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This review probably would've been pretty simple if I'd stopped around halfway through: turn your brain off and watch a bunch of criminals with super powers (who are all named for their various roles for some reason) do a heist while holding off a pair of super powered Executioners. That would have described much of the first half of the series, which is certainly fun, but I wouldn't say it's anything terribly special. The characters are different brands of crazy (or just thrown into the woodchipper of crazy that the others create), the world is an interesting brand of sci-fi that gets a little exploration ... but never that deeply, and the plot is mostly just like an out of control freight train: barreling forward at maximum speed along a track someone else laid to destinations unknown. I like the scene transitions, I'm not super fond of Bunny and Shark as exposition machines but they're fun to break things up, and the visuals go pretty hard when the series busts out the sakuga.

I wouldn't say the series shifts dramatically in its second half, but there is a notable shift in tone. There's a weight to the series that felt notably absent before - for all that these characters were told that they were on the verge of death or going through various forms of Mission: Impossible before this, it was hard to really feel that when everything they did was successful. That stops when Brawler dies... or maybe it's when Hacker leaves the team. Either way, any sense of unity falls apart with their absence as various characters cope with what they have left or put their own plans fully on display, acting on impulses rather than as a unit. And I think this all wraps up quite well as we see the erstwhile Swindler use her image as an ordinary person and Courier wield his unflinching devotion to his profession to grant freedom to a pair of immortal children. And yes, Courier using his arm to make the railgun from his bike functional for one last shot was metal as hell.

That's not to say that everything works for me. That lack of worldbuilding and lack exploration of what the Akudama even are was sorely missed in the latter half where it could have made the biggest difference. Why did Cutthroat have this very personal connection to Swindler, one that literally allowed him to see a red corona extend off of her at a great distance? I would have liked the kind of inspection we got of Courier, which was rather elegantly done, to get more insight into Doctor and Hacker in particular, who were given somewhat limited attention in their backstories despite having a lot of intrigue surrounding them. Would have been nice as well if we had learned about the largely faceless villains behind the actions of Boss and more of what they were after. And while that last episode was definitely cool, I had to turn my brain off to enjoy it. I remember saying out loud that the decision of the Executioners to label all the protesters Akudama would come back to bite them... only for a filmed version of Swindler getting killed to somehow accomplish it later instead. I have a hard time believing that everyone in the city would just take her at her word that she's an ordinary person at that point (they do have a lot of facial recognition technology on hand), though I guess the point was that they were just looking for one last reason to go rise up. It's a minor issue, but still something that held back the ending for me.

Overall, a very good experience that gets better as it goes.

I'm part of the camp that's new to Rose of Versailles. The original series has been sitting in my ptw for a while and I'll most definitely watch it because I'm an easy mark for historical series and series with a strong female lead. So when I saw this movie was announced and watched the trailer, I had little doubt it would be in my wheelhouse. The animation looked impressive, and going through the history of late 1700s France during what is arguably the most tumultuous time for that country was an intriguing prospect. And yes, I'm absolutely fine with making modifications to the real ... life story to include characters like Oscar who contribute a distinct perspective to Versailles, so that wasn't a concern.

Unfortunately, apart from those beautiful production values and some pretty good voice acting, I can't say I enjoyed this experience.

Part of that I chalk up to the runtime of this show vs. the series. It's a given that a nearly 2 hour film isn't going to have the breathing room that a 40 episode series would, so I wasn't expecting this production to take its time and flesh out every character motivation and arc. That being said, there's a difference between not doing that across many of your characters and barely doing it at all. This production speed-runs every bit of content it can, which leads to some abortive subplots that just kind of end anticlimactically (and sometimes confusingly) and character whose arcs are, at best, rushed and, at worst, barely seem to be characters at all.

