I’ve been sick this week, again. Not 100% sure where I caught it from, but I’m kind of panicking a little that I could have passed whatever I had onto my nieces and nephew, who I spent this weekend with. Is anime the cure for all illnesses? Well a lot of weebs would love to tell you that, but I have other streaming services to watch too. Perhaps you might see me review some future Netflix anime shows here on OASG…
(…and another thing, unlike a lot of other countries, we have to pay for a license to watch TV here in the UK – this is because of commercial-free BBC channels)
This week’s Bloom into You takes us on a different turn, and could well put off those anime-only viewers who planned on watching this expecting some sweet melodrama where everyone’s happy.
In the Student Council, everyone is still in two minds about doing this play, no-one more so than Yuu. Believing she has an ally in Sayaka, she is nonetheless curious on why Touko is so desperate to put this play on – Sayaka tells her to check the Student Council records of 7 years ago. After a lot of digging, she learns that the Student Council President 7 years ago was Mio Nanami, Touko’s late sister, and the golden child. And so confronting her about this would fix things right? Or so Yuu thought…
I noticed someone on the anime subreddit called this point of Bloom into You the “Friendship with Wholesomeness is over, Suffering is my new best friend” part, and it’s quite easy to jump straight into this and label Touko an absolute jerk from this point on. The thing is though, once you look deeper at their relationship, you notice how fragile and broken it really is. We see that both of them want the impossible from each other; Yuu wants Touko to change, while Touko wants Yuu to stay the same and not fall in love with her. Yuu is just too nice a person, and that is part of her problem: her great reluctance to say ‘no’. It also seems like a good part of the time, Touko is taking full advantage of this. Perhaps this is my naivety talking here; my last relationship was a long time ago, and it grew into a really unpleasant one, so for all I know, this could be what a lot of relationships are like. Well…from where I see this, Yuu doesn’t want Touko to be a jerk and lie anymore, with Touko wanting Yuu to help her keep her facade. Does Sayaka know any of this though? It’s obvious that she is no longer amused about anything now. Think it’s safe to call this a point-of-no-return for both Yuu and Touko.
A part of me hopes that, with Release the Spyce, I see something dark and mysterious to come about, and it never does. But I’m not sure if this week’s episode is meant to be the beginning of a two-parter or what, since at the end, it sort of…stops abruptly and cuts to the end credits.
This week focuses more on one character who has seen next to no spotlight, and probably for good reason too. Hatsume is the rich girl of Tsukikage, whose family owns apartment buildings, companies, you name it. And to think someone like her would end up as a moeblob spy…well instead of bringing her apprentice in, a transfer student who has a past with Hatsume shows up out of nowhere, and it seems like Hatsume is the only one who doesn’t find any of this suspicious. Well this transfer student is, in fact, a undercover Moryo agent who has been sent to gather information on Tsukikage members.
I wish I could big up this story arc, but there is genuinely nothing exciting about it; almost as if Release the Spyce has sort of hit a low slump. And something else too…do I even want this show to get better? Well, I don’t exactly want to tear my hair out over this show…I mean, I like my hair. But a lot of this show has just become so ‘meh’, that I can’t help but avoid the possibility that this show won’t really get any better. I mean, I already have two amazing shows to watch this season, and is Release the Spyce the one show that ends up falling flat for me this season? Appears so. Of course I’ll finish it, but I will no longer be expecting much from this at all.
I’m not sure if we can call these recent episodes of SSSS Gridman filler episodes, since they all develop some level of story, and none more so than this week’s one, which explains to us a lot about who Akane is and why she does what she does.
Not much in the way of fights this week, only some mild story development. Thanks to a friendly kaiju, Yuta learns that their city is the only world that exists for them, and that Akane is like the city’s architect, destroying buildings and rebuilding them as she sees fit. A thick gas surrounds the entire city, with who-knows-what lurking beyond it. This does, in fact, explain why Yuta has amnesia: because of the possibility of him being artificial, he doesn’t need to have memories. Curious though that interviews with studio staff all say that they want us to see Akane as a good person by the end of the show, but I see all the early show stans are treating her like the crazy sociopath that she appears to be behaving like. I suppose one way to look at her behavior is that she can only see the rest of the city’s population as NPCs…and there must clearly be a reason why.
In video games, we see other people in our game who we cannot directly control, but can alter what happens to them; example games would be any of The Sims franchise or the Grand Theft Auto franchise, where we either control or interact with members of the public, and while we can’t directly move them, we have control of what happens to them. There is still so much story to come in SSSS Gridman, and so it should be very interesting what Trigger will think up next and how they will handle this. Are Yuta, Utsumi and Rikka all completely artificial, or were they based on real-life people that exist outside the city? So much for the anime conspiracy theorists to think up, but I’m too old to get into that. I’ll just look forward to next week.
Since we have holidays coming up and, well, I might actually be more busy in December than I thought, I decided to do my classic/out-of-season show poll early, and you guys might have picked yet another good one: Kemono Friends.
I know that season 2 is due in the Winter season as well, and so will I be watching that along with this? Well…we’ll see. In the meantime, I have some other classic episodes to catch up on, thanks to our favorite streaming service being a jerk to me last week
Episodes 5 and 6 of The Tatami Galaxy have been sort of benchmarks in the show. Episode 5 details our nameless hero’s two years in a hippie health corporation cult. Once again, like every other circle he has joined, our hero feels out of place. Here, these circle members/cult followers all wear bumblebee hats, eat healthily, play softball and look forward to the day when they all board an ark. Much like how these cultists hide behind a metaphorical mask of happiness (and disguise their real feelings), our hero is still unable to move on, but it is this episode where we notice some progress. Here we notice that there are still some things in college that remain (and not everything is reset), and not just this…for the first time, we notice an older protagonist exists, and want to tell his college self something, but what?
Episode 6, on the other hand, is Akashi-less. Here, our hero joins the English conversation circle and actually finds love, of sorts. One real-life girl (Hanuki), a love doll, and a penpal. I think that out of all the episodes seen so far, this has been the weakest. It didn’t really develop a stable beginning-middle-end like the others have done. Plot directions have changed and it almost seems like this ‘rose-colored campus life’ is something that both no longer exists and can no longer be obtained. I want this show to change…or at the very least, go in a solid direction, because each episode really does feel like the same, and it seems more and more impossible for our hero to break out of this time loop. I genuinely have no idea on what he could do.
Things are changing in shows finally, and so what do you think? Dropped some shows already? Already planning next season? Feel free to hit that like button and air your opinions in the comments below…