The summer ends…at last. Yurei Deco finished last week (thankfully), and watching Akebi’s Sailor Uniform (finally) has made me feel that much more positive about good shows released this year. Right now, I’m readying myself for the shows to come in the fall. I know that the likes of Chainsaw Man, the new incarnations of Bleach and Urusei Yatsura, season 6 of My Hero Academia, among others, will be all that anime social media will be talking about for the next 3 months. And so I’m just going to keep my focus on what I will be watching instead of taking little peeks at what I won’t be watching. I’m putting together a dedicated post on my Fall picks, so look out for that. In the meantime, here is me wrapping up the summer.
When Will Ayumu Make His Move? Episode 12
This finale for Ayumu was set to be a confession episode…well, that was the way I was expecting it to be anyway. Instead it has left that possibility for a confession very open.
Urushi wraps up her third-year school trip in Nara with a midnight shogi game with Tanaka, still conflicted at what to say when she returns. But it isn’t until she and her friends go souvenir shopping when she actually accepts the truth in how she really feels about him. If it had to take having to run halfway across town to find a dropped good luck charm he gave her, of course. Love doctor Maki is of course extremely happy that Urushi has accepted it, and at the same time extremely annoyed that she can’t poke her anymore.
Over at school, we get to see a little more of Rin’s own crush, and the fact that Tanaka still couldn’t figure this out just goes to show how thick-headed he can get. Well anyway, I’m happy to see the show end on a good note, and even give room for a second season – a season that I probably won’t watch though. On the other hand, the show has given us a good enough ending to not warrant a season two. Tanaka is able to beat Urushi, albeit with a handicap, and now he is setting himself a new goal: to beat her on an even level. Interesting though how, right at the end, Urushi mentions how much shogi has taken up her childhood that, if he is able to beat her at it, she will have little left. Food for thought, and I hoped this would have been something the writers could have expanded on earlier, or in an earlier episode.
But Takeru and Sakurako were able to reach the “oh-I-dropped-this-let’s-pick-it-up-together” point in their relationship, and that makes me very happy. She no longer needs the coin.
Call of the Night Episode 12
Last week showed us how naïve and impressionable Yamori is when it comes to vampires, with Anko having to deal with a vampire that turned into a monster having not touched human blood for 10 years. Last week we saw that she is also on a missing persons’ case: Akiyama, Seri’s companion, who has now been bitten too. Has he (along with Yamori) been led down some garden path by these vampires who promise them immortal forbidden pleasures at night time? And without even giving a single thought of the consequences?
Well this week we see what Anko is capable of doing, and what stands out is that, when one thinks about it, it is the morally justified thing to do. She wants to draw a firm line between humans and vampires, and does not want the two to interact in any way. And if it means Yamori losing his life, then so be it. As I said, it is morally justified as it saves humans from the trauma of becoming monsters like the teacher we saw last week, and yet Anko is being portrayed as an antagonist for it. Kind of reminds me of some characters in the Monogatari series who act with good morals and yet are cast out in the process.
After a bunch of filler episodes, we’re approaching the end, and Yamori is stuck and has no idea what to do. He has interacted with so many kinds of people in this show, and doesn’t want any of them to be hurt. He’s just a very impressionable middle schooler with chronic insomnia who may or may not have been teased with the idea of having fun as a vampire. But as Nazuna tells him this week, becoming a vampire can actually turn out to be very boring, especially as that night time that thrilled you becomes the norm, and you end up spending the entire night playing video games…
[uh…I’ll stop there…]
Now with Akira and Koharu still freaked out after last week’s events (understandably), with Nazuna now aware of his doubts, and Anko making these threats/non threats, there’s very little spaces Yamori can turn to now. So seeing Hatsuka once again at the end of the episode was interesting. The other vampires he knows may well accept the position he’s in with Nazuna (sort of), but what exactly can they do to help him? What could they do? Would they even want to even? There’s no way I am expecting some epic fight or confrontation in the final episode, because this is just not that kind of show. Even Monogatari episodes had epic confrontations, but I’m pretty certain we won’t get anything like that here.
Summer Review
Call of the Night will get its final episode just as the Fall season begins, so my coverage of the show will wrap up then. As for how the rest of this season went down as a whole for me, well once again it was one of those up-and-down ones.
For starters, Yurei Deco was a major disappointment for me. I think it was a bit of a disappointment for a lot of Science SARU fans as well, who may have been hoping for something on par with Eizouken. The show tried to put a new spin on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with deep philosophical discussions and a dystopian take on the dangers of social media. While I think it succeeded in showing us how worthless fake internet points are, the main plot in finding what caused the populations’ Love Score shoot down to zero kind of shriveled into nothing, especially when it came to the final episode.
