Between seminal works like Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, FLCL, Gurren Lagaan, and of course, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gainax was an institution. They pumped out some all time classics and were defined by their absolute love of the weirdness that was anime. And yet, their closure wasn’t a surprise in the slightest to me. In an era where more and more anime titles were being pumped out each season, Gainax became a relic of a bygone era.

While it may be somewhat easy to just point at one thing and say that was the sole reason why Gainax collapsed, the truth is a lot more complicated. I do think most of their problems stem from one singular event, but even then, there wasn’t a singular moment it all went downhill for the company. Then again, as someone who has followed anime for most of my life, it’s not too hard to see how Gainax slowly died. Here’s the story of a company that started off as a passion project between a group of devout animators, only to eventually lose that drive and become a walking corpse.

Make no mistake, when Gainax began, it was full of nothing but drive. The original founders of Gainax, before forming the company, all cut their teeth making shorts that violated all kinds of copyright laws but they made them because they just wanted to create anime. Their most famous short from this time was probably the short they made for DAICON IV, which illegally sampled Electric Light Orchestra and featured an anime girl fighting Darth Vader and more or less forced their way into the market. But that’s just the kind of company they were. They didn’t care about measly copyright laws because they had a passion to just make solid anime.

Because of the quality of their animation for these shorts, they were able to establish Gainax in 1985 as their own company. For the better part of a decade though, they were in flux. Sometimes they would create profitable works, like Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Gunbuster, but other times they would produce commercial failures like Wings of Honneamise, despite how nearly all of their titles were critically acclaimed.

By the mid 90s, Gainax was on the verge of shutting down. The studio needed money to stay afloat and needed a big hit. Then Neon Genesis Evangelion happened and you better believe that Gainax made bank off of it. Hideaki Anno, the studio’s founder, apparently didn’t want to make the series at Gainax give how strained the company’s coffers were (something that could easily be seen in the last few episodes of the series). But with Eva’s success, Gainax was ready for a whole new era of production to begin from the ludicrous amount of money they now had.

But with that came a double edged sword. Sure, the company was able to put out a lot of great anime and hire new talent like Hiroyuki Imaishi, a lot of shady corporate dealings were taking place. Thanks to the massive influx of money from Evangelion, the head of the company, Takeshi Sawamura, was arrested for tax fraud due to the money earned from Evangelion. Basically, because Gainax was financially unstable in the early 90s and there was no telling how long Evangelion would be profitable, Sawamura saw this as an opportunity to secretly stash some of that money away for a rainy day so to speak in case the company needed it. That’s the charitable reading of the situation, mind you, since the uncharitable one is because Gainax finally had a hit, Sawamure wanted to cash out before the company went belly up when the Eva horse was beaten to death.

Throughout the 2000s, while Gainax was producing critical hits, none of them ever reached the same heights as Evangelion. Titles like Gurren Lagaan and Mahoromatic were successful, but they weren’t Evangelion. In a somewhat lucky stroke of fortune around this time, Anno wanted to remake Evangelion, only this time as a film series. Given how the original series faced production issues, some from budgetary constraints and others from Anno facing several bouts of depression, Anno wanted to create a new version of the series, not dissimilar from what remakes like Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood or Hunter X Hunter did. But, in a move that began to spell the end of Gainax, Anno opted to do the remakes at a new company that he would create, a studio called Khara.

Anno opened up a few years ago about why he did this. First of all, he thought that if he did the series at Gainax then all of the artists would just be yes-men to him and not challenge him whatsoever. More importantly, due to the heads of the studio’s previously shady behavior, as well as the fact that most of the animators working at Gainax were hardly getting a salary, he wanted to ensure that the staff working on the film would receive fair compensation for their work.

And with that, Anno was gone. Gainax would still profit from some of the merchandise produced in relation to Evangelion, but Khara would get the royalties. Combine that with a string of failures like *checks notes* The Mystical Archives of Dantalian and talent like Imaishi leaving to create companies like Studio Trigger, Gainax was in a pinch. They were back to being unprofitable and producing fewer titles than ever before. By the early 2010s, anime streaming became more prevalent around the global and Gainax simply didn’t have the manpower, talent, or money to keep up.

And so came the begging. Gainax begged Khara/Anno for money in order to keep the company afloat, which Khara did, only for Gainax to then sell off the rights to many of the series like FLCL to other companies, as well as selling original concept art, storyboards, and production materials of their earlier series for profit. This resulted in Khara suing Gainax for not paying back the initial loan, which Anno was originally going to ignore until he learned about the the production materials being sold off. Plus, the negative publicity that Gainax was receiving from everything happening at the time was damaging the Eva brand, which only reaffirmed Anno’s actions to make it clear that Khara was now the home of Evangelion, not Gainax. Khara won that lawsuit, plunging Gainax even further into debt.

By this point, Gainax was hardly producing anime. The last series they ever made was in 2015 and it was an anime collaboration with Suburu of all companies. Shock of all shocks, it was a financial failure and Gainax struggled to find funding ever since. They made a second company called Fukushima Gainax and sold it off to another company for quick profit, but without a steady stream of money coming in from anime productions and merchandise, the money dried up. The death blow came in 2019 when a member of the board of directors had “indecent acts” against an aspiring voice actress, permanently blackening the name of the company in any investor’s eyes. And from there, it was only a matter of time until they declared bankruptcy.

Obviously, there’s a lot of things that I didn’t really get into here, but understanding Gainax’s collapse isn’t simple. This was a company that struggled to survive even in its early days, hit it big, then slowly began to make a lot of shortsighted and greedy decisions that ruined the goodwill that it had earned in the anime community. Of course, not making an anime in nearly a decade definitely didn’t help matters, but that was only systemic of the larger instability the company eventually developed. However, if you were to ask me what the really caused the death of Gainax, it all comes back to Evangelion.

It’s hard to not look at everything that happened to Gainax and not trace everything back to Eva. I don’t begrudge or hate Evangelion – it was the hit that Gainax needed to survive – but it’s success led to the numerous poor decisions to try to replicate its success. It’s what made Anno leave Gainax. It’s what led to Gainax selling off production materials and cutting off the financial support they needed from Khara. It’s what led to the tax fraud. All of their problems, in one way or another, all come back to Anno’s magnum opus.

Gainax certainly has a place in anime history, but its relevancy was almost nonexistent even a decade ago. The passion that made Gainax the hub of animation that it was still lives on in studios like Khara and Trigger as they become more and more preoccupied with financial gain. When the quality titles dried up, that was it. Their last notable hit was Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt in 2010, but even then it was a polarizing title that not everyone loved. Gainax has a place in anime history, but that time passed decades ago. It’s not shocking at all to me that Gainax died. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.

Given the years I’ve spent watching and writing about anime, I’d like to think I know a hit when I see one. Whether it be commercial successes or critical darlings, while I have been wrong about many things before, I think I have a pretty good idea of which anime or manga are going to become popular. And since it debuted, I’ve been actively reading Kagurabachi each week and I’ve consistently felt nothing while reading it. It failed to elicit any emotional reaction in me, either positive or negative. It was just a series I read because I had nothing else to read between One Piece breaks.

So when I see all of the hype surrounding this series as the next big hit from Shonen Jump as it pulls respectable sales numbers, such as moving 200,000 copies of the first volume in a month, I have to tilt my head and ask what everyone else is seeing in this series that I’m not. When I read Kagurabachi, I’m not seeing a dark action series about a young boy seeking revenge over the death of his father. I’m seeing a series that is conventional to the point where it has nothing that makes it unique. Rather, it takes inspiration from every major Shonen Jump title of the past decade and feel iterative rather than innovative. This reads to me as Shonen Jump putting the cart before the horse out of a dawning realization they will face problems in the next few years.

But let’s back up a little bit. If you’ve never heard of the series before, Kagurabachi is an action series that follows a young man named Chihiro. His father was an expert blacksmith and forged six Enchanted Swords have magical abilities and were used to end a long war. Sadly, his father was murdered and the swords were stolen with the exception of a secret seventh sword, one that Chirio would grow up to use.

With that sword, he begins to hunt down the people responsible for his father’s death while also searching for each Enchanted Sword before they’re used for evil. This will lead Chihiro and his allies into conflicts not only with criminal organizations, but government agencies looking to acquire the blades for their own purposes.

As far as a general hook goes, it’s a sufficient one. We have a clear end goal and solid motivation for Chihiro, as well as the promise of magical fights and enemies to combat. But even after finishing the first chapter, the problems with the manga already started to crop up. When I read the first chapter of the series, I thought that Chihiro was a dull character and now that we’re 33 chapters in, that hasn’t changed. Chihiro, and Kagurabachi in general, lack an emotional depth.

Oh sure, there are emotional moments in the series, such as when a girl that Chihiro is taking care of named Char is kidnapped and we flashback to her upbringing, but the majority of the series isn’t interested in trying to empathize with the viewer. It seems more interested on delivering action above all else.

That’s fine to a point. I love some Shonen action series like Yu Yu Hakusho, Dragon Ball Z, and Chainsaw Man, but all three of those titles use emotions to heighten the tension of each battle. Kagurabachi doesn’t seem to understand this since it just barrels from fight to fight without stopping to let the characters or the mood have a chance to breathe. The fights themselves are fine, but without a solid emotional stake that the characters have in it, they tend to fall flat. Plus, when the series adds in so many side characters for our heroes and villains to fight against only for them to be quickly killed off, it prevents me from actually caring about anyone.

Killing characters in a story is a tricky thing to do that only a few titles can meaningfully pull off, but Kagurabachi is doing everything a series shouldn’t do in regards to character killing, only introducing random characters with the express purpose of being people for the main characters to kill to show how powerful they are.

There is a power system present in Kagurabachi, but it’s hard to explain what it is. Not in a metaphysical way like in Jujutsu Kaisen where trying to explain how its power system works is meant to be difficult and convoluted, but moreso that it’s just poorly explained. While the Enchanted Blades are straightforward enough – they’re swords made from a powerful ore that grants them magical abilities – there is also something called spirit energy and the people who can use them are called sorcerers.

Basically, everyone has access to spirit energy, but not everyone can use it. Those who can can gain magical abilities, but there’s no rhyme or reason to them. Some can teleport, some can sprout trees, and some can do multiple things, but it’s very clearly stated why that is. Kagurabachi only seems to be interested in the end result rather than the how or the why, making this power system come across as painfully generic.