A couple of examples of those subplots:

- What is the purpose of Hans Axel von Fersen in this plot? He sweeps into and out of Antoinette's life, they fall for each other, it becomes this moment of tension where Louis XVI finds out they've been doing something behind his back, and then it's just shrugged off for the rest of the plot because everyone in the palace effectively ceases to be a character in the plot as the revolution ramps up. It also seemed pretty obvious that Oscar was falling for him, but that just stopped because of reasons.
- What was the point of André's blindness? They do an awful lot to set this up as a big deal after he loses an eye, but beyond a final scene where his vision returns to profess love to Oscar, there's no point to it. It certainly doesn't prevent him from knowing both the direction of the guns firing on her and the location of their intended target so that he can die in the most predictable way possible. For that matter, even his abortive mutual poisoning plot with Oscar goes nowhere. It happens on a whim, he stops it at the last second, and Oscar's only response to it that I can see is just looking at the spot where the poison soaked into the carpet later.
- Why is there a whole subplot about marrying Victor Clement? I get that Oscar's father wanted to continue the bloodline, but this felt utterly pointless. We barely knew this character at all, there's no real tension here (Oscar's not just going to leave behind the French forces she's commanding), and it ends with him just giving her up because she might be in love with André. Kinda sweet, but that's about it.

A couple of examples of those character arcs:

- *sigh* Louis XVI. What is this character's role in the plot, exactly? I think he got less than 5 minutes total screentime and the vast majority of that was dedicated to him falling for Antoinette and then finding out about her infidelity. We get almost none of their relationship together beyond exposition, so Antoinette's whole entreaty to Oscar that she should understand a woman's wandering eyes fails to move me at all, and you can't even feel for the king since he's barely a character in his own story.
- Marie Antoinette. What wasted potential. She starts from a pretty interesting position: a young woman who is caught up in the whims of the rulers of France and Austria, given everything she could ever want, but yearning for something she can't quite grasp (vague, sure, but there's something to it) and wanting to really do something useful with her power... to someone whose whole deal is just giving favors to others, living lavishly, dispensing with almost any interest in her subjects, and having an I guess entirely non-sexual relationship with Ferson. I guess you could say that that turn happens in full because Oscar leaves her employ, but we get to see none of that shift and get very little idea of what Oscar's leaving did to affect her.

None of this is helped at all by the music in this series. The singing isn't bad, but those lyrics just turn every song into the characters expositing about their feelings and making it painfully obvious how we should view a given scene to the point that there's almost no subtlety to glean from them. I rolled my eyes through a lot of them. The dialogue may not have been the best in this series, but at least don't stop those conversations dead so that we can go through yet another musical number about how a given character feels.

At least Oscar as the lead was a strong enough choice to carry me through much of what I didn't like, though even her character arc feels just so scattershot. Oscar is certainly a strong female lead and I would have loved to learn more about what it was like growing up as a girl being raised in the manner of a boy in this era, though we don't get to see much of that. Her character makes some big choices in the plot, some of which gave me whiplash. Sure, let's rally the troops and start firing on the royal guard that she was a part of just a short time ago and that is currently fighting for the queen Oscar had spent years working for. I liked watching her win over the French Guard, even if it felt like it came in fits and starts. Her relationship with André, at least in general (excluding many of the specifics I've already mentioned), was pretty interesting and the romance at least felt genuine, even if it only came together abruptly. And even Oscar's death feels just so avoidable. She's sieging the Bastille and parading around on horseback unguarded in sight of cannons and muskets. I get that she wanted to fight on the frontlines, but at least find some cover. It's more a surprise that she survived that long.

So... yeah, I didn't like this. The more I've thought about it, the less I've liked. It was an average experience at best.

Getting around to this fairly late all things considered. I wouldn't say I was disinterested in it, but when this series came out in 2022, I hadn't developed my taste for romance anime yet. I also was (and remain) disinterested in ecchi shows, but I'll come back to that.

First, I have to sing this show's praises.

I'll address the elephant in the room first: Marin is an excellent character and I knew from her first few scenes that she was likely to join my favorites. I don't always get the hype around a character this popular, but she was very easy to appreciate from those early ... scenes and her characterization only gets better as the series goes on. Sure, she has substantial *ahem* assets, but I'm a simp for strong personalities (ask my wife) and Marin has that in spades. From her very first scene, she's depicted as someone who doesn't judge a book by its cover, pushing back on the kinds of biases and cliques that ostracize people like Gojo. And it's not hard to see why: she fits in with the popular crowd and is extremely outgoing while also fostering a love of anime culture and cosplay in particular. She stretches across multiple camps... often suggestively, but still.

