Spring 2023 TV anime: why Yuri is My Job is exactly like pro wrestling

Last fall was a really packed anime TV season, but did anybody notice that the season that just went by was pretty packed too? I haven’t even watched the stuff on Hidive that I wanted to, like Otaku Elf. It wasn’t just G-Witch out there! But, speaking of Suletta Sundays…

(I’ve avoided spoilers except for The Marginal Service, because nobody but me actually watched The Marginal Service to the end. This post got too long with screenshots, so I cut a few out.)

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury

This was kind of the big one, wasn’t it?

This series’ reputation precedes it, but hey: the new Gundam series juggles genres, luring fans in with an innocent young girl’s fun school life and hints of romance… before clubbing them over the head with the teenage tragedy and merciless robot war that Gundam is known for. And as far as raw popularity, it is successful beyond its own wildest dreams.

Gundam’s themes of class exploitation and generational conflict are universal, but G-Witch refits them into a world closer to our own corporate-led dystopia, more immediately recognizable as today. But the show’s greatest trick is largely playing down that setting, letting it boil over in the background, until things get Real and these kids’ lives are swallowed up by a rather pointless conflict.

One of the things I find myself talking about with friends is G-Witch’s very subtle, natural character work as compared to Gundam as a whole. Gundam— particularly the early works by Tomino— is a series where characters1 turn straight to the camera and tell you, the viewer, exactly what’s on their mind, no matter how weird it is. That’s what’s good about it. But Miorine Rembran, for example, is the opposite. She’s tsundere, she almost never says what she’s feeling. She becomes more and more endearing as she opens her heart to Suletta… but the animators convey all of that to you. You have to watch her face.

As a long-time Gundam nerd, I’m very happy with the high quality of the new show, its new takes on old themes, and the amount of people it’s brought into the fold. Also, the robots are all so cool! I can’t decide which model kit I want the most. (Guel’s Darilbalde btw)

The Marginal Service

Here’s the one I wanted to love the most, and which in turn let me down the most. This is an action farce about a Men In Black-style agency crossed with a Japanese Super Sentai. The main guy is Jacky Bryant from Virtua Fighter2, and in the first episode a game announcer shouts out the ludicrous names of the main characters (Lyra Candyheart! Brian Nightraider!) as they appear on the scene. This is really directly targeted at me.

And for the first couple of episodes it hits, as dumb parody. The members of the Marginal Service are idiots— I love it that way, I’m a Galaxy Angel fan— and every week they bungle through a different melange of cult movie parodies. These tongue-in-cheek early episodes actually hold together, despite the one-dimensional characters (voiced by a star-studded cast) and some truly cheap-looking animation for an action series. It feels like something out of the 2000s, and it would have been slightly off-kilter then, too.

The problem with the show is not that veers into a serious narrative, but that the characters can’t prop one up. As we delve into the backstories of a crew of one-dimensional characters, we find there’s really nothing at all to them, beyond yet more cliches lifted directly from movies.3 One of the show’s big weaknesses is that it rarely actually goes for a joke with its references; in the Family Guy style, it’s just “Hey, this is Dawn of the Dead”. Hey, did you know Die Hard was a good movie?

As a larger plot begins to move, our incompetent main characters begin to feel irrelevant to the story happening around them. And in the final arc, an attempt to get viewers to care about the most abrasive team member— and to ship him with the hero4— falls totally flat.

The finale was surprisingly strong for being able to completely upend the story and veer off in a totally different direction, but it felt like too little, too late. When a whole other squad appears, so much cooler and freakier than our heroes, I was kind of wondering why this show wasn’t about them instead.

Skip and Loafer

If you watch one anime that isn’t already extremely famous and well-known this season… My shortest recommendation is also the one I want you to watch the most.

