like it if Lain were God? I would be comforted by it, probably. You know, let's all love Lain, because in doing so both of two things happen: we are implicated in the story-world of SEL because our viewing creates her, and she is implicated in our world through our collective memory of her. Or - wait, is the Lain talking to me through the computer the actual Lain?

But this is small comfort. It's so, so sad. The last two episodes contain some of the most genuinely heartbreaking moments one might ever see on television. I seriously don't think this is talked about enough. I see a lot of analysis that brings forward the conceptual framework that SEL creates as evidence of the show's masterpiece status, or discussions of the avant-garde, impressionistic visuals, and so on and so forth, but rarely do people mention the essential emotional core of the series. The grief of SEL is pure and unbridled; the visuals are not only strange and alien but desolate and lonely as well. Other reviewers have been right that one should not take this show lightly. As fascinating as it is, it is gut-wrenching, intense and, like I said before, unspeakably sad.

Or, to put it another way: most viewers of this show try to figure out what's going on, figure out the philosophical implications, what the story is, what it's trying to say. This is rarely the right way to approach cinema or animation like this. Feel this show, please. Let yourself feel it. These are images of absolute desolation; they are intended to disorient because for Lain and for the people of this world that is what the experience of being alive is like. Serial Experiments Lain, for all its flaws, is filled with the very genuine, searing, white-hot pain of absolute loneliness. The story is how it is not for some high-minded philosophical reason but because it makes you feel a certain way. That's why, without fail, I break down crying whenever I get to the last couple episodes. There, right at the end, the show discovers the humanity that it kept from you all along, the lack of which cast a shadow over everything. And then as quickly as it appeared, it is gone from you.

This is how you make an emotionally compelling story.

Story: 9 / Art: 8 / Sound: 9 / Character: 10 / Enjoyment: 10 / Overall: 10

So, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica is the series that, back when I was in high school, everyone was talking about. It was supposed to be the second coming of the magical girl genre, something that defied all the genre constraints, something that made clear the terrible pain of being a hero, as all the greatest hero-related media have done. When I first heard about it, I watched the first episode and dropped it – partially because I had other things to watch at the time, partially because it didn't interest me all that much. The visuals seemed too willful in their strangeness, and based on ... the people I knew who loved it, it didn't seem like it would appeal to me all that much. Now, coming back as a more mature viewer after having developed my taste in media a little more, I will say that I think this is a good show. It's far from perfect, and I'll explain why, but it has a lot of merit.

Madoka Magica was done by the same director – Akiyuki Shinbo – as all those Monogatari anime, and it shows. Like some of Shinbo's other shows with Shaft, Madoka Magica is extremely stylish. Like Monogatari, he show is decorated with all the same unnaturally clean, empty architecture, and the witches' mazes are decorated with the same clutter of pop-icon paper cutouts and pop culture references. It's a distinctive, immediately recognizable style and it was one of the only things, along with a sort of idiosyncratic, jumpy, tense style of editing, that made any Monogatari-related media artifact worth anyone's time at all. But Monogatari's story was absolute harem garbage, while Madoka Magica's story is actually kinda good, so all the idiosyncracies of Shinbo's style finally aren't wasted dressing up some dumb bullshit. Now all the disorientation goes somewhere other than up its own ass – even if up its own ass is its final destination. After all, Shinbo's style is controversial for good reasons. It's so stylized that it reduces everything on the screen to a plaything of the director; there is no margin for error here. His tics (hello, Shaft head tilt) are here in full force, and it sometimes stifles drama that could be more dramatic if he gave it space to let it bloom rather than choking it with his willfully obscure style.

About the story: there is a sort of property that a lot of shows have where they really try to turn the emotion-meter up to 11 every moment of every episode. The worst example I can think of is AnoHana, a show which is mainly about people crying all the time and never stopping. There are other shows like that – Your Lie in April, for example, and others but whatever re: them. Now, this isn't one of those. This show has nuance. But still, with all I heard about how the show will crush your soul and stuff like that, it seems to be more of a nihilism-fest than a cry-fest – but a fest nonetheless. I mean, this is a show that from the beginning makes its mission entirely too clear: it wants to beat the viewer to a pulp emotionally, but it summarily fails to do this because it neglects the idea of viewer fatigue. There is only so much grief one can take before it begins to seem old, and the effect can come off as deadening rather than genuinely cutting. (For a show that is better executed in this regard, see Serial Experiments Lain, which simply has better characterization.)

