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Aug 9, 2022
Takashi Ikeda is responsible for Sasameki Koto, perhaps the most bog-standard 2000s girl’s love series out there. His newest manga, on the other hand, is a cut above.
"The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This" is a yuri 4-koma about scriptwriter Elly and her voice actress girlfriend Wako, and their domestic life together. There’s a significant age gap between them that leaves Wako as something of a cute pet in the relationship, and while this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I found it quite charming. To hammer this in further, the two of them are drawn in noticeably different artstyles, with Elly receiving more
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detailed linework and Wako being far more moe.
As far as slices of life go, this is top-tier, highlighting all the cute, sweet, and strange moments of living together with your lover. It’s not pornographic, but it’s also not afraid to talk about sex. Wako and Elly are sweet, understandable characters, and their interactions with each other feel genuine and true to life. Given how emotionally immature yuri characters tend to be, even in adult-focused series, this is a breath of fresh air.
While at first it seems like the supporting cast are going to detract from the central relationship (as notably happened in Sasameki Koto), Wako and Elly’s friends are good fun to be around. It’s neat to see small circles of lesbian friends depicted in something like this so realistically. Of all things, there's an incidental trans subplot late in the manga. I was terrified Ikeda would drop the ball on this, but it's handled kindly and left open-ended without much incident when the manga concludes.
That's my one knock against this series, it ended serialization after 104 chapters but could have just as easily went on for 100 more. While I wish it had, I'm more than happy with what we got.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 28, 2022
This show is good enough that it got me to round up my lesbian friends and play mini-golf. That’s the short review, but I can go long as well.
You should know going into this that I despise real golf and everything it stands for. But lucky for me, Birdie Wing is not a show that respects its sport. In the very first episode, our main character declares “I don’t play golf. I hit a ball with a stick for money.” She's so stupid. This *show* is so stupid, the kind of stupid you get out of 2000's anime and can't help but adore. It's also
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the most fun I've had out of a seasonal in years.
Birdie Wing’s production details have been a hilarious mystery to unravel. Original sports anime are quite rare, so I was baffled as to how this show even got made until I started digging further. Bandai-Namco is our production company, which quickly becomes evident with the tongue-in-cheek Gundam product placement. But behind the scenes, Birdie Wing is inexplicably being financed by HTC’s virtual reality branch. On top of the anime, this partnership will result in a “metaverse museum” and a Nintendo Switch game.
So how well did they use their VR bucks? Well, Birdie Wing’s production values are never excellent, and CG is understandably used to cut corners on the golf courses. However, the character designs are superb, with plenty of unique outfits for the main duo. The animation can be limited at times, but it hits when it needs to, with absurd golf swings and imposing shot angles. The Osamu Dezaki-styled dramatic watercolor freezeframes are an excellent homage. It’s pretty clear that someone on the production team has a waifu, as Aoi is animated way better than everyone else.
Perhaps the greater miracle is that Birdie Wing is good. Everything I mentioned above ends up being a pretty sketchy foundation for a show, and since it’s an original, the screenwriter attached to the project matters a lot. They ended up bringing Yosuke Kuroda on board, whose writing credentials include girls-with-guns kinda-yuri Madlax and the extremely pornographic combat definitely-yuri Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid. So we’re getting lesbians, and we’re getting ridiculous over-the-top action scenes. Somehow, I think he was one of the best possible picks for this.
His script does the impossible and makes golf entertaining. We get a main character who despises her sport and tears it apart with brute-force power and precision. We get a seedy underground golf mafia arc. We get a roulette of increasingly depraved older women in said mafia. We get golfing abilities described with brazenly pornographic innuendo, delightful over-the-top melodrama, classic sports anime rivalry, and maybe even an assassination or two. And most importantly, we get delicious, delicious yuri-bait.
