The reception of Oshi no Ko reminds me a lot of Fumetsu no Anata e. Episode one of season one was pretty good, and it made a lot of people cry. Audiences then proceeded to overpraise it massively, but as the show went on and people started to detect and subsequently grow tired of its formula, and not to mention after its decent animation became not-so-decent, the hype died, with season two feeling to many like little more than the producers failing to get the memo. When people recommend Oshi no Ko, they often preface their praise with phrases like, “Don’t even read what I’m about to write. Avoid spoilers at all costs, and go watch episode one yourself before reading ANYTHING.” And as they do this, they implicitly suggest this first episode is some kind of bombshell which one has to see to believe, or at least an episode containing ideas and details difficult enough to offer comment on such that telling one’s reader to form their own opinion seems like an easier option than simply asserting their own. But this turns out to not be the case at all (and it assumes episode one isn’t followed by the rest of the show). If you kidnapped me, locked me in your dingy basement, tied me to a wooden chair, gagged and blindfolded me, and threatened to do to me whatever creepy stalker rapist murders do when they similarly capture their favorite idol if I didn’t give the premise of Oshi no Ko points for creativity, then fine. I give it points for creativity; it’s a show about two idol otaku who get reborn as the twin brother and sister of their favorite idol, who herself has secretly become a teen mom, and who grow up attempting to follow in their celebrity mother’s footsteps…which is admittedly creative, assuming you want to use more euphemistic words than “fucking weird” or “laughably bizarre.” However, this premise doesn’t change the immediate and continuous trajectory of the series—which is nowhere.
The horribly overlong, eighty-two-minute behemoth that is episode one concludes by suggesting to the audience that the series would proceed in thrilling and unpredictable directions, with one of our lead characters devoting his reborn life to solving a grand mystery and hunting for revenge (for reasons I’ll leave unstated), but what follows is *literally* nothing more than the same dime-a-dozen, boring-as-fuck highschool anime dramedy which you and I both have seen a hundred million times each. Everything even slightly idiosyncratic about episode one, from its intelligent talking baby memes to its teen mom idol “I can’t believe the author is writing THIS story” wow-factor, instantly finds itself a more generic direct replacement within minutes of episode two’s beginning, and episode one itself is constantly screaming that—for what little I’ll admit it did differently—the story is written by the same type of person, for the same target audience, as every fucking piece of rancid roadkill every season of anime for some reason feels morally obligated to leave in its tracks. As I’ve explained, my new two-job, seven-day-work-week schedule has made it so I’m having to watch, think about, and write about every anime I’m attempting to review over night—a time of day when I should be getting through what little sleep I can—and holy fucking shit, trying desperately to stay awake while watching Oshi no Ko while already exhausted, chronically depressed, and sleep-deprived is a kind of torture I would not wish on any but my deepest, darkest, most personal enemies. Within minutes we’re being treated to lolicon humor and a character dynamic indistinguishable from Subaru and Ram’s from Re:Zero, and if this motherfucker wasn’t reincarnated as a baby, he’d have been the same self-deprecating, generic-looking, otaku self-insert we’d get from shitty light novel adaptations of that exact same unenviable ilk.
Speaking of Re:Zero, Oshi no Ko boasts dialogue bad enough to make me go crosseyed when reading the subtitles, and almost bad enough to make me regret learning Japanese so I stopped having to. Imagine a Re:Zero-esque teen drama where overdramatic, immature, unlikable crybabies stand around talking about their feelings for entire seasons of made-for-TV entertainment, only instead of placing the characters in a fantasy world with somewhat interesting concepts, place them in the single blandest realization of a preforming arts highschool humanly possible. If merely having that idea in your head gives you a fucking brain aneurysm, I don’t blame you, but if it doesn’t and you can actually take a second to form such an image in your mind, then congratulations. You’ve successfully imagined Oshi no Ko, and you no longer have to subject yourself to the real thing. Dry, endless exposition; loud, unfunny humor; boring, overdone drama. The one and only consistent element of the series which does actually set itself apart from its contemporaries, but which something tells me has nothing to do with how highly its being praised and rated, is how eye-wateringly hypocritical it is. We’ve all seen the type of show that tries so hard to be the “serious” one, and Oshi no Ko is definitely that. “It’s about teenagers wanting to become idols, celebrities, and entertainers, sure—but oh, no!—this ain’t no Love Live! This show is DIFFERENT! This isn’t just your typical highschool anime. This one takes a hard, unflinching look at the industry, and we get to witness these characters transform as they sober up and face the REAL WORLD.” Then you watch the show and it’s as juvenile as ever? Yeah, it’s that, but Oshi no Ko goes a step further. Not only does it shout “look how adult I am” while appearing completely generic, but it also shouts “look how self-aware I am” while appearing completely corrupt.