And the more I read Kagurabachi, the more difficult it was to read it. It wasn’t because of the quality of the story, though I will say I was pretty unimpressed the more I read, but because I was so bored reading it. Nearly everything that Kagurabachi does can be traced back to the “Dark Trio” of modern Shonen Jump titles that made waves across the industry because of their grim tone. Those three titles – Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, and Hell’s Paradise – are all represented here in different ways. The magic system is very reminiscent of Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man’s minimalistic art style is replicated here as well, and the edginess of Hell’s Paradise and uniquely Eastern aesthetics are on full display. But while each of those titles utilized those elements to enhance its story, it comes across to me that Kagurabachi is aping those series solely because they’re popular and not because it’s doing anything special with them.

That mentality really does become more and more blatant when you start to think about the current state of Shonen Jump. Mining trends until they’re dead is nothing new for the publication, but there’s a certain soullessness to Kagurabachi that feels especially cynical. To anyone who’s been a casual observer of Shonen Jump or the anime industry in general, you’re probably aware that a lot of major Shonen Jump titles are nearing their end. My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen are set to conclude this year and Jump’s biggest cash cow, One Piece, is preparing to end with its final saga underway. It’s an end of an era at Jump and they haven’t found a strong replacement for any of those series yet.

There are some contenders, but they’re not exactly lighting the world on fire. Kaiju No. 8 got a lot of publicity, mostly thanks to its new anime adaptation, but a lot of the hype around that show is fizzling. Sakamoto Days is doing okay, but is rarely known in the States. Dragon Ball Super has gone on indefinite hiatus following the death of Akira Toriyama, and Shonen Jump has been trying desperately to find its next hit. Even then, it can’t help but cancel titles when they don’t manage to become mega hits immediately.

Take MamaYuyu. Never heard of the title? It released one week before Kagurabachi and starred a young boy who was destined to be a hero and defeat the Dmeon Lord, but his adoptive mother is said Demon Lord and he obviously doesn’t want to fight his mom. It was an inventive little series, one that had some good artwork and felt unique and different. It was canceled in April after a little over six months, never having the chance to develop a fanbase despite critical acclaim. Out of the 11 new manga published by Shonen Jump last year, more than half of them were canceled.

Shonen Jump is quickly realizing that when its big series end, they need something to replace it. They’re throwing everything at the wall to find some suitable replacement, but quickly canceling any title that doesn’t immediately seem like it’ll be a hit. So it shouldn’t be surprised that a title like Kagurabachi, which is effectively a greatest hits of modern Shonen Jump tropes, was able to find an audience. Then again, given how aggresively Shonen Jump were advertising the series before it was even realized does seem like they’re forcing people to accept a mediocre title as the next big thing simply because they say so. I mean, they’re already talking about an anime adaptation of the series despite it being less than a year since it debuted.

This isn’t to say that Kagurabachi is a bad title, but it’s an aggressively mediocre one. It’s a series that lacks any and all heart and seems to be content with just giving people what they think they want. If people are talking about a “Dark Trio” of Shonen Jump manga and those titles are super popular, then making a series that caters to that crowd is the logical next step. But other creative efforts are being stifled by that. Titles like MamaYuyu are killed before they have a chance to shine and Shonen Jump is all too eager to elevate the same old trends rather than risk finding the next big thing.

Then again, for a company that seems worried about its output post 2024, playing it safe may seem like the safe bet financially. Maybe not creatively, critically, or artistically, but at least it’ll cash in on edgy trends while ignoring the actual next big thing.

I had originally said back in my Winter 2024 Anime guide that Solo Leveling‘s interesting fusion of Isekai tropes, video game sensibilities, and modern-day setting made it an interesting dark fantasy series that deserved a three-episode watch at the very minimum. And after watching those three episodes, the series gets off on a very strong foot. It violently breaks down any and all expectations you may have had going into it, chews them up, and spits them back out, asserting that it’s not playing by your traditional rules. But that’s the funny thing about recommending you watch the first three episodes of a show – they can be excellent episodes in nearly every sense, but an anime series isn’t just three episodes long. It’s more than that, and from the fourth episode on, my thoughts and opinions on the series dropped considerably.

Why is that? Well, Solo Leveling, much like any other anime series within the past several years, played a game with viewer expectations that has become all too common. In the past few years, you may have heard of something called the “Three Episode Rule.” That production philosophy has become omnipresent in anime culture, and it’s one that virtually every show has to grapple with. Some shows fail that rule, some break it, and then you have shows like Solo Leveling that exploit it. Like it or not, it’s a rule that anime fans live by, and while many critics within the anime community may groan that it has outlived its purpose or that it never served a role at all, I would argue otherwise. The Three Episode Rule is very real and is usually a good indicator of whether a show, like Solo Leveling, is worth your time.

The Three Episode Rule, at its core, is a very simple idea. The main gist of it is that if you want to get into a new anime that is currently streaming or even a classic show, a newcomer should give the series three episodes to sell you on its potential. We all can agree that a first impression is very important, whether it be personal relationships, jobs, video games, and so on and so forth. During those first few moments, we can learn a lot about a person or a situation and make a general assessment of whether we like the person or situation we are in. Plenty of television studios know this, too, so they try to make sure the first episode of a show has something to sell you on it and get you invested. In anime, that usually comes down to some high production values, a killer opening, or a plot hook to really get viewers invested.

But what comes after that first episode? The production values will begin to decline, the momentum established by that intro will slow, and the things that viewers loved about the premiere will be a distant memory. Anime production companies are aware of this, so they try their hardest to make the two episodes after the intro just as important and engaging as the premiere. Not every company does, though, so the anime community has created the Three Episode Rule to try and determine if a series is worth watching. It’s a philosophy that basically admits that you can’t truly judge a series by its first episode alone, and once the bombast and luster of the premiere has worn off, you should watch more of the show before fully committing to it. Once you’re three episodes in, and you’ve seen the routine a show has developed and given the show enough time to convey to the audience what it’s about, then you’ll know if it’s a show worth committing to or not.

Related: All English Dub Voice Actors & Cast List for Solo Leveling

It’s a sound philosophy and one that makes sense. I can only speak from my personal experience, but I find that watching three episodes of a show is probably the best way to determine if you’re going to like it or not. Dozens of shows are coming out each season, and it’s virtually impossible to watch all of them. Having a small system that allots a show one hour to convince you is effective. Each season, I have around a dozen shows that I find interesting, so I watch the first three episodes once they’re done, then make a judgment call if they’re worth continuing or not. Sometimes, this system pays off, like when you have shows like Madoka Magica that keep viewers invested and completely hook them by the end of the third episode. Other times, this system fails, like with a show back in 2021 called Wonder Egg Priority that was bursting with potential and promise after those first three episodes, only to completely collapse in on itself by the end. Still, that’s not necessarily a fault of the show but rather the lofty ambitions of an inexperienced production team, but that’s a discussion for another time.

This brings us to Solo Leveling, a series that ropes you into its world and the situation our hero, Jinwoo, finds himself in at the end of the first episode. He’s locked in a dungeon with an enemy who is unimaginably more powerful than him and already effortlessly killed two of his party members. The next two episodes go on to flesh out the terrible situation, as well as set up the show’s premise where due to a dark ritual caused by this towering titan of nightmare fuel, Jinwoo has been granted the power of a “Player.” What that means to him is somewhat unclear, same with how it applies to this world with its own power system that seems virtually incompatible with his status as a Player. But we learn very quickly that the punishments for failing to complete certain tasks are harsh and severe to the point where you almost want to see him fail just to see what gets thrown at him next.

So, based on those three episodes, Solo Leveling does a stand-up job setting up the rest of the season. The production values were high, and I was roped in. But from the fourth episode on, it’s become evident that the production team at A-1 Pictures has already become a bit too comfortable with the positive reputation that the series has developed in such a short time. They knew, like most anime production studios, that the Three Episode Rule is a very real phenomenon, so now that audiences are already invested, they don’t have to try as hard to keep them coming back week after week. The animation has become a bit sloppier. The uniqueness of the concept has become stale. The hope that those first three episodes had to deliver a dark fantasy epic petered out. Of course, the narrative problems that the show is facing now may also be present in the original source material, but regardless, they’re here, and they’re… dull.

That’s my overall mood after watching Episode 7, the most recent episode at the time of this piece. Jinwoo has become a boring protagonist who no longer has a lighthearted personality and good common sense. In those first three episodes, despite his complete and utter lack of strength, his observation skills and sense of self-preservation made him stand out from other anime protagonists. Now, Jinwoo is physically and mentally a different person and a less interesting one at that. He’s gained exponential strength due to his status as a Player, but with it, he lost the skills that made him so compelling despite being pathetically weak. He’s essentially become just like every other Isekai main character like Rimura from Reincarnated As A Slime or Hajime from Arifureta – characters who are so overpowered that they’re boring to watch now. Solo Leveling tried to remediate this in Episode 7 by having Jinwoo fight against a monster that was leagues above him in terms of strength, but when compared to every other named human character, I can’t help but feel that these potential foes are just going to be weaklings that are deflating to watch Jinwoo fight against, not dissimilar from how I can’t get invested in any side character’s fight in One Punch Man since I know Saitama can one-shot all of them.

Is the series beyond redemption? Of course not, but the longer a show like Solo Leveling goes on, the easier it will be for me to drop it if I don’t see any signs of improvement. I was hooked based on those first three episodes, and I definitely gave the show its fair shake. I saw potential there, and I still see potential now, but I also see a show that is very comfortable to fall into familiar trappings now that it has its audience. This is one of the ever-increasing amount of modern shows that are aware of how important its first three episodes are and will pull out all of the stops to impress in that short amount of space, then start coasting the second it reaches episode four.

I know that the Three Episode Rule is a very polarizing topic within the anime community. I’ve heard arguments stating that it has and always will be relevant when it comes to determining which shows to watch, just as I’ve heard arguments saying that it’s a relic of a bygone era when anime wasn’t as pervasive as it is today. I think that both sides are valid, but the Three Episode Rule does still have value today. First impressions do matter a lot, and this rule is a great determining factor to help a person see if a show is for them. Just be careful of shows like Solo Leveling that will exploit this rule and pull out all of the stops in its beginning, only to consistently take the easy way out time and time again the second those three episodes are over.

In an era dominated by long-running action series, Shaman King, at first glance, appears to be yet another Shonen anime that was simply never able to find an audience in the West. It received consistent support from Shonen Jump’s parent company Shueisha for years and got a modest number of spin-offs, including an anime series, multiple video games, and even a trading card game. Yet, despite predating more popular titles like Naruto and Bleach, Shaman King is remembered as little more than a footnote. Sure, the series has had a resurgence in popularity in the past couple of years (including a new sequel anime, Shaman King: Flowers, which streams on Netflix this year), but it hardly inspires a response from otaku nowadays.