Look, I’m a lesbian first and a golfer last, so I’m going to be real with you. This is a “show, don’t tell” kind of yuri. There’s plenty of plausibly-deniable romance scenes, but you won’t be getting any confessions up-front. However, actions speak louder than words, and when Eve hits a ball so far that Aoi can see it from her flight about to take off, and Aoi makes vows to meet her again while wearing a Char cosplay on a VR golf course, that’s the kind of stuff that counts for me. If I’m reading the foreshadowing right, there’s a nonzero chance that they’re going to be revealed to be sisters in the second season. It would be a laughably bad move, but given the unavoidable skeeziness of some of Kuroda’s works, I can’t say I wasn’t ready. Also this show does the delightful women’s sports anime thing where most of the side characters pair cleanly off with each other.
I’m so glad this show exists, and that it’s somehow the opposite of a soulless money-grab given its circumstances. I could care less about the planned tie-in content landscape, but what matters is that Birdie Wing the anime is made out of love. In my ideal world, we would have one of these every season. Sports yuri is the good stuff, and I can’t wait to see the golf butches being teased for Season 2 in action.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Sep 19, 2020
The first in the "Clamp School Trilogy", Man Of 20 Faces purports to be a phantom thief thriller, but it's actually a romance manga between two elementary schoolers. And for whatever reason, these children and their friends and family are fascinated with the philosophy of love. Characters will monologue for pages on end about what true love really means, with the youthful thievery only an afterthought.
This is all well and good, but the central ideas presented in this manga are just plain terrible. It screws up so badly that the very happy ending left me more cynical of love then when I started. Oops.
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They didn't even have the guts to make Santa Claus real in this universe. Cowards.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 14, 2020
Pretty much as soon as they made their debut, CLAMP launched an extensive shared manga universe revolving around an elite city-sized school campus shaped like a pentagram. Their Clamp School works don't seem to be fondly remembered these days, but I suppose they paved the way for the future Tsubasa/xxxHOLIC/Cardcaptor shared universe, which miraculously took off.
My opinion on Clamp School Detectives is that it sucks ass, so I went into Defenders with the minimum of expectations. It's still not *good*, but it's miles better. School Detectives is ostensibly a comedy, but it has a hard time landing even ten percent of its jokes. School
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Defenders succeeds in being a little funnier by sheer virtue of being a gag manga. The tokusatsu bits run dry pretty quickly, but what emerges is an unfathomable romance followed by a bizarre third-act twist straight out of Rocky Horror. It's weird, it's stupid, and if I had bought a Tokyopop volume of this as a kid I would have eaten it right up.
Let's be real here, I'm giving this manga a lot of pity points because one of the main characters repeatedly mentions how he's in love with his superhero partner and just wants to be his tradwife. Sometimes a transsexual from thirty years ago successfully reaches through the pages and makes me feel something, anything, from reading a mediocre CLAMP manga.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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May 3, 2020
Like any reasonable person, I love vampires and lesbians and vampires who are lesbians. However, one of my more unique penchants is manga that starts off incredibly promising but goes off the rails in the last stretch, leaving me with both murky appreciation and disappointment. Let’s look at what went wrong here.
Vampiress Lord starts off strong with a hefty dose of worldbuilding. Our protagonist is turned into a vampire, but that’s okay, because this series defangs most of their mythical weaknesses and portrays them as once-ordinary people who have gotten a little weird with immortality. Her newfound curse actually a blessing, Yuunagi continues going to
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school as a vampire Mary Sue until eventually romance starts to blossom.
As you may have noticed, this series is relatively conflict-free. This lack of central tension extends to the manga’s relationships, where it is actually quite welcome. Most yuri concerns itself with drama that threatens or delays the core relationship – lacking self-worth, family issues, jealousy, and miscommunication are all common themes. Since Vampiress Lord avoids this drama, it actually gets into some relatively unexplored problem spaces, such as nonmonogamy. When Yuunagi sucks another girl’s blood (an act with obvious sexual implications), she feels guilty about it and has a conversation with her girlfriend, and the two of them set open relationship boundaries that leave them both satisfied. It’s good stuff! And nice to see it come up naturally in a manga.