Just delightful, down to earth shoujo anime. A country bumpkin comes to the big city and becomes friends with a traumatized former child star. Has all the elements of classical teen shoujo melodrama, but refuses to play it up: rather, it concentrates on the kids’ little worries and their growing bonds. Layered, sympathetic character writing, natural, low-key direction; a joy and a comfort. I need as much of this as I can pump into my veins.

A Galaxy Next Door

Well if this isn’t the sweetest, most heart-melting stuff. From the same author as Sweetness and Lightning— so you know what you’re getting— a slow life love story between an overworked manga author raising his younger siblings… and an alien princess.

Aggressively sweet and endearing without quite approaching cloying, with two surprisingly mature leads who are actually capable of talking out their problems and feelings. They’re still early-stage bashful, though; adorable and innocent. Extremely endearing characters, including the precocious kids.

There’s a surprisingly thought-out sci-fi situation in the background— she really is an alien princess, of a remote island community that comes off more like a cult than was perhaps intended. The premise— and consequences— kind of knock on the door for an episode or two but are quickly shooed away so we can go back to watching our main couple blush and navigate their feelings. You know, the good stuff.

Ranking of Kings: Treasure Chest of Courage

I’m not all the way through this because I find Ranking of Kings, even when it tells the simplest of stories, to be emotionally draining. This series has just given me so much empathy for its characters, and it all flows out of my pores when I watch these small episodes. Ranking of Kings’ strongest point is its sheer empathy-- the way it paints a three-dimensional portrait of every character5— and just watching it fill in gaps is a joy.

There is too much weight placed, especially in shonen, on whether a story moves the main narrative forward or whether it is “filler”. These half-episodes fill gaps in the margins of the larger story that were left out from the manga, but that’s not really the point of them. It’s more about spending quieter moments with characters we love; a little low-stakes down time. I think that’s just as valuable as beating the bad guy.

If you fell in love with the first season but weren’t crazy about the battle-heavy second— I’ve talked to a lot of people who felt this way— I would especially recommend you try out Treasure Chest of Courage: it’s got everything you loved.

Yuri is My Job!

Actually just like pro wrestling. A crew of disaster girls staff a cafe that’s acting out a schoolgirl romance story like Maria-sama ga Miteru.6 Visitors come to this place to sip tea and watch the drama and storylines unfold between “sister” pairs. They whisper, they gossip, they post online: really, they’re a homemade cardboard sign away from being a wrestling crowd.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen and after hours in the back room or out on the fire escape, the girls talk out the details of the show: what’s working, what’s not, who’s secretly sabotaging the production.

The charm of this series is the way the cafe’s kayfabe— in short, the understanding between cast members and customers that this is all fiction— reflects and clashes with the girls’ difficult personalities and deeply repressed romantic feelings for each other, resulting in some truly weird entanglements. You could say that some of these girls are working themselves into a shoot, brother.

Kind of a buffet of dysfunctional personalities, from a sociopathic heroine to her stalker best friend to her “big sister” who shoots a little too straight for her own good. Every week the series peels back another layer, and the viewer is the “yes… yes!!” guy watching from the window. Appointment disaster-girl viewing.

Rokudo’s Bad Girls

Someone out there with a lot of pull must have really loved Rokudo’s Bad Girls. This is a shoestring-budget adaptation of a long-running fight manga that ended two years ago: precisely the kind of thing that doesn’t get animated.

Rokudo stands out first and foremost on its bizarre premise: our meek hero has been blessed with a magic spell that makes girls fall in love with him at first sight… but only if they are delinquents. As Rokudo’s high school is pretty much a war zone, this means that he becomes his own delinquent faction against his will as tough girls with all kinds of weird gimmicks magnetically drift into his orbit. Rokudo’s trump card is his true love, the brutal force of nature Ranna Himawari. Cue the battles.