If that's all she had going for her, I might have written her and the series off as good time, but little else. What makes Marin particularly interesting for me is not just how dedicated she is to cosplay (though her attention to detail and care for portraying these characters is palpable and easy to engage with), but how she acknowledges and engages with her own feelings for Gojo. For a girl who is so outgoing and willing to show a great deal of skin, it's so much more powerful to watch her turn beet red and be at a loss for words around someone whose fervor and passion for their craft she admires so deeply, not to mention someone who cares so much about what she does. There's a real connection between these two and it's a delight to watch play out.

And yeah, that relationship really is the centerpiece of this show. The cosplay is great and it drives the story forward through each mini-arc of becoming a given character or set of characters, but the relationship between Marin and Gojo is the throughline that connects them and they are a perfect complement to one another. It's not hard to see why each of them gets so flustered around one another, but it's particularly interesting that they are rarely flustered together, with each finding different moments to feel hot and bothered over (save a later scene where they both are definitely in that camp). Their shared passion for cosplay, borne both of Marin's infectious obsession with these anime and Gojo's creative impulses and desire to act on them, is the catalyst for a bond to grow between them and it culminates beautifully in that finale.

So yes, I enjoyed this series a great deal. Why didn't I rate it higher? I put that down to a minor issue and a sticking point.

The minor issue is that the romance in this show does get off to a strong start, but doesn't advance much past that point. Both characters acknowledge feelings and I'm not expecting in a first season that they talk about those feelings necessarily, but a lot of the development between them comes from the cosplay and the degree of comfort they have together. That's nice and it's still some movement, and as a fan of slow burn romances like Kimi ni Todoke, I'm not exactly looking for speed. Hence this is a minor issue. It's 12 episodes so far and this is pretty decent development over a single cour season, albeit less than I was hoping to see.

As for the sticking point... yeah, it's the ecchi. It's just not my cup of tea and man do they ever lean into it over the course of the show. There are so many lingering shots and slow pans. This plays into the above since I think a lot of this undermines the more interesting aspects of the developing relationship between Marin and Gojo, turning it more into a feast for the eyes of the audience. I get that, to some degree, this is following the male gaze of Gojo. He's a teenager, there's a hot girl in his class who is paying a lot of attention to him, and she is clearly comfortable enough around him to show a great deal of skin. Of course that's where his attention would be. I don't think that we as an audience need a reminder of that quite so often or in such detail. Everything's animated beautifully, they certainly don't skimp on the details, and some scenes use the tension between them to do something more interesting. Still, it does hold this series just a smidge back from greatness for me. I suspect that will change in S2 as we get more romantic development, even if the ecchi isn't toned down at all (I don't suspect it will be), so despite my misgivings, it's not holding me back from enjoying the series at its best.

As someone who has never really gotten into dancing or ballet specifically, I found this series pretty engaging throughout.

Of course, a large part of what works is the stellar animation. MAPPA put their all into a project that did not have to go this hard to succeed, but it pulls off nearly every shot flawlessly with excellent sakuga and, perhaps most importantly, just some amazing cinematography. The series really knows how to draw in an audience, often by giving us the perspective of someone or multiple people in the show.

Easy as well to point out that Junpei is just a joy as an MC. The ... mark of a good MC in any sports show is that they bring you into their world and get you invested in what they're doing, and on that front, Junpei absolutely delivers. But the mark of a great MC is one who takes it a step further, finding ways to invest us in the choices they make and root for them throughout. Junpei succeeds on this front as well, taking us on a roller coaster through his time with ballet. Even some of the elements of the show I didn't much care for initially - that Junpei's drive away from ballet is driven by a desire to live up to the man his father was and that he continues to steer clear of ballet due to peer pressure - don't stay problematic for long as the series finds interesting ways for Junpei to overcome them. The series doesn't so much subvert tropes as it does lean into them to surpass them. Honestly, his journey through the series was reason enough to experience this in full.