It’s at this point that I run out of nice things to say and have to address the elephant in the room: Vampiress Lord was cancelled shortly after the first volume, and the mangaka had to cram everything she wanted into the next two. As such, the second half of this series is rushed to the point of tearing apart what made the first half good. Yuunagi’s relationship with her girlfriend goes from slow and exploratory to deadly serious with the drop of a hat. Right afterwards, the series pulls the desperation move of “introducing the council of the most powerful vampires”. It really doesn’t help that this whirlwind of flat characters includes two whose only traits are ‘slut’ and 'otokonoko’. The last couple of chapters got bad enough that I had to stop and ask myself “wait, was this series written by a man the whole time?” because it started feeling like *that* kind of yuri.
The final chapter of the series is an omake in which the mangaka explains how the series got axed and apologizes for its rushed state, as she had to crunch her 7-volume plan into a few chapters. It’s genuinely sad, because while the material that I wasn’t a fan of still would have shown up in those potential later volumes, there would have been plenty more chapters about the gentle undoing of societal expectations for the sake of fluffy yuri.
A butch woman wrote this manga and frankly, who am I to argue against her.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Feb 25, 2019
My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness is, well, very clearly about being a lesbian and being lonely. My Solo Exchange Diary has a less straightforward title, but its theme still becomes apparent pretty quickly.
My Solo Exchange Diary is about your mom.
It’s about all the things you have to hide from her. It’s about trying to come to terms with how she raised you. It’s about trying and failing to escape her unceasing mental and physical gravity. It’s about looking for substitutes for her seemingly uncaring warmth. It’s about being a family disgrace in so many different ways.
Peppered throughout are the mangaka’s reflections on depression, motivation, separation,
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and self-harm. It’s pretty potent stuff, and her melty two-tone artwork puts an air of cuteness on top of all this suffering.
I'm not sure if I'd call it warmful, but reading this manga does make me feel a little better about myself.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Nov 21, 2018
Last month a very strange thing happened. I found myself reading, God forbid, a heterosexual manga. And on top of that, I found myself sincerely enjoying it too. So how did I even get into this position?
Well, it’s my love of Akiko Higashimura’s previous works that brought me to Tokyo Tarareba Girls. The cast consisting of women in their 30’s was the part that really intrigued me. It’s so rare to see mangas about people past high school and young adulthood, and especially ones from the perspective of working women. The closest other thing I can think of to this perspective is Turning Girls, the
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hilarious and overlooked Trigger short about female coworkers struggling together as they face the prospect of turning 30. Tarareba Girls feels like a continuation of that spirit, in name and in plot. Our girls are into their 30s, haven’t married, still have boozy girl’s nights together like nothing has changed in a decade, and are generally terrified about their futures. Reading this through my birthday gave me some very relatable feelings!
Packed into this romantic/depression comedy is a lot of explicit and implicit social commentary. Lots of grumbling about how underwhelming the men in Japan are, lots of questionable guys doing creepy things, some discussion about the role of married women as workers versus housewives, just the whole works. You start to get the feeling that within the current societal romantic setup, everyone is kinda suffering in some way. And this isn’t just a Japan thing! While some of the sexism and ageism is pretty specific, a lot of is totally applicable to any culture. My takeaway from the early volumes was that heterosexuality is terrifying and as long as it entails inherent relationship power imbalances, nobody will be happy.
This sounds sad and hard to read! But I promise, once the manga gets rolling it ends up being way lighter reading. The trio oscillates in and out of all sorts of relationships, some messier than others. A better work-life balance is achieved. The one thing that stays the same is the girl’s endless nights drinking and badmouthing their men. During these drinking escapades they’re visited by anthropomorphized representations of milt and liver who fill their thoughts with ‘what-if’ questions and aging anxiety, which is a nice callback to Clara from Princess Jellyfish.