I’ve always been fascinated by the existence of Shaman King. Not just because of how it seemed to drop off the face of the Earth for a decade, but because the story itself subverts basically every trope you would expect from a Shonen series. The tone and journey our heroes take to reach the end is unusual, to say the least. Even thinking back on some of the major plot beats, it’s striking how blunt the series is with its endgame and the path it takes to get there, as well as how frustrating that journey is to watch unfold. It’s a complicated series in more ways than one. Now that it’s concluded and easier to get into than ever, I think it’s something that any fan of quality Shonen series should experience. 

In the world of Shaman King, some people (known as Shamans) are able to commune with the dead. These shamans can channel these spirits either through themselves or through objects and, by combining these spirits with the shaman’s latent powers, create unique constructs and abilities. One such shaman is Yoh Asakura, who channels and becomes friends with a fearsome samurai named Amidamaru. At first, you think the series will focus on Yoh’s exploits throughout Japan, dealing with a variety of ghosts and shamans along the way. Very quickly, however, we realize that it’s all a prologue to the Shaman Fight. What is the Shaman Fight you may ask? The ultimate tournament arc. 

From the fourth volume through to the very end, all Shaman King appears to be interested in is the tournament. The winner will become the new Shaman King, effectively able to channel God, so the series goes all in on exploring plenty of theological concepts. In Shaman King, all religions are correct, as each religion is more or less a reflection of the Great Spirit, or God. There are archangels, Babylonian deities, Meso-American demigods, Egyptian gods, and many more all vying for representation in the series. This allows Shaman King to offer a global perspective on religion and other cultures — including ones that are rarely portrayed in media. 

Multiculturalism is one of Shaman King’s biggest strengths. Despite being a Japanese series created by a Japanese author, Hiroyuki Takei, the series feels like a globe-trotting adventure. There are plenty of organizations that Yoh and his friends come into conflict with that have members from all around the globe. The same is true of many allies Yoh makes as well. Some are from England, others are from the Middle East, and one of the most prominent supporting characters later in the manga is from a small village in Africa. These locations help to inform the viewer not only about who the characters are but also some of the spiritual beliefs of their home country, painting a picture of how spirituality differs across the planet. It’s a fascinating read since many of these elements appear to be well-researched and are based on actual indigenous cultures. 

But I think by far the most fascinating thing about the manga is how Shaman King subverts the tournament arc trope. Tournament arcs are one of the defining elements of a Shonen series. You name a Shonen series and there’s a very good chance it has some kind of a tournament arc. The reason these arcs are prominent into Shonen manga is pretty obvious: most are predicated around action, so why not create a situation where combat is the main driving force? If the story is to progress, then our characters need to get into more fights, with the author allowing each enemy to shine for a brief moment before fading from the spotlight in favor of the overarching antagonist. And Shaman King completely disregards this. 

In Shaman King, almost immediately after the Shaman Fight begins, in a stunningly brazen move, Hiroyuki Takei outright states who the winner will be. That is Hao Asakura, a Shaman who continuously reincarnates with the singular goal of becoming Shaman King. Everyone knows he’s going to win, so most of the manga becomes a futile attempt to either stop him or discover a way to delay his ascension to godhood. He has a loyal group of followers who, despite being defeated at points in the tournament, never fade away from the spotlight. They stay around and cause legitimate chaos for our heroes, doing everything in their power to ensure Hao’s inevitable victory. As you read or watch Shaman King, you slowly stop caring about the frivolity of the Shonen action and instead begin to care about the narrative at large. It’s a fascinating plot progression that keeps viewers engaged despite abandoning its action.

Yet that may be where Shaman King begins to falter. Once we reach the Shaman Fight and the traditional tournament structure, as well as when Takei reveals the series’ endgame, fan interest in the series began to waver. That makes sense. Once you reveal to your audience what the conclusion will be and firmly state both in and outside of the text that it’s not going to change, readers are bound to lose interest. Not only that, but the Shonen elements that were so prominent earlier in the manga were replaced by deep, contemplative pieces that mused about the futility of violence. In other words, the stuff that people liked about the early days of the series was dropped almost entirely, annoying a large number of fans.

The reception was so bad that the series was discontinued in Shonen Jump in 2004 before getting a proper conclusion. Shueisha said that interest in the series dropped so much that they would only print the final volume if there were at least 50,000 people who would buy it in Japan, which is unheard of today. Hiroyuki Takei then took five years to finish the final three volumes, blaming that lengthy process on a combination of trying to do justice to the series in giving it the ending it deserved and also a loss of motivation on Takei’s part after readers rejected his intended direction to instead clamor for generic Shonen tropes. 

In my own experience, I only was able to read the finale of Shaman King in the early 2010s solely due to fan translations, as Westerners wouldn’t get an official localization until only a few years ago thanks to Kodansha. Given that Shueisha wasn’t going to do anything with the series after it floundered in the West and in Japan alike, manga publisher Kodansha acquired the rights to Shaman King in 2018. The company immediately began to celebrate the series on the eve of its 20th anniversary with a new and complete rerelease of the manga. It released digital versions of all 35 volumes, including the ending the West never got, and published omnibus editions of the series throughout the early 2020s.

But Shaman King wasn’t just a manga now, was it? No, Shaman King had two anime adaptations, both of which were severely flawed in their own ways. The first adaptation began airing in 2001 and, given that the series was still being written at this time, it featured an original ending. In fact, most of the anime had original plots and episodes, making it a weird adaptation that ignored a lot of themes from the source material. Then again, Shueisha took more direct control of the anime towards the end of its run and implemented more Shonen tropes, just as fans allegedly wanted. Meanwhile, when this series came to the West, 4Kids Entertainment picked up the rights — a company infamous for censorship and “Americanization” of anime they acquired — and aired it on the forgotten Saturday morning cartoon block, the FoxBox.

In 2021, a new anime production was announced, one that claimed it would faithfully adapt all 35 volumes of the manga and deliver an authentic adaptation. The problem was that trying to adapt a manga as long as Shaman King into 52 episodes was an almost impossible task, so a lot of the series had to be cut or reduced heavily. For example, the first three volumes are handled in four episodes and the pacing is so absurdly rushed that key moments don’t have time to land or impact the viewer before we’re rushed to the next big setpiece. 

It feels like no matter what, Shaman King can’t catch a break. Whether it be the delayed manga, the cliffhanger ending Westerners had to deal with for over a decade, or two middling anime adaptations, Shaman King just has the worst luck. Shaman King is a subversion of what a Shonen action series can be, one that becomes more confident in its voice as it progresses. It’s a series about multiculturalism and spiritualism, hitting topics and themes that other Shonen series just don’t want to tackle. I appreciate Shaman King for the risks that it took, and I applaud Hiroyuki Takei for staying true to his vision despite how that negatively affected readership. Since we’re just beginning the new year, if you’re looking for a new series to get into, I’d highly recommend giving Shaman King a whirl. It may not immediately impress you out of the gate, but give it time and you’ll discover something fairly unique and compelling.

This article is part of Frame Jump, a column from Jesse Lab looking at anime and other media from Japan. You can read more of his wonderful work here.

The man is considered to be one of the founding fathers of the modern-day anime industry, mostly thanks to his works in Studio Ghibli and his dedication to keeping 2D hand-drawn animation alive in an industry that is becoming more and more reliant on digital techniques, sometimes to a frightening degree. With 12 films under his belt over six decades and a production studio known throughout the world, Hayao Miyazaki is a legend in nearly every sense of the word. He’s not perfect by any means, but there’s no one else like him in the industry.

Why is that, though? What makes Hayao Miyazaki… Hayao Miyazaki?

That was one of the questions I was asking myself recently when I sat through his most recent film, The Boy and the Heron. I have seen it twice over the course of a week, once with subtitles and once with the English dub, and I kept asking myself why I was finding it so compelling. It’s a good movie, but it’s one that I think has some pretty obvious flaws that you’ll need to contend with. Yet I was able to overlook them much easier than I would if it was a Mamoru Hosoda film or a Masaaki Yuasa piece. Plus, whenever anyone watches a film by Miyazaki, it’s clear that something is going on there that’s hard to pin down – some tone, some perspective, some element that can’t be captured by any other director. So, I wanted to examine what that special ingredient may be and how only an artist like Miyazaki can effectively use it.

If I were to use a single word to describe all of Miyazaki’s library, which is not an easy feat, mind you, I would probably describe it as pure. Now, that word can mean a lot of different things, depending on the movie. In some films, it means a lack of cynicism as the world is presented to us from a child’s point of view. In other cases, it’s examining broad concepts in simple terms and just letting the feelings of the piece evoke imagery and emotions in a viewer. And then there are times when the film’s message is ultimately about the desire to maintain purity in the world and to prevent its corruption, if only for a little bit. Miyazaki, for all of the themes and ideas he may constantly pull from, loves to showcase the purity in the world.

This is usually pretty relevant whenever aviation, or flying in any capacity, is involved. In most of his movies, his characters either gain the ability to fly or participate in a sequence where they soar through the skies, marveling at the calmness of it all. From Nausicaa to Kiki’s Delivery Service and Howl’s Moving Castle to The Wind Rises, the clear skies are usually the place his characters go to in order to achieve peace. There’s a stillness and quietness to the skies, which embodies a concept that Miyazaki loves to throw into his film: Ma. Ma, in simple terms, means stillness, and Miyazaki likes to include these beats in his films, pure little moments where the world and environment can just exist as is. No tension, no chaos, no rushed pacing, just a breather for audiences to take in the film and engage with it on a deeper level.

You can almost reach a zen-like state when you watch a Hayao Miyazaki movie. Yes, there are scenes where a lot can happen both in the context of the narrative and on-screen, but all of his films eventually return to that state of inner peace. When I was watching The Boy and the Heron, that film was almost all introspective contemplation, something that is very befitting of a man who is approaching the end of his life and can be seen at times to be therapeutic not only for the audience but for Miyazaki himself.

It’s no secret that Miyazaki puts a lot of his beliefs and personal history into his films. As a child, Miyazaki grew up in the remains of post-war Japan and directly saw the affect effects that World War II had on his country. Combining that with his complex relationship with his father, who helped manufacture fighter planes in the war, it’s easy to see how Miyazaki developed his strong anti-war messages that can be seen in Nausicaa, Porco Rosso, and Howl’s Moving Castle. But as Miyazaki grew older, he became more and more interested in examining his own life and his relationship with the world. The Wind Rises, despite being a film about a real-life airplane designer, Jiro Horikoshi, is basically about Miyazaki trying to reconcile his past with his family’s legacy and how his family inadvertently corrupted the purity of the skies that Miyazaki loves so much. Granted, that may be a lofty reading of it, but the elements are present. Miyazaki is a storyteller, and the stories he wants to tell are deeply personal to him.

