I probably say this at the start of every new season, but I really am glad to get into some fresh shows. Call of the Night kept me going, and my out-of-season show Akebi’s Sailor Uniform hooked me in from episode 1. Maybe I’ve just been too quick to point out the shows I either hated or found disappointing, than the ones I genuinely enjoyed. It’s just another old habit of mine.
Anyway, my other new shows, The Eminence in Shadow and Bocchi the Rock!, haven’t started yet, and I have still yet to cover Call of the Night‘s finale, so let’s get into the Fall season properly.
Raven of the Inner Palace Episode 1
What motivated me to pick Raven of the Inner Palace? I know nothing about the story, and shows set in ancient China are the kind I would usually not flock to. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to avoid all the big name shows this season, but I think it had more to do with the fact that a lot of other shows that don’t have well-known franchises attached to them just did not interest me.
(NB: For future coverage of this show, I will be using the Chinese names used in the Crunchyroll sub.)
After Xia Gaojin storms the imperial palace, deposes the Empress Dowager and claims the title of Emperor, he turns to Liu Shouxue, the Raven Consort, for her help. Extremely reluctant to help the new emperor (who she does not answer to), he tells her how he stumbled upon a jade earring. He is convinced that the earring belonged to a former consort who died before he arrived, and that her ghost needs to be at peace. But that is not the whole story.
There’s also what could be the central part of the show; Gaojin getting revenge on his mother’s poisoning. Suspecting the Empress Dowager to be behind it, he works to gather evidence and prooves that she is, instead of just going into a blind rage and executing her. On first impression, the new emperor Gaojin seems to be a decent kind of guy, who wants to root out the corruption in the palace left behind by his predecessors. He’s already succeeded in pushing Shouxue’s buttons, tempting her with baozi buns and telling her she’s cute, but not being lecherous about it in any way. Will this end up turning into some romance? A part of me wants to say no, but it does seem to be looking that way. And as for her? Well I thought it was interesting to see that she is taking an interest in this case too, mingling with other court ladies and their servants and asking what they know about who owned the earring. A spoiler at the end of this episode also reveals that there is more to Shouxue than just her being a consort with supernatural powers, and that she is more tied to the throne than we thought.
Raven of the Inner Palace has so far done a really remarkable thing by getting me very interested in a story I would never before touch. I want to know more about not just who Shouxue really is, but also the true motives of the new emperor. If he simply executes the Empress Dowager here and now, then he becomes no better than his mother’s assassin. I know nothing about the original light novel either (which has since ended in Japan and will receive an English release next year apparently), but I am also expecting this jade earring story to be an arc among many other arcs in the show. Why else would this first episode have a ‘Part 1’?
I think one thing that’ll put off viewers is whether we’re supposed to remember these characters by their Chinese names or the Japanese names. Crunchyroll uses the Chinese ones, but even then that may confuse viewers. We are given a lot of information and unfamiliar names; they show us names on screen only briefly, and so I do hope that name showing in episodes is a reoccurring thing. There look to be a lot of people in the show, and viewers aren’t expected to remember them all. I remember Assault Lily: Bouquet doing that; we were even given names on-screen for the two main girls in the show in each episode.
Aside from small complaints like that, I’m liking where this show is going so far a lot. You don’t really see this kind of story or subject matter outside of Chinese dramas and anime, so this is something really refreshing to see.
Call of the Night Episode 13
After what happened at the end of episode 12, I expected Anko to come out guns a-blazing, or for the vampires to ‘deal’ with her. But none of that happened in this show’s finale. Instead we get an extended Monogatari-style chat between Yamori and Hatsuka, who we learn is in fact a guy, and a moody Nazuna telling the other vampires to stay away from Yamori.
Call of the Night is not a show that has room for action or fighting, like what the Monogatari series has. In this final episode, both Yamori and Nazuna go on a bit of soul-searching. After how Yamori saw Anko kill a vampire with relative ease, he is still very spooked and wondering if all of this is even worth it considering how much he doesn’t know about vampires. Meanwhile, Nazuna is starting to feel like she has lied to him, in making out that staying out all night and being a vampire is an amazing thing to do, when in fact it grows into something very boring once it becomes the norm. I was scratching my head in why Hatsuka came in at the end of last week, but as we watch their interaction at his apartment, we sort of understand a little. Despite what he said to him, I don’t think he had any real intention in making him into one of his offspring. Instead his words acted like more of a wake-up call or confidence boost to Yamori.