Milt and Liver also run an advice column chapter at the end of each volume, in which real world ‘what-if’ women mail them their romance problems to sort out. This is a really interesting role for the mangaka to take on, and it’s played fairly sincerely – obviously there’s a lighthearted air to it, but she does try to offer serious advice. The problems get weirder and more convoluted as the manga goes on, which is always a fun time.
Speaking of romantic advice, I actually kind of disagree with the ending that Higashimura went with. But that’s not a problem at all! I’m younger than the depicted women, my world view is way different, and the ending still carries a very coherent message: don’t regret yourself or make excuses, just keep on living to your best.
Like most of Higashimura’s works, Tokyo Tarareba Girls has a painful autobiographical undercurrent to it, which makes it feel all the more genuine. It kinda sucks being an awkward aging romantic mess of a girl, but I love seeing the mangaka reflect and work through it over the course of multiple manga series!
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Men still suck though. Try to avoid them if you can.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Aug 19, 2018
After having a tough time getting into the series and having to restart a few times, I raced through the second half of Wandering Son in a single day. Now I’m just lying here in a haze, trying to collect myself into a human being again. I feel like this writeup is a necessary step in the process. Let’s do this.
Wandering Son, or Hourou Musuko, is a manga about the self. It's extremely introverted, with characters lost in thought, staying home from school, and mulling over their anxieties all the time. When a character makes a particularly bold decision, they’re often ridiculed and punished for
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it. There’s always other stuff going on, but most of these bold decisions are about gender identity. This is a manga, perhaps THE manga in the eyes of many, about dysphoria and being transgender. The uniqueness of Wandering Son is that it starts our cast off in elementary school, right before the onset of puberty. This gives us a different perspective than many other trans mangas, which star college-aged characters grappling with their identity while being young adults. But wow, this is a uniquely brutal perspective.
At the start of the manga we are shown our main characters, Nitori Shuuichi and Takatsuki Yoshino. Shuuichi wants to dress like a girl and Yoshino wants to dress like a boy. Pretty early on, Yoshino’s identity issues are sidelined so the plot can zero in on Shuuichi - compared to everyone else, he’s suffering immensely. He’s trapped in a world that doesn’t know how to help girls like him, but even he doesn’t know that yet. However, his world seems to be built perfectly around enabling his crossdressing, from friends that keep encouraging him to endless school festivals revolving around gender-swapped plays. Unlike other mangas, our trans character here is not deeply repressed, which makes the relentless march of time all the more painful to watch.
Going into Wandering Son, I didn’t realize that we would see these kids grow up all the way from sixth grade to the end of high school. Instead of timeskips or focusing on a single year, our cast just keeps gaining years. You know how in a lot of anime and manga, high school graduation almost feels like a metaphor for death? For once, that implication actually carries some extra meaning. Puberty stops for no one, and with every passing year our protagonist Shuuichi will be less and less able to convincingly present as female. Throughout these 123 chapters, we see Shuuichi grow, not okay with any of the physical developments happening to him but unable to do anything. This is cruel and painful, especially as a trans woman who went through the exact same motions, just more internalized.
If you read through Wandering Son with the adolescence of Shuuchi as your guiding narrative thread, you will end up with a truly existentially depressing manga. Seriously, this perspective is more personally painful to me than anything even Goodnight Punpun can conjure up. It’s a good thing there are other, more palatable narrative threads woven throughout. Yoshino’s story, for one, never reaches these levels of anguish. Their classmates have fights and relationships and arcs. The adults in this story stand out a lot – more on some of them later. And last but not least, there’s a wonderful slow-burning romance throughout the second half of the manga. Shuuchi having friends and lovers through all of this is the authors’s greatest act of kindness throughout the story, reminding us that even people who are very clearly suffering still deserve and will find people who support them. This is a very important message for any dysphoric people who find this manga and want to use it as solace.
*********************SOME ENDING SPOILERS BELOW***********************
But still…this is not a very hopeful manga. At least it isn’t to me.