But it’s that audience that may also be the key in trying to determine what makes Miyazaki so singular of a director. If you were to ask Miyazaki who the target demographic for his films is, then he would almost certainly say children. In nearly all of his films, children are seen as the driving force of the plot and the audience’s surrogate character. No one child is the same in his films, offering different perspectives for different ages and genders. The children of My Neighbor Totoro, with their wide-eyed innocence, contrast nicely with a character like Kiki, who is learning to grow up on her own and live the life that she wants to live. Each of his films can also easily be understood by children, allowing anyone to become engaged with his filmography. When I was growing up, outside of watching Kiki’s Delivery Service on a nearly monthly basis, I watched most of his films when I was 12 on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block, finding myself easily enamored by what I was watching.

Was it different from what I was used to? Undeniably. The only anime I had seen up until that point were either action shows like Yu Yu Hakusho that aired on Toonami or series co-opted by Saturday morning cartoon blocks like Digimon, Monster Rancher, and Fighting Foodons (sidebar, does anyone remember that show because I can’t be the only one who remembers it). But I felt like watching a Miyazaki movie was like finding an oasis. In an industry that was interested in pumping out more and more titles and selling merchandise, Hayao Miyazaki’s films never came across that way. Yes, Studio Ghibli made bank off of merchandising films like My Neighbor Totoro, but that felt more like an unintentional result than a clear goal. His films were meant to always be artistic statements that could be understood by children and allow those feelings to resonate with them.

It seems like the anime industry forgets that animation typically skews to a younger audience. Obviously, there are numerous examples of anime series that are targeted toward adults and those with mature sensibilities, but as time goes on, it feels like those examples are becoming the majority. Anime aimed at children seems like they are becoming more and more fringe. I mean, take Astro Boy, one of the most defining anime series ever made, and compare it to its modern-day reinvention, Pluto. Now, Pluto is a great show in too many ways to count, but I would never dream of showing Pluto to a child in my life. As more and more anime targets older audiences, it’ll become harder and harder for children to get into anime. Miyazaki’s films at least offer an easy and accessible entryway into the medium.

And it’s unclear how long that’s going to last. Miyazaki announced that he was going to retire at numerous times in his career, only for him to come out of retirement time and time again for another film. That seems to be the case once more, but there is concern that, without Hayao Miyazaki’s guiding philosophy and artistic vision, what does the future of Studio Ghibli even look like? In the decade between The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron, Studio Ghibli’s production schedule decreased significantly, with the quality of those films also being a lot lower than what is expected of Ghibli. Two of those films were directed by Miyazaki’s son, Goro Miyazaki, and for as much as Goro may try to replicate his father’s style, it comes across exactly as that – an imitation of something genuine and sincere.

As sad as it is to acknowledge, Hayao Miyazaki will eventually die and the anime industry will never be the same. There will be mourning and musings about how Miyazaki was unlike any other director in the industry. That’s true. No one will ever be like Miyazaki. No one can ever have the same experiences or pour themselves into their work as much as him. No one can try to find the magic and beauty in innocence and convey that through the eyes of a child. No one can convey stillness and silence like Miyazaki. Miyazaki gives you time to think about his movies as you watch them. And if I had to hazard a guess about why no one else will be like him, that’s my go-to answer.

Frame Jump is a column from Jesse Lab that focuses on anime, such as Happy Sugar Life, Attack on Titan, and One Piece. You can read the full archive of what he’s written so far here.

Oh sure, there is a lot to say about the franchise as a whole and how it holds a special place in many an anime fan’s hearts. I’m just not one of them. It’s not that I think I have some higher moral authority on the matter or think that it’s overrated. In the modern-day anime industry, where almost everything has a toxic fandom that will attack anyone and everyone who criticizes their beloved franchise, I’m not even criticizing the show as a bad series. I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about the series from fans who have followed it for all of those ten years. I gave it a shot years ago when it first came out, dropped it, and never felt the need to look back on it.

I guess you could consider this piece as me coming to terms with why I never cared about Attack on Titan. As someone who watches an unhealthy amount of anime on a weekly and monthly basis, why did a show like Attack on Titan never click with me, but weirder and probably more objectively poorer series like Happy Sugar Life did? I think the overarching reason has to do not only with the show itself but also with the state of the industry and the studios that would be involved with the production of it.

Make no mistake, I respect the hell out of what Attack on Titan did for the anime industry. From my own personal experience growing up, anime was always seen as being a niche interest. To an extent, that’s still true, but within the past decade, anime has become more and more mainstream and gained wider recognition outside of Japan. One of those reasons was primarily because of Attack on Titan and its release. The series began streaming on Crunchyroll five years after the streaming service launched in 2008, and while it wasn’t the series that catapulted it into the anime juggernaut it is today, that honor would probably go to Sword Art Online, it still pushed a ton of people to get Crunchyroll subscriptions back in the day. Even then, it made Netflix and Hulu dive headfirst into anime to capture some of that delicious Attack on Titan cake, which resulted in them having their own slew of anime productions.

I also have to commend the series for launching the studio that first began producing it, Wit Studio. The studio, established by former Production I.G. employees, put their heart and soul into Attack on Titan, which was the first production under their new studio. In that way, Attack on Titan could serve as a mission statement of sorts for Wit Studio and what they wanted to accomplish. They wanted to storm onto the anime scene and redefine what an anime was capable of. In retrospect, there’s no denying that the first episode of Attack on Titan did all of that and more. It’s an absolutely fantastic first episode of any show – anime or otherwise – sends a clear message about the premise of the show and the world its characters live in and almost demands viewers to stick around for more.

RELATED: Jujutsu Kaisen Manga Chapter Release Date Schedule

It was around October of 2013 that I got my Crunchyroll subscription, not for Attack on Titan, which was almost done with its first season, but for a series called Kill la Kill. I had heard about Attack on Titan all throughout the summer from friends and co-workers at the summer camp I worked at, saw the Survey Corps logo on plenty of jackets, and heard the amazing OP “Guren No Yumiya” on loop. So I gave the series a spin alongside the other Fall 2013 series and enjoyed the first episode a lot to the point where I began to slowly catch up to the first season. But as I got through more and more of the show, my focus shifted to those other Fall shows like Kill la Kill and Beyond the Boundary. It wasn’t because Attack on Titan was bad or conventional, but rather because I was bored by the characters.

Yes, I know that nowadays, many of the core cast members of Attack on Titan are beloved and go through wonderful arcs and have several layers of nuance to them, but back then, I found myself bored. I found Eren and Mikasa to be uninteresting, and the side characters were underutilized. I guess I had developed the perception that if this was going to be a series that killed its cast, I should give a damn about them, yet I wasn’t developing any emotional connections. Again, knowing what I know now, the show definitely does go into some out-there and somewhat subversive directions with its cast, but I’m someone who loves a good character drama, and Attack on Titan, at the time, just wasn’t doing anything for me, despite the universal praise and wonderful animation. 

So the series kept trucking along, and I found myself becoming more invested in other shows, yet I was still aware of the success that Attack on Titan had earned. Even when fans were criticizing the show, which was somewhere around the third season, I think, I was still hearing plenty of recommendations for it. But by that point, the show was already fairly well established, with dozens of episodes to its name. It got to the point where it was on my backlog, but the show had become so large of a watch that I just kept becoming disinclined to watch it. Much like how I don’t really want to go back to Persona 5 because I know I will be spending over 100 years playing it, I also didn’t feel the need to spend precious hours of my day watching something that I knew I wasn’t a big fan of initially. Why would I invest my time into something I was originally mixed on?

So I stayed away from the series for a while, but then I started to hear about the series for a completely different reason. In 2019, Wit Studio, after three seasons, decided not to produce the show’s last season. To many, this was a shocking development as Wit Studio built their entire reputation thanks to Attack on Titan, and for the longest time, no one knew exactly why they did this. Recently, however, the founder of Wit Studio opened up about why they dropped the show, and the answer was that it became too demanding for them to produce. Not necessarily because the sequences were difficult to animate, even though they were, but actually making the series was too taxing. 

The behind-the-scenes production of the first season of Attack on Titan was a nightmare. Yes, we hear all about how anime studios are essentially workhouses and staff are mistreated often (I’m looking at you, MAPPA), but Attack on Titan was especially chaotic. Wit essentially begged for animators as the show went on to help create the same kind of spectacle that was present in that first episode, and things were so down to the wire that episodes were turned in mere hours before they were set to air. There were year-long breaks between seasons to help the staff get some breathing room from the Titan-sized expectations of the series, but grueling work is still grueling work no matter how far apart they were. Plus, by this point, Wit had already grown to a point where they could take on other projects with less demanding production cycles that were less mentally draining than Attack on Titan. So they said farewell to the series that made them.

It was interesting to me to hear about this as an outsider because I interpreted that there were some problems with the series moving forward and that Wit knew something that we didn’t know at the time. Ultimately, it was for a better work-life balance for their staff, or at as good of a work-life balance that you can get in the anime industry, but I was curious to see who could fill those lofty shoes established by Wit. The answer, it turns out, would be… MAPPA. A studio that has no problem openly exploiting its workforce to diminishing effects.

I admit that when it comes to MAPPA and the seemingly endless negative stories about their working conditions, that just sealed the deal on why I wouldn’t bother with the series. We all have to choose our battles on what we support and don’t support, but this one is my personal line. Knowing what I know now, I feel weird watching their shows. And I admit, that is a bit of a hypocritical stance to take, especially given my enjoyment of some of their shows like Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen. However, these feelings towards MAPPA are relatively recent and have tainted my opinions on the company as a brand. I can’t look at MAPPA animation anymore without thinking of how inhumane their practices are, much in the same way I can’t watch any Woody Allen movie without thinking of the allegations against him.

What made it even easier for me was the almost comical levels that this “final season” was split into multiple parts, then subdivided even further into smaller parts. I appreciate that MAPPA didn’t just try to fart out a conclusion and gave the animators time to create a worthy conclusion to the series, but I can’t enjoy the series, or at least the ending of the series, knowing that the people behind it were responsible for some of the worst conditions in the anime industry. I know it’s unfair to associate Attack on Titan with such an unfortunate company, but it’s still an association that can’t be overlooked. At least fans seemed to have been satisfied with the show’s finale, despite how it’s been drawn out to the point where calling it “the final season” has all but become a joke.