The actual reason I’d assume this show is so well-regarded by most people is how edgy it is. The selling point which is supposed to be oh-so ingenious is that the show looks like generic shit (and it is, but that’s not important). It’s supposed to look like generic shit with generic cute girls in generic school uniforms in a generic school setting with generic marketing strategies and pandering character designs all surrounding a generic pretty-boy MC, but just as you begin “tricking yourself” into thinking you truly are looking at generic shit, brooding edgeGOD protagonist hero savior turns around, looks directly into the camera, and beings to philosophize, “Everything we do is a lie. From idols to actors, all entertainers are liars, and audiences themselves *want* to be lied to, because the relationship they’ve formed with us is parasocial. Our job, and particularly the job of idols, is to act endearing and seductive enough to get our audiences emotionally invested in our fake personalities, so that way, they then turn around and start financially investing. At this point, the cycle of manipulation is complete, and our paychecks just get fatter and fatter. This is all cynical, this is all cold, hard, mechanical industry, and everyone who pays into it is being lied to.” You, the actual viewer in the actual audience, is then supposed to go, “Woah…that’s deep.” And I guess it is. The problem comes when the series finishes stating these statements only to act as if having stated them gives it some kind of moral high-ground or some degree of self-awareness that makes it intelligent AFTER it commits the exact same sins using the exact same strategies. This is an idol show, a standard teen dramedy about marketable waifus with whom to ship the MC. It is still sucking the golden tit of otaku culture, pandering to the same captive wallets and pocketbooks that pay for exactly what it is supposed to be criticizing, and therefore itself.
Ever since transitioning from a young adult with no commitments or responsibilities to a real fucking adult with far too many of both, my life has consistently been defined by long, undisturbed status quos. My sister, on one hand, ran out of the house and abandoned all sensible decision making influences in her life as soon as possible; got situated in hostiles and apartments with unsavory roommates; got tangled up in lending and borrowing, student debt, and other money troubles; got knocked up by a guy she would soon grow to despise; got admitted into rehab, out of rehab, and soundly into AA—the whole shabang. But me, on the other hand, always planned in advance, monitored, and carefully operated every change in routine which my life would undergo, and I was never ever one to, as least in the big, scary, life-changing kind of way, “make mistakes.” This uneventful little life of mine really must’ve pissed off someone upstairs, though, because 2023 has completely, mercilessly upended this status quo root and stem. Ever since January 5th, my life has witnessed enormous fundamental change after enormous fundamental change, and the daily, weekly, yearly standard of always being able to predict what’s coming next, always having a back-up plan, and always having feet to land on found itself replaced with a seemingly endless series of rapid, blindsiding periods of stressful, terribly consequential change. This new normal has not only left me with no time to devote to my once-defining passions such as watching anime and being SingleH, but also with way too much unwelcome perspective to feel that doing so would even be worth it. I mean, with day-to-day life feeling so much bigger, it’s difficult not to view these loves of mine as being comparatively small. Luckily, though, this season had one truly worthwhile anime for me to watch and review…but it definitely wasn’t Oshi no fucking Ko.
This was an anime sold to me on its premise which failed me on the exactly same token. Isekai anime, for example, are often criticized as being completely and totally, 100% unrealistic on the singular grounds that their protagonists are poorly written for not seeming to care about their previous lives once reincarnated. Obviously every genre has its exceptions, but I’m sure we can all think of a protagonist who got isekai’d by Truck-kun and who didn’t seem to be too terribly bothered by the prospect of leaving behind their families, friends, and—ya know?—entire fucking lives and being reincarnated into a fucking video game. The two reincarnated protagonists of Oshi no Ko are similarly unbelievable for this same reason, but whereas the me of the past had kind of just accepted this trope as part of the genre, the me of the present refused to let it go. To me, Tengoku Daimakyou was the only show of the season truly worth watching and reviewing, but the problem with going to review *good* anime is that you never know how long the process of doing so is actually going to take. With the way my life is now, that thing I once called “spare time” has become alien, and keeping up with seasonal anime in a fashion that doesn’t involve pulling all-nighters has become literally impossible. Since I can’t really budget time for writing the way I used to, I just kinda have to hope life works out in such a way I can effectively last-minute anything I want to write for nowadays, but, just as I was finishing up that brilliant, beautiful, Production IG gem and getting filled with all this inspiration, my aunt died, and so I missed the competitive deadline. Having to pass up a show I was actually passionate about writing for was disheartening enough, but to have the next in line be such an empty husk…I just can’t empathize with characters who move on like an entire lifetime’s worth of experience beyond their interaction with their favorite pop idols is worth nothing of note, whether they left behind shitty lives or not. It seems like every day now I cry; I see something that reminds me of my old friends, and I cry; I see something that reminds me of my old workplace, and I cry; I scroll back through my camera roll, see how different things all used to be, and I cry. Everything these kids cry over…it all just feels as two-dimensional as they are.
But maybe I’m just fucked.
Thank you for reading.