Shuuichi gets the girl, so that’s a happy ending, right? Except every little bit of subtext is arguing the exact opposite. Let me explain further. Shuuchi meets 2 adult trans women throughout the series. The first is young, pretty, and lives happily with her husband. This seems like the perfect role model for Shuuchi and any dysphoric readers! A beacon of hope that yes, it is possible to transition and live a great life. But she kind of stops being an influencing voice for Shuuchi, for whatever reason. Instead in the manga’s endgame we are introduced to an older closeted trans person. Living as a husband and father for all these years, after their wife’s death they took to crossdressing in her clothes. This character is totally unable to pass. In a sense she doesn’t care, although she worries immensely about how her young daughter will view her. Forgive my weird pronouns throughout that. Anyways, compared to the first trans woman this is a character we are clearly supposed to feel pity for, unable to pass in a world where passing means everything, and burdened with single fatherhood at that too. I would love to comment more on the specific hardships of transitioning at an older age, but alas I lack knowledge of that experience. This old woman shows up in the third-to-last chapter, so clearly she’s meant to represent something. As Shuuchi grows older and older we mentally associate him with her instead of the younger trans woman. Shuuchi’s love interest even makes a passing remark about being okay with dating a weird crossdresser well into old age, which is kind of cute but also reinforces that Shuuchi will never be able to truly transition and will be stuck uncomfortably as a man, feeling like a crossdresser instead of a “real woman”. This is immensely depressing. I’m lucky as all hell to have the resources and social ability to start transitioning as a young adult. Too see the subtextual conclusion of this manga boil down to “yeah, Shuuchi is forever stuck as a boy wanting to be a girl, but that’s kind of okay” feels like a punch in the gut. This is a very good author who is able to write to the trans experience impressively well for being a cis woman. However, for the love of me I can’t tell if she intended the ending to be this melancholy or if I accidentally extracted an extra layer of suffering out of it. It doesn’t matter, this is how I still feel at the end of the day. This is my ultimate takeaway from Wandering Son, and it’s what tore me apart. I’m sorry if my feelings are unrelatable or if my writing style was accidentally problematic or if my takeaways are just plain wrong. I wanted to make my wallowing as productive as can be and this writeup/explanation is what I settled on. So thanks for sticking through it.
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Wandering Son is good, I think. It’s not as deeply relatable for me as some other trans-themed mangas, but it’s still a worthwhile read with a unique youth perspective. It’s not fetishistic, instead it’s both sympathetic and cruel in oscillating doses. If you can relate strongly to the dysphoria stuff in this manga, then that’s wonderful. But don’t be fatalistic about your assigned gender, even if the manga seems to be towards Shuuchi. A happy future may seem impossible right now, but one day Things Will Be Better.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jul 11, 2018
After seeing almost all of the Macross series, I’m here to say that Macross 7 is maybe the best one? I’m being completely serious, and I’ll try to explain some of why I found it so special.
BOMBER!! Let’s start with the music. SDF Macross was made to sell toys, and Macross 7 was made to sell CDs. To accomplish this, the show focuses on the band Fire Bomber, who have about a dozen insert songs in the show. At first these songs may seem tacky or repetitive, and it doesn’t help that the early episodes keep using the same two songs, but the soundtrack seriously
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grows on you to the point where it’s hard not to sing along. The song lyrics can feel nonsensical at times, but by a certain point in the show, everything clicks and suddenly all the song themes directly correlate with what’s happening on the screen. The opening and first ending are also totally kickass.
I can’t go any further without talking about the elephant in the room: Basara. He’s our main character this time around, and boy is he different. Unlike the military recruits of every other show, Basara is a guitarist and vocalist who is completely opposed to war and fighting, believing that everything can be solved with music and love. But he’s not a totally stoned-out hippie about it! He’s impulsive, feisty, and extremely faithful to his beliefs. in other words, he’s an asshole. Most people who don’t like 7 can’t stand Basara, but I think he’s so fresh and interesting. His flaws are very pronounced but understandable, since his morals are so straightforward and idealistic. He’s a beatnik through and through and I’m glad we have him instead of a by-the-books military man as the main character.