But the me of today is different from the me of 10 years ago. I’m no longer looking for the next big franchise to dive into and immerse myself in. At least, right now, I’m more interested in smaller and more interesting anime projects. Has anyone here seen Pluto? That show is just plain stellar. Plus, with other smaller titles disappearing into the cracks, I’m much more interested in watching anime that doesn’t have the massive and lofty expectations. That series isn’t going anywhere and has cemented itself as a bastion of the anime community for time immemorial. But I view it more as a symbol now than an actual show. Like how I don’t see myself ever rewatching Dragon Ball Z simply due to how long it is and how much it transcends the anime industry, Attack on Titan now occupies the same space. It’s a legend, but it’s something I can respect and appreciate for what it did rather than what it actually is. 

Frame Jump is a monthly column on all things anime from Jesse Lab. If you want to read more Frame Jump, you can find all the articles published so far here.

We all have that one show or movie that we have that reaction to. It may be because of the quality of the experience, the feelings that it evoked in a person, or the memories associated with watching it, but there are some pieces of media we just never want to experience again. Films like Requiem For A Dream or Mother!, or games like Hatred and Manhunt 2 are my go-to examples of this phenomenon, but oftentimes it isn’t because of their quality. They may be beautiful, artistic, and fully realized experiences, but so uncomfortable to engage with that you swear off ever experiencing them again. There’s an anime that fits this definition to a T for being so disturbing and unsettling that I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again: Happy Sugar Life. 

Don’t let the lighthearted and fun title fool you. Happy Sugar Life is anything but pleasant and cute. In an industry that seems almost averse to actually exploring horror in any meaningful way other than to pepper pre-established Shonen tropes and action series, Happy Sugar Life decides to tackle themes on a weekly basis that are beyond taboo. Normally when a show broaches one of these themes it’ll be enough to raise alarm bells for a series being “problematic,” but Happy Sugar Life goes way, WAY beyond that. There aren’t any monsters in the show (that aren’t human), or even a lot of gore. But it still scared me in such a way that I don’t ever want to think about it again. I mean, I’m doing that now, but only because I want to spread that suffering to other people. 

The series, an adaptation of Tomiyaki Kagisora’s manga, debuted in 2018 on Amazon’s failed attempt to create an anime-centric channel on Prime called Anime Strike. This experiment lasted for all of a year and had titles like Made in Abyss, Land of the Lustrous, and Re;Creators as exclusives, which is also probably why those series don’t have too much of a following in the West — sadly. Happy Sugar Life was the same, fading into relative obscurity and to this day still being exclusive to Amazon Prime. Given how anime has consolidated around Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, Hulu, and Netflix, there’s very little reason you would ever search Amazon Prime for Happy Sugar Life unless someone told you about it. In that way, it’s kind of like a Creepypasta about this one forgotten anime on an abandoned Amazon streaming channel that was so vulgar that it was quickly buried and lost to time.

Before we get into what this series is and why it’s perfect for a depressing Halloween spectacular, I do want to give a content warning because… there’s a lot to be aware of here. Trigger warnings for pedophilia, rape, molestation, mental illness, suicide, sexual assault, child abuse, and alcoholism.

The series follows two girls, Satō and Shio. Satō is a high school girl who is fairly popular and is trying to hold down a job working at a cosplay restaurant as she lives on her own due to her family not being in the picture. One day, she finds a lost girl named Shio, whom Satō takes in and begins to take care of. Shio is barely in elementary school, but that doesn’t stop Satō from developing intimate and most certainly romantic feelings for her, going so far as to discuss marriage and killing anyone and everyone who gets in the way of her happy life. But of course, that idyllic dream will be difficult to maintain, especially when Shio’s brother appears putting up missing posters all over the town and other parties want to take Shio for themselves. 

The main idea that permeates through most of Happy Sugar Life is the idea of purity vs impurity. Within our lives, there are some relationships that are theoretically meant to be pure and wholesome, like the love between family members or the sacred bond between married partners. To characters like Satō, these concepts are sweet and pure, something that is to be desired and savored. She loves Shio with all of her heart and often does what she can to maintain the purity of their relationship. She tries with all of her might to keep Shio uncorrupted from the outside world and from Satō’s own actions, going so far as to forbid Shio from leaving the apartment and barring her from entering a room in the apartment with a conspicuous amount of bloody bags in them. Shio doesn’t mind this as, again, she’s a pure and innocent child who only assumes the best in Satō. She doesn’t know about the horrors that Satō enacts upon anyone who may make her happy sugar life “bitter.”

And it’s that bitterness that truly does give the show its edge. While other horror properties may give you physical and visceral thrills to terrify and shock, all of Happy Sugar Life’s scares are psychological and leave a dull numbness in the viewer. Nearly all of its cast are deeply troubled people who are reprehensible in their actions. The method in which Satō embraces her yuri tendencies may be bad — and believe me they are yandere levels bad — but they’re nothing compared to the horrors that her unnamed aunt may or may not have done to her. It’s an all-encompassing chill as the trauma of the characters piles up slowly but surely, painting a picture that abuse breeds abuse.

Nearly all of our young cast members suffer abuse from an adult, whether it be biological parents or people put into positions of power. In the most tragic case, there’s a teenage boy who works with Satō named Taiyō, who starts off the series like your average side character. He’s pleasant, a little bit quirky, but generally a nice guy. Within the premiere, he’s molested and raped by his boss and develops a fear and disgust of older women, frequently going into a panic at the mere thought of being close to one. His solace though is Shio, whom he meets and sees as an angel capable of cleansing him of his sins, often leading him to be manipulated by Satō for the chance at interacting with her. By the end of the series, he’s regressed to the point he’s a reclusive shut-in who has lost everything and can’t even function as a member of society. 

I have to give Happy Sugar Life credit for not trying to hide its horror from the audience, going so far as to basically reveal its hand in the first episode, then spending the rest of the series as a game of cat and mouse between Satō and the various people attempting to find Shio or cause harm to Satō for her actions. There are several mysteries that the show establishes, like why Shio was lost, how Satō got the apartment they live in, and what happened to Satō’s aunt, all of which keeps viewers engaged with its reprehensible cast. As the series progresses and the stakes become higher, each of our cast members begins to crack and becomes more desperate to reach their goals.

We see the slow degradation of several characters’ mental health as trauma upon trauma is put on them. This trauma isn’t meant to make us sympathetic to them, however. In fact, you shouldn’t find any of its cast sympathetic in any way except for Shio and her role as a victim. Rather, that trauma serves as an important rationale for why these characters are doing what they’re doing. Satō does what she does because her aunt imbued in her a twisted sense of love and validation that could only come from someone with a broken definition of the concept. Taiyō uses Shio as a therapeutic symbol of sorts as a way for him to overcome his past. Even Shio’s brother Asahi only looks for Shio with such determination because he wants to prove to her, as well as himself, that healthy and loving relationships are possible. The series never once asks us to relate to its cast of broken young adults or even pity them. They are who they are because of their trauma.

That being said, it uses trauma in a way not unlike how a high schooler may implement trauma in a story they’re writing. They’ll throw in a mature concept because it will lend gravitas to a character’s backstory, but not really bother with actually learning or understanding the implications of that concept. Happy Sugar Life is very well aware of the implications and often just piles them on to see its characters crack because that makes good drama and horror. At times, it does border on tragedy porn where it seems like every single person in this world either is a monster or becomes one through frequent and nonstop abuse. I understand that trauma is powerful in altering how a person operates, but seeing a character like Taiyō shift so rapidly into a broken mental state strains credibility and just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. 

Believe me, at times, I wanted nothing more than to stop watching Happy Sugar Life. The horror this show exudes isn’t grand and glamorous and in your face. It’s insidious and gets under your skin because of how relatable it is. It’s a kind of horror we see in the news. A horror where actual monsters commit unspeakable acts against innocent people solely for their own benefit. A horror that the nightly news plays on repeat to inform the populace that there are monsters like this out there. This is a series that depicts selfish monsters sickeningly trying to find a way to exploit a young girl’s naivete for their own benefit. But I kept watching the show. Why? Because I had to see how it ended. Would there be a happy ending? And would that ending give enough sweetness to repel the bitterness of everything leading up to it?

And as the final scene began to play out and we see the perpetuation of abuse and the cycle slowly beginning again, all I just felt was dead inside. I got my ending, and it was nothing but bitter. I didn’t need a monster devouring the souls of innocents to be afraid. I didn’t need a group of paranoid researchers arguing about which one of them was an alien. All I needed to be afraid was a little girl saying that despite everything that happened, she still loved Satō. That was enough for me. I never want to experience that feeling again. If you’re brave enough to go down this rabbit hole and see the all-too-real horrors of Happy Sugar Life, then go for it.

I just won’t be joining you and I don’t think I ever will.

On the surface, I’d easily say that it was one of the best live-action anime adaptations. Granted, when your competitors are stinkers like Dragon Ball Evolution, Netflix’s rendition of Death Note, the overproduced Ghost in the Shell, and if we’re really going to stretch our definition of what anime is, The Last Airbender, it’s not exactly hard to be considered the best. The bar is just that low. But I just can’t get behind saying that One Piece is the best adaptation since I think it has a few key weaknesses, mostly in terms of performances, how certain arcs are truncated beyond recognition and some wonky pacing issues. Besides, it’s impossible for Netflix’s adaptation of One Piece to be the best when Alita: Battle Angel exists.

Released in 2019, Alita: Battle Angel was a passion project 16 years in the making by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Based on a ’90s manga called Gunnm (localized to Battle Angel Alita for the West), the series is an evolution of a lot of the anime cyberpunk traits that could be found in titles like Akira and Ghost in the Shell. The series and film, by proxy, center on Alita, an amnesiac cyborg who is reconstructed by an engineer named Daisuke Ido. As Alita slowly recovers her memory, she engages more with the world she inhabits, namely the poor and destitute city of Scrapyard and the floating idyllic city of Zalem primarily as a bounty hunter.

Related: Netflix’s One Piece Is the Perfect Introduction to the Series

The history of Alita: Battle Angel’s production is almost as fascinating as the final product given how the film was in production hell for so long. It’s funny to me that for as much as Hollywood has been attempting to make their own live-action anime adaptations a thing, most of them end up never being made and have become punchlines to anyone who still remembers them. Case in point, Warner Bros.’s baffling attempt to make their own version of Akira, going through five directors in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, it’ll be made. But leave it to James Cameron, a man who is 1000% dedicated to making sure his vision is brought to life or die trying, to be the one to helm the film.