That's not to say the series is without its flaws. As a foil to Junpei, I don't mind Ruou, but I never really got invested in his journey through this story. Maybe that's because a lot of it is backloaded in the season, maybe it's because it's just hard to get invested with someone who starts the series off so stand-offish, but aside from a few moments like his dance in front of the school and his breath-taking performance in Swan Lake, I can't say he drew me in. Part of the problem there is that he's the subject of some absurd bullying that I found difficult to stomach. He's not a bad character by any means, but he's just not as magnetic as Junpei.

Where I feel the series stumbles most, though, is with its female lead, Miyako. Great introduction, easy to get invested in, love how the romance develops, everything's great until the series gets into its final few episodes. I won't spoil it here, but for a romance I was surprised and delighted to see play out, the way it ended was particularly frustrating. It's one of the main reasons this series doesn't soar nearly as high as I'd hoped.

Nonetheless, this is a strong 11 episode run and I appreciate where it left us with Junpei in particular. I kind of anticipated it, but that's also the nice thing: it made a lot of sense for his character after all he'd been through up to that point. I don't think I would have been happy with him ending up anywhere else. So yeah, great show, absolutely worth the watch.

I'm of two very distinct minds on this one.

On the one hand, I love the concept of this series. There are some really cool concepts at play and it makes for an interesting and mostly engaging world. The more we learn about the cyberworld as portrayed here, including how it's accessed through the glasses, the various errors that pop up and resulting obsolete spaces, and in particular the variety of illegals on display, the more interesting this gets. This series is at its absolute best in its first few episodes and roughly in the middle of the series when it just delves into these concepts ... without relating them to some wider ranging story, and if the whole series had been nothing but that, this would have been a great ride that I'm sure I couldn't help but recommend, particularly with this nice visual presentation and some great animation of its cyber world.

On the other hand... well, that isn't what happened. There's a lot more at play as we learn about kids dying and becoming comatose as well as the separation of cyberbodies from physical bodies. I'm a fan of a good mystery told well, but I can't say this one quite worked for me. The series does a great job setting up the mystery through a variety of characters and as a part of building out its world, and even though I wasn't invested in that mystery in the first half of the season (largely due to this series' obsession with keeping many of its most central and knowledgeable players as mystery boxes), I appreciated the slow build-up of information. And as the first few episodes of the second half started, I was getting more invested, particularly as Isako's character got filled out.

Cut to the last roughly 5-6 episodes and that slow drip of information turned into a deluge. Suddenly, we were getting incredibly detailed and specific information along with a lot of technical jargon specific to this world, and as someone who likes his jargon and was taking copious notes to keep up, this just confounded me. I couldn't keep up with much of the information dropped in episodes 22 and 23 in particular, and given that the series only had a few episodes to tie it back together and provide a meaningful conclusion to its many mysteries, this put the series as a whole in a precarious position.

I'll give the series credit: it kind of sticks the landing with a pretty satisfying conclusion between its main characters... assuming you're fully bought into their journeys. That being said, I don't think it works overall. The bonds between its most central characters in particular don't feel that well established despite their spending so much of the series together because far too much of it is spent with them at odds. I'm not sure I can fully explain why many of the characters just didn't click with me, though I think a lot of that has to do with just how little we knew about them for so long. You can have characters be a mystery for much of the series and have them work, but they still need to have something to grab onto and, aside from a couple of side characters I really enjoyed, I can't say that happened here. It doesn't help that the series can't help throwing more characters and lore into the mix even as it goes into its penultimate episode, which distracts from its efforts to wrap things up succinctly.

Still, I didn't dislike this experience, I just wish it had either been more consistent with its delivery of information if it wanted to focus on this mystery. If we had known more about Isako, Nekome and Takeru in particular before those later episodes, it would have been easier to connect to their motivations and generate interest in the mysteries surrounding them. There was plenty to dig into, but by the end, my head was spinning with way too much information.

I watched this in preparation for its upcoming S2 in Summer 2025 and I feel like I'm missing something.

I get it, comedy is subjective, people's mileage will vary. And as a lover of comedy series and movies, I recognize that this is not exactly in my wheelhouse. For context, I turned 39 just this month and, though I certainly had a college experience, I wasn't exactly a frat boy. I attended parties every now and then, but I didn't join a frat and I didn't drink much. So, to an extent at least, that might explain why some of this humor didn't land for me. ... It's just not the kind of experience I had, so it feels foreign to me.