We actually do get that exact military man in the form of Gamlin, who’s painted in such a poor light through his pathetic social interactions. Even if he can save the day he can’t save a failing dinner date for his life. It’s also a messed up that he spends the whole show trying to marry a fourteen-year-old.
Mylene, the band’s bassist and backing vocalist, is our fourteen-year-old in question. She’s bratty and irrational most of the time, which gives her a very bad rap amongst many watchers. But c’mon, that’s how fourteen-year olds really are, especially if you spoil them with rich parents and giant music robots! Mylene is a great foil to Basara, two jerks for different reasons trying their best to be a part of something much greater than their own egos. This doesn’t make them bad characters at all, it makes them really stand out compared to most anime characters.
This is a show about a band, which makes it a different beast than the other Macrosses! Like its shift in genre from idol to rock, the show is rowdy, more rough around the edges, and not afraid to try some new stuff. This more experimental approach is interesting because it’s at complete odds with the low budget – cels and audio samples are constantly reused, but in some rather interesting ways the more the show goes on.
With bands come fans, and there is no better fan in any anime than Flower Girl. She’s a cameo figure, showing up in every episode. She dreams of meeting Basara and giving him flowers but the plot intervenes every single time to prevent her from doing so. Her struggle goes from being a gag to being really depressing to being emblematic of the show as a whole, with some episodes jump-cutting to her to represent loss or determination or unrequited love. In a show bursting at the seams with annoying yet lovable jerks, she stands out as a beacon of light.
Macross 7 totally could have done more with its unique concepts though. Imagine a rival punk band appearing halfway through the show to challenge Fire Bomber’s monopoly on the music scene. Imagine everyone needing to switch instruments for an episode. Imagine them getting washed up and trying to radically reinvent their image and sound. Imagine the songs themselves eventually getting really experimental, as if Basara had suddenly joined Throbbing Gristle. Imagine the production studio really going all out on the vocals recording and imbuing the fight scenes with way more auditory inflection and power. If Macross 7 cut some of the alien stuff and focused more on the trials and tribulations of being a band, it truly could have been a 10.
One last thing, for all you art fans out there. The colors are really good?? Like, stupidly good??? The animation cels are nothing to write home about, but the backgrounds are beautifully painted with bright pinks, oranges, purples, blues, and pretty much any pretty combination you can think of. So many good panned-out sunset shots. Also, this is a show where outer space is blue, and I think that's wonderful.
Macross 7 is great because it is able to so effectively walk the lines between campiness and seriousness, it can really defy your expectations. Those 49 episodes will feel like a breeze. It’s the most experimental of the Macrosses by far, and in the wake of safe boring shows like Delta, that carefree nature and willingness to explore new thematic territory really pays off. I don’t feel like I sold the show quite well enough in this review, so let me just say I felt a certain magic that I don’t normally feel when watching anime. A feeling of flow, of really connecting with and grooving along with the show. Maybe this is what Spiritia really is.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 24, 2018
TL;DR it's bad. But if you want some convincing, here you go.
I was going to ignore Caligula entirely, until I heard that Tadashi Satomi was tangentially connected to the project. Satomi is a scenario designer who used to work at Atlus. He’s responsible for Persona 1 and the Persona 2 duology, which happen to be some of my favorite games. Caligula seems to be his current project, at least Caligula the game. That’s right, this show is a video game adaptation, which is never a good sign. Anyways, this show is particularly frustrating because for a while, it straddles the line between a flawed show
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with potential and a total slugfest. I had to keep watching not because I enjoyed it, but because I wanted to see if it would ever get better. It didn't...