By the by, I should mention that I'm a musician, by which I mean I've been doing music for a long time, and I know a lot of people who've dedicated their lives to music. There's sort of a mysticism in a lot of media about musicians – the idea of dedicating one's life to the craft, and the idea that once one has bound oneself to music the unbinding is the most painful imaginable thing – and that's really just off the mark, and it's disappointing that it serves so central of a function in this show. I mean, playing the violin is a job. People do it because they love it, but you know, also for money, and it's just not as big of a deal as one might imagine. Yeah, this error is forgivable because of the role it plays in the story, but it does indicate that Kamijou's character is basically only present as a plot device – a gender-reversed fridge girl of sorts.

This error is not major, but it is an example of something that plagues this show. Unfortunate as it is, the thing just isn't that well-written. Madoka Magica's treatment of relationships between characters is actually quite nuanced and satisfying, and the lessons learned from that treatment are pretty universalizable. Where it stumbles, rather, is the design of the characters themselves. Dialogue is stunted; we are left with sparing clues as to what types of people these are. The characters' history slips; people act out of an unexplainable amount of love for people we don't know (this isn't a problem in the main relationship – not to be spoiled – but certainly in others). In most cases, it takes strong personal relationships as a given and works with them, forgetting to sufficiently justify their existence in the minds of viewers. Especially, this is the case for Miki's relationship with Kamijou. I understand what the show is going for, but it's a bit hard to understand within the universe of the show, a difficulty which is never resolved (or is resolved via some deux ex machina-style reasoning – it was never meant to be fully understood, for example).

It is also hurried. Watching these characters collapse, it's like a shadow of a collapse rather than the real thing. It happens too quickly; we don't see deeply enough into the mechanisms of their minds; like them, we don't know what's important but we also don't exactly know what's unimportant. The characters are too vague, too general. Even a little bit more work fleshing this out would've been helpful. But this too is valuable for the series, I guess. It's just so cold, so detached and so barren that you can barely recognize any of its components as human. It's blatantly a TV show. Again, there are cases where this would be justified, but this just falls short in terms of self-awareness; it insists that we should care about these characters rather than the concepts they represent, but doesn't give us sufficient reason to.

As a genre piece, then, this is a rousing success just because of how far it diverts from the image it sets out for itself from the beginning. The structure of the series is almost entirely based on the idea of subverting an image. But that's another arena where a mistake is made, because it diverts from the image too quickly and within three episodes or so it's incredibly dark, dark enough that we know it can never recover. Like others have said, shows like this need to pace themselves, because after that point, the idea of the subversion of the magical girl genre loses its power, and so does the idea of darkness. We know how dark it can get because it's already gotten there. From that point, it never lets up on the gas until the very end. Again, this could be interpreted as a good thing or a bad thing, but it indicates to me that one of the main points of strength attributed to Madoka Magica – that it cleverly subverts all the optimism of the magical girl genre – is perhaps not entirely secure.

Besides, there are shows that do what Madoka Magica does, but better. Serial Experiments Lain is one of them; Princess Tutu is another. But this is certainly a good show; its ambition is unparalleled, and it has all the blistering intensity you could want. I think many of us know about hope and loneliness and despair and all that, but it never hurts to have a reminder. And Madoka Magica is probably Shinbo's masterpiece, too, a creation that puts all of the aesthetic dimensions of his craft to good work. When Madoka Magica ends one is left with a deep, resonating sadness; while it stumbles throughout its run, it certainly ends on a strong note. Watching Madoka Magica really does feel like watching something important and significant, in its own earnest, slightly immature, rebellious way. The show's attitude can be best summed up by watching the show's opening – a lighthearted affair where all the characters appear together, as if they were in a relatively optimistic, lighthearted anime. It takes guts to do what Shinbo proceeded to do, and perhaps anger and anguish, too.

I have given Madoka Magica a 7. The technical flaws with it were too glaring, and it remains, for the most part, locked within its own moral universe in a way that renders it unable to complete the subversion it wants to complete. These characters don't feel mythical; they feel small, and as a consequence the universe of the show also feels small. I don't think this is what they were going for the way it might've been in Serial Experiments Lain; I think, based on the huge, far-reaching, 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque theories it puts out, that it wants very much to be something large. Unfortunately, Madoka Magica remains earthbound; but it accomplishes a hell of a lot while it's down here.