On the other hand, it's not like that has stopped me from enjoying series before. I've loved a lot of series that bear no resemblance to the life I've lived, and not all of them are just fantastical romps like Saiki K and KonoSuba. I don't think it's a lack of connection to what's depicted that is harming my enjoyment.

No, that has more to do with where this series derives its humor. There are a bunch of running jokes and, unfortunately, the series runs them into the ground to the point that they just aren't funny after a few times seeing them. The proclivity of its male leads to disrobe got old really fast, but never seemed to go away. I'm sure many people find the binge drinking funny, but it never worked for me - that might be due to my seeing way too many real life stories about alcohol poisoning, or it may just be that the joke is played out quickly when so much of the plot of this show relies on its characters getting black out drunk. I also tired quickly of Iori and Kouhei's rivalry as well as their and their friends' efforts to put the kibosh on any relationships they might have with women. Jealousy and frustration I get, but this just felt straight up mean in certain scenes. Nor did I enjoy seeing them trying to derive humor out of misunderstandings of who is romantically interested in whom and what perversions certain characters engage in. It was played out early and yet it kept on going. That's not to say none of the humor lands, but what does work are usually more novel jokes and absurd scenes, which did get some laughs out of me.

The series isn't helped by seeming to push all of its best material to the background and only bringing it out occasionally. It seems to recall that it's a series about diving about 6 episodes in before setting that aside for a while and returning to it towards the end. I get that it's a comedy series first and foremost, but part of what sets this apart from other comedies is its focus on the setting and the drive of its characters, which would draw more interest from me if the series spent some more time on it. The characters themselves also offer opportunities, particularly with Aina's story. I found her pretty compelling at points, just a shame we don't get much insight into other characters beyond base urges and frustrations.

I like the art style well enough and there are aspects of these characters and the comedy that I enjoy, but they seem like exceptions rather than common elements to the series. Maybe with a fresh coat of paint from S2 and some renewed focus, this could hit better. For now though, I don't have great expectations.

Well, that was certainly 18 episodes of an anime... Honestly, it's not bad, but it left me wanting. For a series that got this kind of incredible visuals, it doesn't have a lot going on narratively and it leaves a lot of its central mysteries unanswered.

On the narrative side, there's clearly a split between those on Earth who follow where the central AI Sapientia leads, mainly (presumably) because Sapientia brings such perfect peace to Earth. We're not told much about that process, but fine. What's difficult to get is why they follow it so blindly, particularly a couple of the main characters in this ... squad sent up to the moon to murder a dude. Where does their unshaken confidence in Sapientia come from? For that matter, why aren't the squad on the Moon making a very clear case for why they had nothing to do with one of the biggest atrocities on Earth? Why aren't they talking to Jack and his squad the first time they meet and clearing the air? The narrative all feels like one giant idiot plot for much of its run and I can't for the life of me understand the justification for leaving it that way for so long beyond just stretching out the narrative to cover 18 episodes.

And then you have the mystery. What the fuck was L-Zone? Did that ever get explained? How was it going to turn the Moon green? What is Mary and why does she have this bond with L-Zone? Is she a SEED? Apparently not because she picked up Phil from the wreckage of his ship. What was Sapientia's aim in all of this? To just wipe out the entire population of the Moon, is that really all Sapientia was after? It caused huge atrocities several times over the course of the series, including the inciting incident and driving much of the plot, but we know next to nothing about what it was actually trying to do.

I thought the characters were decent, the ending wrapped things up pretty well (though with a note that some piece of Phil survived somehow and also that Earth went through years of turmoil that are never shown - would have been nice to see some of the fallout of their decision to burn down the AI at the center of this story), and the concepts in the series had some legs, it's just a shame that this series clearly had little idea of how to pull them all together well. Much of the series felt like it was paced oddly (particularly for an 18 episode series) and the answers to mysteries were sporadic and piecemeal. There's good here, but it's buried under a lot of puzzling choices. If you want to just experience some good animation with a lot of cool sci-fi visuals, you could do far worse, but I can't recommend this one.