Allegedly, James Cameron became aware of the series in the early 2000s thanks to Guillermo del Toro, who turned him onto the property. That in and of itself is nothing but a minor miracle given that at the time, Battle Angel Alita’s only presence in the West was a two episode Original Video Animation (OVA) and the manga, which wasn’t in frequent circulation. Cameron became enamored with it the series and wanted to bring it to the big screen, but he became invested with Avatar and trying to bring that project to fruition. When it became clear that his time with Avatar and its sequel Avatar: The Way of Water would take up virtually all of his attention, he asked Robert Rodriguez, a friend of his, to direct the film with Cameron being heavily involved in the film’s production as its producer. And the two were able to eventually get the movie made. From all that, it’s clear that both Cameron and Rodriguez adore the series.

Alita: Battle Angel, as a film, tells a story that we’ve seen before. There’s a visceral class divide between the people of Scrapyard, now renamed Iron City, and Zalem, framing the inhabitants of Zalem as egotistical out of touch socialites who literally dump their trash into Iron City. While we don’t see too much of Zalem in the film, it’s presence is felt not only in how oppressive it is towards people who live horrid lives but also how desirable it is to be there. For people born and raised in Iron City, it’s seen as a paradise not dissimilar from the American Dream. If you work hard enough, of course you can make it up there and live a good life. But the reality of the situation is that no amount of work or effort will enable anyone from Iron City to make it up there. After all, they’re just trash to Zalem.

Related: The Mostly Unknown Cast of One Piece Is A Blessing And A Curse

The film very efficiently relays this message thanks to its world build and just how well designed the world is. Visually, Alita: Battle Angel put a lot of effort into making the dystopian Iron City look like a true cyberpunk world. People walk the streets with all sorts of cybernetic enhancements that are shown off in some admittedly creative ways, mostly thanks to the brutal competitors in the fictional sport of Motorball. In fact, most of the special effects in the film are wonderfully animated, which should be no surprise given that Cameron is known for his technological innovations and Rodriguez is able to effectively shoot an action scene. When the film wants to be an action blockbuster, it delivers violence that you wouldn’t really expect from something that’s a PG-13 movie. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there’s an R-rated version of the movie considering how brutal some of the action scenes can be.

Most of these scenes involve Rosa Salazar’s Alita, who is probably the most polarizing thing about the film. It has nothing to do with her abilities as an actress, but rather the decision to make her look… well, like she’s from an anime. Her entire face has been CG’d in order to give her the proportions of an anime character, including her big eyes. And it’s because of this decision and how it nestles her firmly in the uncanny valley that so many people just can’t jive with the movie.

I would argue though that the CG actually serves to help endear us to her, with her larger eyes evoking an almost puppy like aesthetic and wide eyed innocence as she sees the world of Iron City and Zalem with wonder only to have the rug pulled out from under her. Plus, her more humanoid appearance directly contrasts with the villains she goes up against, who use cybernetic enhancements to make themselves barely recognizable as human, most notably through Jackie Earle Haley’s hulkish depiction of the enforcer Grewishka.

Stepping away from the unique design decisions of Alita: Battle Angel, what makes it superior to other anime adaptations like One Piece? Shows like One Piece and even Cowboy Bebop did have more time to flesh out their world and establish a core cast of characters just because they were designed as long-form television series instead of films after all. But Alita: Battle Angel stands above them ever so slightly because it’s not afraid to be what it is; an anime. It leans into and owns the fact that it is an anime and doesn’t try to hide away from it, blending those anime inspired elements well to its broken world.

Related: What Does One Piece Mean To Me?

Cowboy Bebop almost seemed to be ashamed that it was from an anime, doing anything and everything within its power to distance itself tonally from the anime and grounded it in something that, theoretically, should have appealed to Western audiences. One Piece does this a lot better, showcasing anime influenced designs and set pieces that aren’t afraid to be weird, but the dynamic between these more animated moments and the more realistic tone and color palette keeps it from perfectly mixing together. But Alita: Battle Angel’s tone is consistent between the original manga, OVA, and the live-action version. You can tell that Cameron had a reverence for the source material and faithfully did what he could to keep what he loved about the original series alive.

Plus, unlike most other live-action anime adaptations, Alita: Battle Angel was actually financially successful! The movie gross just north of $400 million on a budget of $200 and turned a profit. Most of that came from international markets and home media sales as the film earned about $84 million in America. That’s not a bad number mind you, especially since it over-performed during the four-day President’s Day weekend when it released, but it’s still not an especially noteworthy domestic total. However, positive word of mouth and fan campaigns made sure that Alita: Battle Angel would still be remembered, sometimes intensely so thanks to the #AlitaArmy. However, those efforts seemed to have paid off since James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez have made a blood pact that Alita: Battle Angel would get two sequels, making it a trilogy. He has all of that Avatar: Way of Water cash after all.

There is an argument to made about how One Piece, which is undeniably a bigger anime franchise, can have a more positive impact on the perceptions of live-action anime just through how wide of an audience it reached thanks to Netflix. But popularity doesn’t always equate to high quality and while I said it before that One Piece is a fine show, Alita: Battle Angel is a more entertaining experience. It has the passion of major fans of the franchise behind it who were uncompromising in bringing their vision to the masses. It brought a world that was inspired by and went on to inspire classic cyberpunk titles with action and animation that are still impressive to watch with the best use of an F-bomb I’ve seen in an action movie. It’s based on an anime, but isn’t ashamed of its heritage and tonally uses that to respectfully portray the tone of the original. It’s not a revolutionary movie mind you, but Alita: Battle Angel is at the very least a textbook example of how an anime adaptation should be handled by Hollywood. Now, let’s see how that production of Your Name ends up.

This month sees the release of Netflix’s attempt to adapt One Piece into live-action, and to say that I am approaching it with caution is an understatement. I’m not looking at the series from a place of utter fan devotion. I understand the Netflix series needs to make sacrifices and alterations and to have astronomical expectations would only do me a disservice. After all, this is the same company that decided to give the green light to their attempts at Death Note and Cowboy Bebop. If it’s great, then I’ll be sure to give praise where it is due, but I’m not exactly holding my breath for perfection. Competency, yes, but nothing more.

It’s safe to say then that I’ve had One Piece on the brain. I’ve decided to reread the manga, which now has 103 volumes in print in the United States, and I’ve just been filled with a wave of nostalgia as I’ve done so. I can remember where I was at certain points in my life, the friends I’ve made and lost, and just how One Piece has always been there for me in some way, shape, or form. So in lieu of offering some deep analysis of what the story of One Piece is, which would take multiple columns and thousands upon thousands of words, I’d rather talk about what One Piece is to me, as a fan who has been there since the very beginning.

In 2003, my mom brought my brother and I to a local comic book store, a store called New World Manga that I still visit to this day. Back then, my brother and I really only went to pick up Yu-Gi-Oh cards, but my mom wanted me to buy a book so I wouldn’t just be spending my allowance money on some cheap piece of cardboard I’d forget about in a week. So I browsed until I saw a book I remembered seeing in a copy of my brother’s Shonen Jump magazine. The series had goofy characters with wacky powers like the cartoons I watched every Saturday morning. I picked up the first two volumes of One Piece. From the moment I read it, I knew One Piece was an adventure series unlike any other.

The premise is that a young pirate named Monkey D. Luffy wants to become the greatest pirate of them all: The King of the Pirates. To do that, he needs to find the One Piece, which was hidden by former King of the Pirates Gol D. Roger. Luffy assembles his crew, sails the seas, and beats up bad guys using powers he got from eating the Gum-Gum Fruit. These powers allow him to stretch his body as if he were made of rubber.

I had never read anything like it before. Keep in mind, by this point I was still reading books with a lot of pictures in them, but American picture books always felt so static and bare. One Piece was kinetic. Each panel felt alive and full of personality, from the goofy faces Luffy and his friends would make to the frenetic and oftentimes brutal action. There was blood in this series, and it didn’t shy away from making our heroes lose. This wasn’t just a simple story where the good guy saves the day every single time. Luffy and his friends would be beaten, and they would strive to get better to overcome those odds. Needless to say, I was hooked.

I would go to the comic store every few months to grab a new volume. Even when my brother stopped playing Yu-Gi-Oh and had no reason to go anymore, I still went to get the latest volume. I watched the the anime as it aired, then read each of the chapters the episode adapted. I scoured the internet and researched stuff that I hadn’t read in those volumes, helping me develop my media literacy skills. By the time I was in middle school and the manga was reaching the end of the “Alabasta” arc, I was stunned to learn about an arc called “Water 7” and how that arc apparently was even better than “Alabasta” (and it is). But for all of my love of these adventures and brilliant moments of catharsis when Luffy  defeated the villain of the arc, I didn’t really have anyone to share it with.

There are two big reasons I hypothesize why One Piece never caught on in the States in the 2000s. The first of which was the abysmal 4Kids dub. To make a long story short, 4Kids was a company that released heavily censored versions of anime to fit into a children’s cartoon block. References to death were a no-go, as were guns and any form of extreme violence. It gave us some wonderful bits of absurdity, like Brock from Pokemon calling rice balls “jelly doughnuts,” Yu-Gi-Oh fabricating the Shadow Realm as a substitute for death, and One Piece having a myriad of alternations that changed character backstories, gave some lovably terrible accents, and just made the series come across as too kiddy. While Naruto and Bleach received more faithful dubs and weren’t compromised in their presentation to Western markets, One Piece was all but destroyed due to 4Kids realizing that unless the series was heavily edited, they wouldn’t be able to present it.

That was undeniably a major roadblock that set me back. Here I was liking this show people called childish, while the real teenagers would talk exclusively about Naruto. The other shoe dropped when we reached 2010. Because of the glacial release schedule of Shonen Jump and Viz Media at the time, One Piece in the West was leagues behind what was happening in Japan. So in late 2009, the publisher announced a major push to catch up to Japan, and in six months, they would be publishing 30 volumes of One Piece. I could keep up when it was one volume released every three months, but the rate Viz was going at was impossible for me to keep up with. I was in high school and between buying games and saving up, I couldn’t justify spending $300 on One Piece volumes, so I dropped the series for most of high school. I was content to have my memories of One Piece be the 4Kids dub and leave it as a permanent fixture of my childhood.