All of this would just be wish-fulfillment fantasy for a guy with a very specific kind of kink, it not for the surprising strength of the character of Rokudo. Despite his shrimpiness— my buddy Carl compares him to Krillin from Dragon Ball as a lead character— Rokudo refuses to play harem king or command his troops from the back lines. No, Rokudo is always there up front, scared out of his mind an getting the absolute shit kicked out of him every week with a smile on his face. He’s a leader who inspires by giving his all, no matter how little he’s got. Rokudo is a real man.

The adaptation is, again, a little cheap; it has no chance of competing with the intense, violent, ugly-on-purpose art in the original manga. But as someone who really loved the manga, it’s a totally unexpected treat to see this story animated and voiced. I’m very pleased to even have the first arc animated at all; I can’t imagine this was popular enough to get another season, and the people making it seem to know that. Both the 12-episode anime and the 26-volume manga end in “and then we all had many more adventures!”

My Home Hero

This is another super-low-budget adaptation of a long-running manga, another series that’s surprising that it even exists. When I looked up the author, he’s also responsible for the popular isekai “I’m Standing on A Million Lives”, which shares a lot of thematic space with this series.

My Home Hero is bloody suspense pulp. A dad murders his daughter’s abusive boyfriend after overhearing that he’s going to kill her this time. The kid is mobbed up, it turns out, and despite Dad’s surprisingly comprehensive attempts to cover his tracks, this killing is the trigger for an endless game of cat and mouse between our hero’s family and a criminal syndicate.

This one pulls the viewer in quick and leaves them in a perpetual state of cliffhanger anxiety. Some of the turns in the plot are a bit difficult to believe— a few of the deductions are on the level of the supernatural— but its power to leave you on the edge never fails. Hero’s wife is the most ride-or-die wife of all time.

Also, after reading the second part of the My Home Hero manga, I want to note that it completely blows away this part. Like, holy crap. They have to want to animate that— they cast Akio Ohtsuka as a guy who isn’t even important in the first part, knowing his future role— and I don’t know how you’d even pull it off; the arc is so long.

My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999

The other day, an older nerd friend lamented to me. “We nerds won culture, and I hate it. Everything is for us. It feels wrong.”

I told him that the current hot shoujo boyfriend is a pro FPS gamer, and he winced.

Yamada-kun is cute shoujo fluff about a hot-mess college girl who gets dumped on an MMORPG and falls further into said MMORPG to cope. In so doing she meets the titular Yamada-kun, who’s good-looking, aloof, and a famous pro FPS gamer. The immature and impulsive older girl and the stoic, guarded younger guy gravitate to each other and slowly open up.7 Ah. That’s good stuff.

This is the same crew at Madhouse who did Ore Monogatari (My Love Story); they nail shoujo aesthetic and it’s kind of sad that (as far as I’m aware) it took them eight years to be given another such series. The staff know exactly what they’re doing and they knock this one out of the park. Based on a long-running series, the Yamada-kun anime ends at just the right part.

Pleasing the gamers in the room, the MMORPG also gets a lot of detail in the animation despite really just being window dressing for the story. The series makes a strong case for the return of Ragnarok Online: the lil’ munchkins are just so cute.

Birdie Wing Season 2

You’ve been waiting to hear me talk about this one, right? Well needless to say, the finest in golf lesbian mafia sports action entertainment only got better in its second season. Thing is, I can’t say a lot as the series pretty much immediately drifts into Big Spoiler Territory.

While the first arc is perfect shonen, the second part of Birdie Wing drifts more into soap opera melodrama as it explores the legitimately surprising origins of both of our heroines. In more ways than one, it really starts to feel like Gundam around the middle part of the series!

The last arc is a fast-forward power level escalation between Eve and Aoi as they blast toward their final confrontation. I’m being vague because even in this phase of the story, Birdie Wing is hiding twists that you’ll truly never see coming. The writer (Yosuke Kuroda; this series comes off as his baby) doesn’t forget anybody or anything.

My only complaint with Birdie Wing is that the kisses were offscreen. Eve and Aoi deserve better.