The first episode is vaguely interesting in how off everything is. Seriously, things are just wrong. The main character says his lines and is repeatedly ignored by everyone, like he never said anything. Characters repeat lines and actions multiple times. The audio levelling is busted, with one female character in particular being significantly louder than everyone else for no apparent reason. These aren’t the signs of a totally broken show like Hand Shakers, they’re a little more subtle, and I’m still not sure whether they were intentional or not, because it would thematically make sense and these problems never show up in later episodes. Either way, the protagonist’s rose-colored high school life is a lie, he learns he’s trapped in a fake world Truman Show-style, and he tries to outrun his mysterious pursuers and figure out what’s going on. This second episode is, unfortunately, probably the best the show ever gets. It’s the only time there’s a real sense of desperation, as afterwards our protagonist forms a resistance team and everyone gains superpowers.
In order to introduce and flesh out some of the more important characters on this resistance team, unfortunately named the Go-Home Club, Caligula opts for character-specific episodes, where one character in particular meets face-to-face with one antagonist (oh yeah, there’s an entire antagonist team called the Musicians). The idea behind these episodes is to have the antagonist act out their personal philosophy, and then either have the protagonist explains why it’s wrong or have the philosophy just collapse upon itself. These episodes are where some of Caligula’s worst aspects bubble up.
Caligula has bad politics. There’s no other way to say it. And this matters a lot in a show that frames itself around philosophy and trying to be “deep”. At its core, most of the Musicians have flawed ideologies because they focus too much on self-indulgence and isolation. In action, however, this plays out in increasingly baffling ways. The first antagonist is an obese dude who didn’t take care of himself IRL, so with the powers of this virtual world, he pretends to be a cute petite girl and have dainty little tea parties. For once I’m going to ignore the potential trans subtext (the only intent seems to be to further demonize and condemn). This is such a textbook message for a show that prides itself on being interesting and philosophical. A guy is fat so he pretends that he’s not, and that’s why he’s the villain. Was this really the most pressing thing on Satoshi Tanami’s head? For reference, Persona 2 also has an arc about fat-shaming, but it goes the complete opposite route. It ties fatness to bullying and guilt, and concludes with the positive message of loving someone no matter what they look like.
The second arc is even more nonsensical. It features a shut-in antagonist convincing the protagonist to hide herself away in the library forever, and cut off all her friends. During this conversation they bond over psychoanalyzing Gollum from the Lord of the Rings. To me that doesn’t seem like isolation, that seems like making a new friend over shared interests. Watching the two get along pretty well kind of defeated the message of the episode for me.
Episode 5, however, is where the politics go from underwhelming to actively regressive. Unsurprisingly, it’s the gender politics episode. Our antagonist is a woman who runs a speed dating service: all the girls feign interest in the guys, and then take them to the bedroom, where they proceed to drain the men’s energy or brainwash them or something sinister like that (this show is surprisingly hard to follow). The gender reductionism really hits hard. Every single man in this episode is a lustful sexual beast who only wants to be stepped on by women, while every single woman is a succubus who manipulate men into these situations and suck their lives and memories away. This is a crappy generalization to make, and it only gets worse once our protagonist escapes her role as a seductress, gains free will, and challenges the antagonist to…a beauty contest. Even after gaining agency, the only way she can defeat her foe is through male worship.
The show gets bored of character episodes for a bit and starts making ensemble cast episodes after the halfway point. These are the worst ones, unbelievably slow, stupidly unfocused, and the blandest cooking in any anime. And there’s two in a row.
By now we’re in the endgame episode-wise, and yet the show is still trying to throw new minor antagonists at us? I guess that would make sense in an RPG game, but it’s nonsensical for a show to do it so nonchalantly. Even weirder is that fact that our new villain of the day is just a flat up torture-fetish murderer instead of being motivated by petty self-interest like the other villains. It’s a strange change of pace, especially when they lurch into the lighthearted that same episode to talk about how bullying isn’t okay.
Watching Caligula was an act of emotional labor. Not that it was intense and draining, instead it was so shallow and boring that it felt like a crappy day job. I had to force myself to sit down and shove these episodes into my eyelids. I don't want to do this to myself. At this point I’m phoning this review in as much as Caligula feels phoned in – a lot. Please understand.
Tadashi Saotomi, what happened to you.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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