On a general level, I'd say this does it's job pretty effectively. You're throwing a bunch of young Japanese girls (and one boy hiding out among them) into the figurative meat grinder, starting by putting them to work and slowly wearing away at them before unleashing them on the horrifying world beyond as American soldiers invade the island. That can't help but evoke a sense of despair to some degree.

One of the more controversial choices that others likely take issue with is presenting the blood and viscera as flowers. This is one aspect that works for me. There's a surreal nature to it that is ... still pretty horrifying, particularly as the petals pile up around them or stream out of wounds. It's also a good way to transform San's perspective on flowers into something distinctly darker as the series goes on. And the generally Ghibli-esque animation in general evokes a connection to a set of movies that include the likes of Grave of the Fireflies, so it does lend itself well to this kind of darkness. From what I hear of the manga, this does denude the anime of some of its more palpably brutal scenes, but it gives the special an identity all its own.

The cocoon and silkworms as metaphors are... OK. I think they work fine enough, but they don't really assist the story meaningfully. I would have rather taken more time to get to know more of these characters because, in the end, we really only get a little insight into most of the characters in this special. Mayu and San get more attention than most and you worry most for them, so Mayu's death does hit particularly hard (as do a couple of others, in particular that first death among them just outside the cave), especially as it comes so close to the end. And that can work well enough...

...but I think it falls short of working consistently.

The series does a good job emphasizing the sort of inhumanity of both sides in this conflict, but it goes to extremes that seem particularly unlikely given the circumstances. When the girls are thrown out of the cave, there's little rhyme or reason to it, especially given how essential they've been to tending to the wounded and supplying the commanding officers with water and food. When they're being chased into a cornfield, the decision to start burning down the corn to get at a group of three young girls seems like an excessive response, particularly if the soldiers are aware that one of the girls is wounded. And finally, and perhaps most egregiously, the decision of the remaining group of girls to end themselves with a hand grenade is... a lot. I can see how they might have built up to this with propaganda about the Americans imparting a strong belief that their soldiers would just do the worst things possible to these young girls, or if we'd heard more about their value system and their views of sacrifice, but absent that, their relative lack of hesitation on the basis that they are likely to die anyway just seems to come from nowhere.

Finally, I do think San's development into someone who can speak up for herself is good, but it's weakly delivered upon. She has good instincts and intuition, which work well when harnessed by someone willing to take charge. The decision not to go into the forest and instead going into town had major consequences, but it was the decision of those around her not to take her view into account. Later, she stands up to her fellow girls when they plan to just kill all of them together, saying that she and Mayu didn't make that choice, but it changes no minds to do so. Does that mean the value of her standing up is that she gets to decide her own course? I suppose that follows at the end when she decides to stare down the barrel of an enemy soldier who had just killed Mayu, even if that decision did not feel in character for her.

Overall, I think there are some good ideas in here, I think they're just muddled in their delivery. I can see what they were going for, but the themes could use some work, as could the sense of realism and build-up through better establishing these characters and how they think.

This series has been slowly smoldering in my ptw list for a long time, and not just because it’s 110 episodes long. There are many series of that length and far longer that are roller coaster rides full of rises and falls in pacing, and while this certainly does have those kinds of pacing differentials, it’s more of an exercise in patience than most. Frankly, in a series full of incredibly choreographed and carefully articulated space battles animated with far more care and attention than many of its contemporaries, LotGH is not about those space battles.

Well… it necessarily is to some degree. The series’ battles ... often feel sterile and removed. We watch a variety of ship models undergo explosive decompression in space, see the same laser beam patterns criss-cross a battlefield, observe little triangles and patterns move across a screen as though they’re playing Asteroids or Galaga on ultra hard mode. After each battle, the narrator gives you a rundown of all the battle wounded and dead, ships and people, using sterile numbers. At the same time, the series never really lets you forget that these are lives being lost, not just numbers. It’s reflected in the pained expressions of the admirals who send their soldiers in to die, the loss of named characters, many of whom have gotten substantial screentime and characterization. It’s delivered through visuals of the people onboard these soon-to-be destroyed ships, in some cases through people actively trying to put their organs back inside of themselves. Perhaps the series most effective delivery on these deaths, though, comes from the aftermath as governments and militaries grapple with a dramatic loss of life, often encountering major consequences in the form of a populace that is absolutely devastated by the sudden loss of so many lives for no obvious purpose.