Humans are not expected to know everything about each other in order to learn about romance, and the same applies to vampires. The news of a vampire hunter being out there certainly alarms Hatsuka, and leaves something for any second season to come. On top of this, vampire stories with LGBTQ+ characters and themes have been around for a long time, and so I like that Hatsuka’s own sexuality isn’t really presented as some kind of massive gimmick. Even Yamori got the chance to call him cute, which threw him off a little.
Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, life becomes a journey of discovery, and I think Hatsuka saying this to Yamori was just the thing he needed to head out and find Nazuna. The two of them now have a reason to work to fall in love with each other. Nazuna has been told that in order to prevent Yamori’s death, she must become someone worthy of falling in love with. And the 14-year-old Yamori has just begun his life journey of falling in love for the first time.
The events of this final episode set the ground for a second season, but will it get one? The source manga isn’t finished, and the story in this adaptation only scratches the surface of what is to come. We got to see other vampires and humans in the show, but only fleetingly. So on that reasoning, it would make sense for these dorks to return in a season two. Nazuna has been ordered to make herself a vampire worth falling in love for, after all.
Call of the Night has really been a fun show to watch. Its visuals, character design and soundtrack all worked together to make a modern-day vampire story that doesn’t really follow any of the traits we might often see in such stories. The colors red and black are replaced by the neon lights of a midnight city, making it look like the exotic place that Yamori had hoped to be a part of since he first begun skipping school. If this does get a second season, I am hoping to see more of the same, with the character designs expanded somewhat. We didn’t really learn that much about some of the other vampires, plus I wished we learned more about Akira and Koharu. I’d like to see a second season, and given how well-received it was, I’m sure one will come.
Odd Taxi Episode 1
I knew very little about Odd Taxi and the story inside it, so I dived into this fresh. And I’ll say that so far, it is everything I expected it to be.
Our protagonist may be Odokawa, but the show’s story expands much further than just that. The first episode is an establishing episode of course, but already I’m so curious about all sorts of things that have happened. Even as I finished this episode, I could tell that this show was going to be a slow burner.
The main story is, as far as I can see, centered around a missing high-school girl, but not everything is as it seems here. The first scene shows us a body wrapped in tarp falling into the sea. Then we move onto Odokawa, who is an antisocial loner who already has incurred the wrath of the two identical twin meerkat police officers, and is also speaking to someone in his apartment who we don’t see, leading us to think that he may have some involvement with the missing person. Other people we meet in this episode, Odokawa’s doctor Goriki, the alpaca nurse Shirakawa, and Kakihana who is desperate to get married, along with many others to come, will all play their part in this mystery and how it will be solved. On top of Odokawa’s bizarre behavior at his home, the older police officer, Kenshiro, is crooked and accepts bribes so he can look the other way, and medication from Goriki’s clinic keeps going missing.
As a local taxi driver to all of these potential suspects, Odokawa is put in a very precarious position. The police want to know what conversations he has had with these people, and his own apathetic, antisocial and shifty behavior does not help the situation. But what I can’t quite understand yet is the reason why Kenshiro is accepting bribes from who is potentially the main suspect, and by that I mean what is his motivation to do it. To be even more antagonistic to Odokawa and pin the missing person case on him? Or is it just the simple fact that he is plain crooked? This opening episode has given me a lot of questions that I’m curious to know the answer for. Added to this is that I’m really liking the character designs here, and as more people appear in the show, I’m more than certain that they’ll get better.
I also knew nothing about rakugo until now as well…
2 mystery shows, an isekai show and a cute-girls-doing-cute-things show; that’s my run for this season. I don’t know what The Eminence in Shadow will give me, but I’m sure it’ll either make me like isekai some more, or reinforce my belief in it being a trending genre. Both Raven of the Inner Palace and Odd Taxi have me intrigued and wanting to learn more. And I think Bocchi the Rock! won’t be trying to be anything more than just cute girls forming a band. Perhaps I am just being too doom-and-gloom, and just need to think more positively for this Fall. I mean, I’m already enjoying two shows, right?