A friend of mine later told me about fansubs. I couldn’t tell you the site, it’s probably defunct now, but he said I could read all of One Piece there for free, and they even had chapters that weren’t published yet. I read everything I could over the course of a winter break just so I could catch up to the Japanese release schedule and follow along from there. I decided to buy those 30ish volumes whenever I had the chance, opting to go for single volumes instead of the 3-in-1s so I could have a vivid and lively shelf. In college, I continued to read One Piece as each volume came out and slowly but surely filled in the holes of my collection, all the while recommending the series to my friends. No one would take me up on it, though my roommate and I struck a deal that when One Piece ended, I would loan him every single volume of the manga for him to read as long as he didn’t engage with the series until then. He agreed, and that deal is still alive to this day.

The only person who took me up on my offer to get into One Piece was the woman I’m currently dating. When we were first talking, she was interested in getting into anime and didn’t know where to start. Me, being the sadistic fellow I am, recommended that she should watch One Piece. It was the pandemic, after all, and there wasn’t really much to watch. She wanted to watch a long show to pass the time, and by that point, it was approaching 1,000 episodes, so why not? It met her criteria. And so she did. She watched every single episode over the course of six months, all to make sure she could watch the 1,000th episode as it aired. Why? Because it aired on her birthday, and she wanted to celebrate with One Piece.

Now, whenever I recommend One Piece to a person, I always provide them with the means to access it. I’ve recommended it to multiple people now who have either watched it from my Crunchyroll account or read the volumes I loaned them, and they all have loved it. Without the asterisks of the 4Kids dub and being relatively on par with the Japanese releases, One Piece is more accessible than ever. It’s still a mammoth of a task to sell someone on dedicating months, if not years, of their lives, to catching up to a fantasy series that has been ongoing since the ’90s and shows very little sign of ending any time soon. Theoretically, though, it’s easier now than ever now to sell your soul to Eiichiro Oda’s masterpiece.

But that’s one of the most beautiful things about the series — it’s always there. I’ve lived in several countries, held down numerous jobs, wrote for several different outlets, and One Piece has always been constant. It hasn’t defined my life, but it has been an element that factored into my upbringing. I wouldn’t be into anime today if it wasn’t for One Piece piquing my interest all of those years ago. Even though I can’t remember concretely, it was also probably influential in helping shape my reading abilities and gave me the wide vocabulary I have now.

I’m happy now that One Piece has become one of the defining pillars of the anime industry. While other series have seen their stars rise and fall, One Piece continues to shine. Hell, One Piece recently broke Crunchyroll because of the debut of Luffy’s Gear 5 power-up. One Piece just elicits joy in those who experience it. The world is massive, and I wish when I was growing up I had the communities today to discuss the latest chapters or episodes, but I don’t regret not having them. I still was able to find enjoyment in Luffy’s epic journey to become the greatest pirate in the world, and I’ll be there to see the final panel when it’s all over. One can hope that the Netflix series will be able to encourage more people to get into the series, but if not, then I’ll still keep recommending the manga to newcomers. Why mess with perfection?

Inspired by the 2001 Dreamcast game Illbleed of all things, Danganronpa sees a large cast of high school students, usually around age 15-16, become isolated and trapped in a high school and told to murder each other by the school’s psychotic headmaster, Monokuma. These students are unique though since they are considered the “ultimate” at a particular talent (or Super High School Level in Japanese). It could be for something relatively common like baseball, cooking, or swimming or something more outlandish like maid, dictator, or serial killer, but these students all have unique personas and even more unique mannerisms.

The only way for a student to leave the school is to murder another student, then get away with it in a class trial, where you need to collect evidence and testimony to determine who the killer was and hold them to justice. All the while, you’re also trying to figure out who among them is the mastermind pulling the strings and what the ultimate purpose of this whole experiment is.

One of the most immediate reasons why this franchise has endeared itself to so many people is due to its absurdly large cast of characters. Each game will give you over a dozen new faces to flesh out, and with the game spending so much time getting to know these eccentric personalities, you’re bound to find at least one or two people you’ll like. With the stakes as high as they are, this leads to some soap opera drama between certain characters, watching a few of them develop friendships and even romances due to the time they spend together.

Indeed, a lot of Danganronpa feels like a soap opera for the anime community. Much like in a soap opera, emotions are so heightened and over the top that players can’t help but become invested in them. These games can go on for dozens of hours and have us become intimate with the cast to the point where even the slightest revelation about a character may reverberate with the rest of the people they’re stuck in isolation with. They’re not exactly relatable like most soap opera characters due to their extreme social status, but the problems they face are. There are characters who suffer from issues like depression and identity issues, and the games do not shy away from talking about them. Sometimes they aren’t handled well, (Don’t talk to any Danganronpa fan about Chihiro.) but there’s something to be said for at least generating discussion, even if the execution is at fault.

There is of course the myriad of overarching mysteries in each entry, whether isolated to a single chapter or developed over the course of the game, but Danganronpa will always try to take big swings and go for the fences. Each of its revelations is meant to be shocking, its reveals are meant to elicit an emotional reaction from the player, and the resolution often leaves players wondering if their actions, while justified, are necessary. It says a lot for the franchise that it can provide hours upon hours of entertainment despite the numerous and frequent decisions made by the characters that are just plain stupid and moronic that should make it blatantly obvious they are the killer. The solid characterization does a lot — and I mean a lot — of heavy lifting here.

But the bold risks go beyond just the confines of the games themselves. The very structure and presentation of these narratives deserve mention too. In 2016, the franchise concluded its then-ongoing trilogy with a dual anime release, Danganronpa 3: Future Arc and Despair Arc. These series aired simultaneously, with the ideal way to watch them being to hop between each series as they aired. Never before have I seen an anime experiment with storytelling like that, and while this does create an uneven viewing experience, (The Despair Arc is by far the more interesting of the two due to its returning cast.) it still led to plenty of online discussion within the fan community as it aired.

The series even goes so far as to directly comment on its status within the anime community in its final game, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. Without going into any spoilers on this immensely polarizing yet oh-so-satisfying conclusion, one of the final codas the game ends on is not exactly a condemnation of the fanbase that it created, but a representation of its fans and the franchise that they love. Fans are split on whether such a message ruins the entire point of the series and puts the escapist elements of that entry into an uncomfortable new light, but I can’t think of any franchise, anime or otherwise, that would even dare to conclude itself the way that V3 did.

And it’s those fans that are probably the most enduring element of the franchise. Whether coincidental or not, the rise of Danganronpa’s popularity in fan groups directly parallels the increasing popularity of anime in the West in the 2010s. During that decade, anime began to rise in prominence thanks to streaming and fan communities spreading information and sharing posts about their favorite titles. While I think it would be a gross exaggeration to say that Danganronpa was solely responsible for this spread, it at least had somewhat of a hand in it in those early days. You couldn’t go onto a site like Tumblr in the early 2010s and look at anime without something Danganronpa-related popping up at you.

Even today, there’s something to admire about how Danganronpa has just pervaded anime culture and even modern-day culture in some small ways. It’s hard to look at any project that features an involvement by Kodaka, Komatsuzaki, and Takada and not think of Danganronpa. Sometimes it works, like with the brilliant Akudama Drive, while other times you get Tribe Nine. Danganronpa also has a rampant presence within the cosplay community, with premade costumes ready to go at the drop of a hat. It’s nearly impossible to hit any convention and not see at least one Danganronpa cosplay. And then you just have its general placement within the video game industry at the time it arrived, as one of the defining reasons to own a PlayStation Vita and its status now as one of the premier visual novels, with ports to modern systems like Nintendo Switch.

In truth, the anime adaptation of the first game that came out back in 2013 is probably the worst way to experience the Danganronpa franchise. It’s clunky and heavily condensed to the point where most of the intrigue that was present in the game has been removed. But that still doesn’t deny its importance. People flocked to that show that had never heard of the franchise before. I was one of those people after all. It introduced me to a franchise that I can say contains some of my favorite games of all time.

Fans of Danganronpa are a passionate bunch. Their voraciousness to get others to experience the series isn’t because they want to provoke some kind of reaction in people or because of how excessively anime it is, but rather getting them to experience something that engages them in the way few franchises ever could. Fan or not, you won’t ever forget your time with a Danganronpa game.

I got into the series during the pandemic and quickly read all of the manga. Whether it’s the manga or the anime, the story excels at showing some incredibly well choreographed fight scenes and hitting some highly emotional and poignant climaxes for its arcs. Fans from all around the world were clamoring for more Demon Slayer content, and it was only a matter of time until the show received a third season adapting the “Swordsmith Village Arc” of the manga. The third season premiered in April, though there was an early theatrical screening of the season in March, and since then my thoughts on Demon Slayer have shifted considerably. At the beginning of the season, I was eager to see the next leg of Tanjiro’s journey. Now, on the cusp of the third season finale, I couldn’t care less about what happens next.

It’s a sudden shift, but it’s one that I’m not really all that surprised about. Last year I said that Demon Slayer was one of the best shows of the year thanks to its bombastic “Entertainment District Arc.” I’ve reached the point where after two seasons and a feature film, which happens to be the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time, I’ve seen everything that the show has to offer. I know all of the tricks that Demon Slayer likes to use, and I’ve grown bored of them. While there are some anime series that are constantly adapting and developing with the times, like with Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War when compared to its earlier seasons, Demon Slayer is not one of them. It’s fundamentally the same show it was back in 2019. Because of that, it’s grown stagnant.

It’s hard for a series to reinvent itself after so long, especially when the series focuses on doing one element really well. In the case of Demon Slayer, melodramatic action is its forte, and it will try to build its major beats around that. When the first season debuted, those moments were flooring and had viewers talking about each episode every week. But as new seasons debuted and the show continued to use the same techniques, those moments began to lose their luster. We’ve seen Tanjiro be senselessly beaten before. We’ve seen the sympathetic backstories. We’ve seen the over-the-top yelling and the simplistic animation for comedic effects. We’ve seen the single scene in each season where the villain is defeated with Ufotable pouring every cent of its budget into that one specific moment. By this point in the show’s run, it’s effectively recycling everything that it’s done before with little variation.

The issues with the Swordsmith Village Arc go just beyond familiarity. There’s supposed to be a plot here, one that over time has become increasingly irrelevant. In the beginning, Demon Slayer had a clear and strong emotional core to hook viewers. Our protagonist Tanjiro had his sister turned into a demon and was trying to find a way to turn her back into being a human. But as the series has progressed, the show has become less about the relationship between Tanjiro and Nezuko and his efforts to save her, and more about the supporting cast and their histories. While developing a large supporting cast is to be expected the longer a show runs, the fact that Tanjiro’s arc has been inactive makes him a boring protagonist. That’s not helped by giving him a new supporting cast with little established relationships to work off of.