Story: 8 / Art: 9 / Sound: 5 / Character: 6 / Enjoyment: 8 / Overall: 7

The animation is fine. Character designs, for the most part, walk the line between cliched and genuinely individual, but I'd give them most of them, with the exception of maybe Sorata himself. Jin, too, but his foil, the nameless Student Body President, saves him from this. It's worth noting, though, that Mashiro and, curiously, Chihiro, are both masterpieces of design. Mashiro is one of the few leading female characters that actually do look as beautiful as everyone in the show insists they do (most of the time, they're honestly indistinguishable from the rest of the characters); and the interplay between Chihiro's eyes and her hair ... is kind of cool, as well.

The background art is kind of cool, possessing this very, very oversaturated quality that livens up the atmosphere of the show and goes nicely with the motif of colors that's brought up a couple times and sort of serves as the metaphorical background for the show as a whole. Notably, there's a parallel there between the world they live in and Mashiro's art, which also veers toward the extreme end of color saturation. On art, though, I thought it was interesting that Shiina's art was so vaunted. That kind of stuff can be difficult to represent, and on the whole, the show isn't about her art, so it doesn't really matter what it looks like, but seeing the paintings of hers that are shown, I doubt she would ACTUALLY make it all that far in the professional art world, outside of local competitions. Nit-picky, I know.

The music is there, I guess. Some of the singing in the opening themes goes a little bit out of tune here and there, which I like, being the pretentious avant-gardeist that I am. Other than that, the music never really asserts itself here. In the end, I can't think of a single time that music really added to a scene. The voice actors fulfill their roles dutifully (watched in subbed form), with the best performance going to Shiina and the worst probably to Sorata (he yells a bit too much).

OK, now that that's out of the way, I can write on some of the actually important aspects of this show. I don't write reviews usually, and I doubt many people are reading this, but I feel like my opinion is more relevant here than usual, because as an artist (specifically, a composer, but a "creator" nonetheless), I feel like this anime misses a few marks in portraying a realistic artistic struggle.

On the most surface level, there does not exist a world where the entire arc of one's career is going to be determined by one audition, and frankly I can't see why Sorata didn't enter his game design plan into somewhere more around the area of 3-5 different competitions, which is what I (and many of my colleagues) do. It's usually worked for me. This is addressed at the end, when some of the characters resolve to continue working toward their goals. I was surprised that Chihiro, or someone, at least, didn't intervene and inform Sorata or Nanami that, yes, there are indeed other game design competitions / voice acting studios out there. Anyway, who really cares about that, other than me, apparently?

The various struggles - self-worth, overworking oneself, the feeling of constantly being behind - are pretty much universal, not just artistic, but the way the show addresses them is, I suppose, fairly true-to-life. There are a couple threads that are picked up that aren't really explored fully - Sorata, for example, begins to take his anger out on Mashiro, forcing her to conform to a more "normal" life, but then he just stops, and everything's okay, I guess. The most satisfying arc in the story is Misaki and Jin's story, and everything else just sorta goes on and ends without much satisfaction. What can I say?

Here's where I regret what happens in Sakurasou: it has the chance, and fails multiple times, to address themes that deal with the characters specifically. Here's the litmus test: if you replaced all the characters with engineers, and rather than an art school, it was an engineering school, would you notice the difference? Probably not, To Be Honest. Some of the motifs would change; characters would adapt slightly to account for their new careers; but overall, nothing much about art would be missed. Sakurasou needs to seriously level with the actual struggles facing actual artists. Sure, these are naive high school students, but a few are, apparently, some of the leading artists in their respective fields, so I'm thinking the show should be going into some of this stuff:

1. Sure, we get backstories as to how some people got into art, and these are relatively convincing. But there is the perennial, and paralyzing, question of why to continue. What are these characters' ultimate goals, other than self-fulfillment?

2. Very rarely is the struggle of originality dealt with. Frankly, Sorata's games sound like afterthoughts, just things thought of to carry the plot forward. We never see him struggling with the creative process; we never see him trying to think of ideas; we just see him magically produce an idea and a pitch, but that's all fill-in-the-blank stuff. How does Rhythm Battler represent him personally?

3. Mostly, art is done in solitude, at least the type our heroes are doing. Yet we don't see too much of that retreat; when characters are found alone doing their creative thing, someone always walks into the room. But that loneliness - and the way that what you're working on sort of takes over your life for short periods - is never shown. Why?

These are all based on my own experiences, but I've heard from others who've had the same problems. I'm sure there are others that the show could explore, but, you know, there are a couple.

Given that Sakurasou is art and was created by an artist, I'm surprised at the lack of attention paid to the way the characters engage with their own definitions of art. The show works fairly well as a character study, but I feel like it would've been a more convincing, vibrant show if it had explored some of those questions a bit more.