And that’s why I say it’s not about the battles.

This series is about consequences.

It’s about schemes on top of other schemes as various forces play outside of the battlefield to assert dominance over the universe, whether to enforce a long dead ideal regarding Earth’s control over outlying colonies or simply to maintain a place of dominance in universal trade.

It’s about competing philosophies and societal ideals playing out on a grand scale chessboard with human beings used as so many pawns. Over the course of the series, this shifts from the battle between democracy and autocracy to internal battles over who should have the reins of power to struggles between the central personalities as each vies for a means of control.

It’s about big personalities who desperately want to demonstrate their military acumen on the battlefield against the most brilliant opponents, and also about trying to win the hearts and minds of the populace.

It’s about what happens in the void those big personalities leave behind when they pass on, figuratively passing the torch in more ways than one onto friends and loved ones.

Honestly, there’s so much that I could unpack in this series, particularly about the various relationships involved.

I didn’t even know I wanted romance in this series, but the slow build of the relationships between the leads and their eventual wives feels so genuine and subtle in a way that most series don’t have the patience to handle.

The brotherly bond between Reinhard and Kircheis is one of the closest relationships of the show and one of the most inherently tragic as the series marches on, rivaled perhaps only by Reuenthal and Mittermeyer’s friendship.

Julian and Wenli have a great mentee/mentor relationship, but also a family bond that grows stronger as the series goes on and as the former finds the footing to stand on his own, often in ways Wenli would prefer he didn’t.

There are so many small relationships I could draw attention to that I love throughout: Sitolet and Julian, Merkatz and Bucock as wise mentors to so many, Mueller and Wenli,

And yes, at the core of this series and buttressing everything else that happens, the relationship between Reinhard and Wenli comes full circle throughout this series, giving us some of the absolute best dialogue I’ve heard in any series. They’re rivals; they’re adversaries; they hold a deep mutual respect and aversion for one another. In many ways, they represent two sides of the same coin, and regularly mention how, if they had been born into different circumstances, they may well be standing where the other is. Without this relationship, the series wouldn’t work.

It’s not just about close relationships, though. Oberstein constantly feels enigmatic (for once, an enigmatic character done right as each action makes you question his motives and could lead to different answers), yet his part in the plot is one of creating distance and making himself a target in place of others. Schönkopf plays the bombastic rogue so often in the series that it can be easy to miss the subtle influences he places on those around him, particularly his estranged daughter. Truniht is a bastard of a character throughout, yet the motives of his final days in the series remain a mystery. And he’s not even the biggest plotter with Rubinsky, Heinrich von Kunmel and De Villiers all playing arguably bigger and more consequential roles.

And even all this doesn’t take into account how many little plots were in play throughout. Susana von Benemunde, De Villiers, everything surrounding Jessica Edwards and Andrew Fork, Dominique Saint-Pierré’s plots… there’s just so much to cover that it’s not surprising at all this series is 110 episodes. The fact that all these characters are memorable even after so many episodes is a testament to how well written they all are. And unless they're dead (in some cases, even if they are), no one ever disappears from the plot, even if they manage to escape playing any significant role for dozens of episodes.

I loved the experience. I wasn’t riveted for every moment (there were a couple of episodes in there that are basically just extended exposition dumps to give background, which are certainly helpful, but a slog to get through), but when this series grabbed me, it wouldn’t let go and I can’t stop thinking about it. A classic for a reason and well worth the time.

Hey, it’s House M.D. with a loli in the lead role. Sure it was kind of derivative, but a medical mystery anime isn’t terribly common. Of course, one of the few examples just so happened to be airing this season in The Apothecary Diaries, a series that already had a lot of steam going with substantial worldbuilding and a palace intrigue plot to boot. However, I’m not here to compare. What makes this series special?