The Swordsmith Village Arc saw the removal of longtime supporting characters Zenitsu and Inosuke, two loud and brash characters that polarize fans due to their personalities. Despite their sometimes aggravating presence in the narrative, they were at least unique and at this point have a well-established dynamic with Tanjiro. In the Swordsmith Village Arc, we’re introduced to many new characters for what is ostensibly the first time, setting us back to square one with new repores that aren’t given enough time to develop. We meet the Mist Hashira, Muichiro, the Love Hashira, Mitsuri, and Genya, the younger brother of the Wind Hashira. Technically we did meet all of these characters earlier in the series, but they were just casually introduced with the expectation that they would be developed later. And now that we’ve reached that point, their backstories are underwhelming and repetitive.

Muichiro and Genya are both tragic characters who were forced into action over the death of their loved ones. Both of them hate the fact that they are drawn into fighting and both feel unbridled rage towards the demons for what they’ve done to their families. While their personalities may be different — Genya is more openly angry while Muichiro is as expressive as drywall — their backstories share so much in common that when we get two episodes dedicated to fleshing them out, it feels like we’re watching the same story twice. Mitsuri at the very least has a chipper personality and decent comic relief bits to distinguish her from the other new characters.

With so much time spent focusing on the new cast, the pacing of the arc is all over the place and feels haphazard. The first episode of the season is a double-length premiere that spends most of its time catching up with our villains. The rest of the episode then establishes the general goal of the arc, that being Tanjiro getting a new sword. Then there are two episodes of downtime before the next eight episodes are dedicated to two entirely different fight scenes. Not only that, four of those eight episodes are flashbacks to establish the new cast, with three of them occurring back to back. It grinds the central conflict of the arc to a screeching halt. Not even the villains have much time to get development, something that was a strength of the first season. This is decompressed storytelling at its worst, and it just left me bored week after week. It should not take this long to adapt this little manga. It leaves the plot feeling emaciated when so little forward momentum actually happens from episode to episode.

None of this should be surprising to any viewer. This is a shonen series after all. They are known for their glacial pacing at times, but at the very least shows like One Piece, Dragon Ball Z, My Hero Academia, and Dr. Stone know when to vary things up. Demon Slayer used to have some subversive moments within it to keep viewers engaged. The big bad guy was introduced in the second episode. The main supporting character of the Mugen Train film died at the end despite not really being given a chance to develop. The Swordsmith Village Arc robs the series of the few subversive traits it had in favor of a conventional action series with stunning animation.

And for some that may be enough. Lord knows I love to just turn my brain off and watch some slick animation. But cutting-edge animation will only be cutting-edge for so long. Better animation will rise, and when those shows surpass Demon Slayer, it will have nothing to fall back on other than its weak story, overly familiar characters, and padded-out runtime.

It would be easy to claim that my feelings towards Demon Slayer are a blowback to its popularity. The series is still one of the most watched shows of each anime season, and volumes of the manga are being bought ad nauseam. But I don’t think I’m alone in my thinking.

I mentioned earlier that when the third season premiered, it had a theatrical release and many fans were left disappointed by it. Sure, one aspect of the disappointment was almost certainly that this “film” stitched together the last two episodes of the second season to the season 3 premiere, but there were some fans who were disappointed at how little new content was shown. I’d like to think that those fans who went into the theater to see the premiere instead walked away realizing that Demon Slayer’s decompressed nature is starting to interfere with the quality of the show.

Not much can be done at this point. When the third season concludes, there will only be about eight volumes left of the manga to adapt, which can be done in probably two seasons at the pace the show is going. The final arc is next, and it’s almost all action. Demon Slayer will still stick to its tropes, and it will still try to develop new characters with similar tragic backstories. Nothing will change. But I’m no longer interested in the show anymore. I’ll watch it, but unless something changes in the next season of the show, it will be out of obligation rather than enjoyment.

This Sunday is Mother’s Day, a time when children pay respects and give thanks to the mothers that raised them. While there are plenty of famous mothers in the world of film and television, there aren’t really that many amazing moms in the world of anime. With some notable exceptions, I think there are four types of mothers that usually appear in anime, most of which feel slightly underdeveloped.

You have moms that are more background characters, mostly serving to cheer on our protagonist or offer some sage motherly advice every so often, like Delia Ketchum from Pokémon and Inko Midoriya from My Hero Academia. Then you have the dead mothers who serve to motivate our protagonists, like Trisha Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist and Kyoko Honda from Fruits Basket. There are also the badass moms that are more known for their action heroics and everything else besides being a mom, most typified by Dragon Ball Z’s Android 18. Finally, you have the moms that are defined by motherhood, but that element is only a single facet of their character.

While most anime moms tend to be a mix of the first three categories, like how you can define Kushina Uzumaki as basically all three, the moms that are not defined solely by motherhood have me the most curious. The best moms in anime are the ones that feel like fully developed characters that just so happen to be mothers. Usually, motherhood does play a significant role in how they are perceived, but they have clear dreams and aspirations that go beyond supporting their children. Hana from Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children springs to mind, as does Oshi no Ko’s Ai Hoshino. However, those mothers are the exception rather than the rule.

May I then present to you a mother who is a fully developed character who goes beyond just being a mother, cares deeply for her child, and is inside of a series that is one of the most popular shows airing right now? And it’s a tragedy when I say that she will not receive any love or attention on Mother’s Day, not even from her own daughters. Ladies and gentlemen, this Mother’s Day, we should toast Lady Prospera from Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, a true mother of the year if I’ve ever seen one.

Now I know what you may be thinking: “Isn’t she a reprehensible woman who is clearly in the wrong and has committed unspeakable crimes that are too mortifying to explain? Isn’t the show presenting her as the ultimate antagonist, one worse than the military-industrial complex that is stoking aggression and civil wars throughout the galaxy? Wouldn’t she be seated at the table of all-time worst anime parents like Fullmetal Alchemist’s Shou Tucker, Made in Abyss’s Bondrewd, and Evangelion’s Gendo Ikari?” Yes, yes, and yes. All of that is true. She is indeed a heinous monster, and yet she is a mother who cares deeply for her child and is almost single-handedly elevating The Witch from Mercury into one of the best shows of the spring season.

Lady Prospera is known in the Gundam franchise as a “Char Clone,” based on the antagonist of the first Gundam series, Mobile Suit Gundam. Char was a highly charismatic primary antagonist in that series. He was also defined by his mask, which allowed him to keep his identity a secret while fulfilling his hidden agenda and manipulate others as necessary in order to eventually emerge as one of the main antagonists in a later Gundam series. At this point, it would have been a shock if there weren’t some kind of a Char stand-in during Witch from Mercury’s run, so seeing any character that even vaguely resembles Char or dons a mask is an immediate red flag for longtime fans.

So she’s an obvious antagonist, but then throughout the series, she’s shown as being nothing but supportive of her daughter Suletta Mercury and her dreams of attending school. On the surface, Prospera is a mother who seems to want what’s best for her daughter. She offers up motherly advice, always listens to her daughter’s problems, and does what she can to have Suletta enjoy her life at Asticassia School of Technology. For the first half of the series, we see that life in school is everything that Suletta wanted it to be. She makes friends, tells her mom about them, and is developing a deep relationship with a girl named Miorine Rembran. And all the while, Prospera is happy for her daughter.

And that’s where the story would theoretically end if we were basing things off of the first season that aired in fall 2022. The series was a light-hearted spin on Gundam that was mixed in with elements of Revolutionary Girl Utena. The tone was admittedly lighter, something that seemed to be intentional when the show began so that the ultimate shift toward darker and more serious topics would be all the more notable. This is Mobile Suit Gundam after all. It wouldn’t be a proper series of the show if some war crimes weren’t introduced. And Lady Prospera Mercury spurs most of the most significant crimes against humanity.

Lady Prospera may love Suletta, (The jury is still out on that.) but even if she truly does, her love is superseded by her desire for vengeance against the Rembrans and what they did to her. Miorine’s father, Delling Rembran, was responsible for the execution of all of Prospera’s colleagues for developing a Gundam that syncs with their hosts, which also included the death of her husband. Since then, her desire for vengeance has grown to an absurd degree, going so far as to basically turn her daughter into a doting pawn, and her other daughter was experimented on to the point where she no longer has a physical body and is only a mind inside of the Gundam that Suletta pilots.

Prospera is a vile monster, but you can’t deny her motivation. The prologue goes to great lengths to establish just how monstrous Delling Rembran and the conglomerate of businesses he leads are, as they function as a corporatocracy that persecutes anything he deems as dangerous and engages in warfare to preserve his business interests. To that end, Lady Prospera uses Suletta as a tool to further her goals. Prospera planted the desire to go to school in Suletta’s head and has gaslit Suletta to such a degree that she’ll basically do whatever her mother says. It’s to the point that Suletta openly murders someone in cold blood and is fine with it because her mom said it was a good thing. It’s chilling to witness, and you can’t tell if Prospera’s affirmations to her daughter are genuine or not as long Suletta is still doing what Prospera needs.

It’s Prospera’s machinations that make Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury so entertaining week after week. She’s the grand manipulator of all of the events in the plot, and people either have no idea that she’s behind all of the suffering or they’re fully aware but are complicit in it for one reason or another. Every time she pops up on screen, you feel a chill go down your spine as you wonder what she has up her sleeve. The same was true for Shou Tucker, Bondrewd, Gendo Ikari, and all of the other villainous anime parents.

Like it or not, people will remember a good villain, especially one that commits atrocities towards their children. There is no denying that Prospera has done this. She turned one of her daughters into a Gundam to further her revenge and allowed her other daughter to be emotionally, psychologically, and physically destroyed in the most recent episode to help ensure her revenge on Delling can be fulfilled. But there’s such a theatricality towards it all that I can’t help but be impressed by it. She fully commits to the depravity of her actions while putting a pleasant smile on her face and assuring Suletta that mother knows best. You want her to be taken down so that she can receive karmic justice for the crimes she committed, but that would also mean that we have less time to hear her Shakespearean villain speeches.

So this Mother’s Day, if you’re spending time with your mother, take a moment to remember that there’s a mother who probably (and rightfully) won’t be receiving any love from her daughters this year. Prospera Mercury is a mother who has entertained many through her speeches on the injustice of the military-industrial complex and is working tirelessly to create a world without war. And she is getting no love from her daughters! To make up for it, you should declare a toast for Lady Prospera, anime’s mother of the year!