Where it did really well in terms of artwork and original soundtrack, character design was something I found a little questionable, largely because I couldn’t connect with any of them, not even main characters Berry and Hack. Her sudden switch to living off-the-grid didn’t feel as hard-hitting as I was hoping; it was just presented to us with precious little explanation. We were told next to nothing about who Hack was either, where they came from, and who they were before they joined the Detective Club. It often felt like these people in the club were just collected together in the show, with us not really seeing any reason why they’re there, or how they got there. If we don’t know about the characters, then we don’t care about them. And if we don’t care about the characters, then we don’t care about the story.
Every episode where I was expecting we’d get further into uncovering Phantom Zero and the Zero Phenomenon, the road just went at a snail’s pace. That final episode we saw last week was incredibly rushed, almost as if the writers were scrambling to find an ending that worked. So having Phantom Zero turning out to be one human being who did it all as some part of ‘competition’ to take her place as arbiter of the island’s social media just did not wash with me. Injunction Jo was no Willy Wonka, and Hack is no Charlie Bucket.
The idea of a show like Yurei Deco was a great one; it was just its execution that put viewers off. Should the ending have been fleshed out some more, and give out a deeper metaphor about dystopia and social media? Well it shouldn’t have been as rushed as it was, I’ll say that much.
Now that When Will Ayumu Make His Move? has finished, what are my final thoughts on it? Well as the show started, I honestly didn’t think that much, and was wondering if it was even a good show pick or not. It took me a long time to get to warm to all the characters; some earlier on in the show (like Sakurako), and some later on (like Tanaka). In the first few episodes, I was a bit conflicted on how Urusei was presented too; an otherwise very intelligent and caring senior and club president who crumbles when it comes to any kind of emotion. Maybe that is just what teenage hormones are like when you are constantly trying to convince yourself out of love; something I never had to deal with myself.
I’ll get to characters like Sakurako in a moment, but Tanaka was someone that initially frustrated the heck out of me. The more I watched, the more I understood why he was the person he is. From the way I saw it, it turned out to be a mixture of years of hard kendo training and masculine pride. He wanted to prove to the girl he liked that he could step up and actually win a game of shogi, even when we could see how terrible he really was at it. That didn’t stop him from trying though, and I liked that a lot about him. With wingman and kohai Rin coming in halfway through to whip him into shape, he became a much more likeable character for me.
Its secondary cast shined for me though. Takeru felt like a bit of a standard ‘best buddy’ kind of character, but the character designs of both Rin and Sakurako really hooked me in. Now one perhaps wouldn’t normally think there’s much in the way of outstanding when it comes to Sakurako, but she was something that Urushi was not: someone who had already accepted how she felt long ago, and was just poking Takeru into doing the same, whether it by natural conversation or by hypnotism. It was also good to have a character like first-year Rin be Tanaka’s wingman. The plot point of her having a crush on him too was something I was expecting anyway, and so her putting that aside to make sure her senpai is happy was nice to see too.
I’ll talk some more about Call of the Night once that show has finished. The upcoming final episode will give us a lot of things to think about. Does Yamori really want to be a vampire? Will Anko live up to her promises? And will the viewers stop comparing the show to Monogatari?
For me this season, there were just these three shows; I didn’t really pay attention to anything else, even though looking back, I really ought to have. And by that, I mean the show that everyone in the world watched and I didn’t: Lycoris Recoil.
A show that one of my non-anime best friends recommended to me, and even Hideo Kojima confessed to enjoying…and I missed it. I was able to see what parts of the show were about, and that the two main characters were completely smitten with each other. As for the little details, who the main antagonist was, the show’s setting, and so on, that will have to wait until I can find the time to binge watch it…and I will do, eventually. Maybe I’ll put it in an out-of-season poll one time.
The fact that I didn’t really monitor any other shows this season puts me in a weird position, as I can’t really make a generalized opinion on whether this Summer season was a good one or not. 2022 has been a funny year for me when it comes to picking shows, and when you get to see my Fall picks, you’ll understand a little more. I’ll confess that the year (right now that is) has made me burn out more often than usual. Picking out shows like Yurei Deco, season 2 of The Demon Girl Next Door and that-harem-show-that-shall-not-be-named-ever-again made me question my tastes more so than usual. And the unusual shows I’ve picked out for the Fall will either reinforce that belief or shatter it. There’s only one way for me to find out.