It features a lot of modern medicine and remains relatively realistic throughout. I say “relatively” because the first case involves a man with blue blood having his leg bitten off by ... a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton and a later one involves spontaneous combustion, but most of the mysteries in here are more grounded. There’s even one I was able to puzzle out before the titular Ameku could do it. Nice to see that Microbiology PhD is paying off. Even the more outlandish cases have a certain allure to them, basically dragging you by the nose to the end just to see how it all comes together.

And it’s not just grounded in its mysteries, but occasionally in its drama. Ameku spends a substantial arc dealing with the realities of a child dying of cancer, someone she formed a relationship with but abandoned to isolate herself emotionally from the reality that she can’t save everyone. It’s not exactly a deep emotional journey and I’ve seen it explored better in a single episode of Scrubs (“My Super Ego,” well worth the watch).

The animation is pretty good throughout. They do a surprisingly haunting job with the flames in this series and many of the visuals really pop, particularly in the OP.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I’ve got for the positives.

While this series does get some of the basics of House M.D. right (a genius doctor who does his own thing to save the lives of his patients, often flouting rules), it spends a lot more time dealing with forensic science than actual medicine, more often dealing with cases where someone has died and trying to find the killer. It’s not a surprising turn, but it is disappointing, as the show becomes more a series of murder mysteries than anything else, and we’ve got plenty of those in anime.

What makes that more frustrating is that its mysteries aren’t things you can figure out by looking at a crime scene. You have to have the necessary medical knowledge to be able to put together information at the scene with diagnostics, which means that unless you have a very technical set of expertise, you’re not resolving any of these mysteries (much less the more convoluted ones mentioned above) before or at the same time as Ameku. Mystery shows can still work OK if you can’t predict what’s going to happen, but part of what makes a great mystery is being able to put the pieces together. If this was just a medical mystery, it might be interesting to just watch them puzzle these things out based on a variety of test results and analysis, but we’re solving crimes here as well and it feels like a large part of that is just a giant shrug and “leave it to Ameku to figure this out.”

None of this is helped by having a lead character who just isn’t Gregory House. To be clear, I wasn’t looking for a carbon copy of House in loli form, but I was looking for a character who had more personality than this. House is interesting in part because he’s got a lot of problems and is generally abrasive to everyone, including his patients and staff, all of which barely conceals a lot of damage in his past and present. By contrast, Ameku just isn’t much more than a very self-confident young doctor with a complex about being called small who struggles with the deaths of her patients and doesn’t understand the word “no.” It’s not exactly a distinctive character archetype in anime, and it wouldn’t stand out among a sea of medical mystery dramas in live action. Really, the only thing that seems to distinguish her is the almost “mind palace”-like deductions she does while sketching out connections with her fingers, both of which heavily evoke Sherlock Holmes… and as someone who has gotten very frustrated with how much mystery series lean on the legendary detective, this did not help my perception of Ameku as a distinctive character.

It’s not like this series doesn’t have interesting ideas, either. That’s part of the problem: it knows how to do a good medical mystery drama, it just doesn’t spend a lot of its time doing it. There’s a short mystery involving a child and their mother that was particularly interesting to follow and did, in many ways, feel like an actual episode of House M.D. An episode involving the excavation of a tomb and the belief in a resultant curse (before the fires start) wasn’t too far off, either, even if it did feel a bit extra. It’s just a shame that these feel more like the exceptions rather than the rules, with each of them spanning single episodes while other mysteries cover multiple episodes. And the split between these and the more over-the-top-crazy mysteries didn't help. It ended up doing the worst of both worlds: never feeling so absurd that you could just turn your brain off and roll with the crazy, nor so grounded that you could really get into the mysteries and how the characters explore them.

Even the final little arc, which brings some personal stakes back to Ameku and Takanashi’s doorstep, feels like it puts an arbitrary and weird time limit on an investigation for something that doesn’t feel all that heavily consequential after watching the series tackle so many cases of death and near-death, though they certainly try to sell it as more. Adding a ticking clock to a mystery can sometimes work, but it didn’t work here.

There are good ideas in here that I can see absolutely working out for the better over a broader span of episodes with more diverse mysteries. It’s just a shame that so much of this feels so humdrum with a cast of characters that are fine and mysteries that average out to fine without ever really pushing the strengths this series should have in spades.