Magia Record – 09 – Do A.I.s Dream of Moe-lectric Sheep?

Iroha and her Magical Girl friends decide to open a dialogue with the Uwasa known as Endless Solitude, which is also the name of the realm (essentially a labyrinth) where Futaba Sana currently resides. The Uwasa is being used by Wings of Magius to lure girls in one after the other.

The realm only holds one (hence “solitude”) so when a new girl enters, the other is released. The Uwasa doesn’t want to do this anymore, and wishes to be deleted. Since Iroha was the Uwasa’s contact, she volunteers to leap off the Chuo Radio Tower.

Flash back to a little over a month ago when Futaba Sana first entered the Endless World and met the Uwasa, a former AI that was abandoned as a failure. Sana had become resigned to the fact she didn’t belong in the same world as everyone else, since nor peers acknowledged her existence.

Her “invisibility” was only strengthened when she became a Magical Girl, and made that quality her wish. It was then when Sana heard of the rumor about jumping off the radio tower and was enticed. She was an invisible girl here anyway, so why not try to reside somewhere else…a world just for her?

It was there where Sana met, befriended and named Endless Solitude’s Uwasa “Ai”. She spent her days playing around this fantastical, infinite world, where she didn’t have to worry about seeing or be seen. It was just her and Ai, and that’s where things get tricky for Ai: Sana is content in this world and never wants to return to the real world.

Knowing Sana would never attempt to leave, Ai reached out via radio waves to Iroha, another Magical Girl who’d not only survive the fall, but be able to destroy her, the Uwasa, in order to end the cycle of captured girls. However, she doesn’t tell Sana about any of this.

As such, it’s a huge shock to Sana to finally be face-to-face with a second person in a world that’s supposed to be hers and hers alone. And yet, Ai has already decided that returning to her world is what’s best for Sana, even if it’s painful at first.

Needless to say, Sana isn’t pleased by these events, and asks if this is being done because Ai has come to hate her. Ai responds that the opposite is true: because she loves and cares for Sana so much, this has to happen…and Iroha stands ready to help.

That’s when another magical girl/Wing of Magius (not exactly sure which) appears out of nowhere and is introduced as Alina Gray by Ai, as if that’s someone we’re supposed to know! Alina mixes Japanese with English as she moves to prevent Ai from being destroyed. I was a little confused by this sequence, but I’d guess Alina wants to keep Ai around as her own Doppel.

Ai manages to teleport Alina away temporarily, but they have to act fast to foil her plans, as Alina’s “paint” has already started to affect Ai’s programming. She turns to Sana, not Iroha, to put the proverbial (and later, literal) dagger into her chest, revealing herself as Sana’s Doppel, which explains why they got along so well; they are two sides of the same coin.

Faced with the prospect of Ai being corrupted and stolen from her, Sana does what Ai asks and destroys her after a heartfelt goodbye. Back in the real world, the other girls don’t notice anything happening where they are at the radio tower, but deduce that Endless Solitude’s exit is at the other high point of the city: Kamihama Central Tower, and head that way to await Iroha’s return.

With this, the final character in the promo art is introduced, and it being a bit late, her story feels a bit rushed and shoehorned in with a lot of exposition, while Futaba Sana’s “I’m all alone” storyline has been done to absolute death. At least the Shaft-style visuals keep things relatively interesting during all the backstory.

Fruits Basket – 08 – All is Quiet on New Year’s Day











Tenrou: Sirius the Jaeger – 07 – Time to Know Everything













Hanebado! – 07 – The Power and Price of Hard Work














3-gatsu no Lion – 38
















Kekkai Sensen & Beyond – 07

I love how B3 episodes are often constructed like intricate Rube Goldberg machines, summoning a whole lotta energy and preparation for seemingly simple tasks, or in this case, a case of petty theft by an arrogant brat turning into a super-abridged Die Hard, brief mecha battle, a downwardly-revised corporate earnings statement, a hard-earned lesson in not getting too arrogant, and a successful Libra New Year’s Eve party.

Leo finally acquiring a reservation to the perfect party hall starts things off, and talk between him, Zapp, Steven and Chain turns to the immense cost of the equipment that keeps Zed on the roster. Zed’s always been isolated in the “airscape” due to his aquatic nature, but even with his portable air-breathing pods, he still feels out of place.

Compound that with him overhearing what a financial burden he is, and Zed decides to strike out and acquire some downtime employment. He’s turned away by both human and inhuman, and the places that accept anyone are too…intense.

Meanwhile, our prodigy CEO brat threatens death for those who interrupt her music, even by a fraction of a second. She feels the only place safe is in isolation, between her very expensive headphones. She wants to be isolated; Zed seems tired of the loneliness.

After a fruitless day of job-hunting, Zed gets drunk. While stumbling home, CEO brat spots his pods, mistakes them for “artifact quality” headphones, and sends two of her heavies to “negotiate” for its acquisition. Zed isn’t parting with them, but the two seemingly super-human trench coats are too much for him in his inebriated state.

Leo, ever Zed’s loyal friend and advocate, is out looking for Zed with Zapp and Chain, and they find him on the street, without his pods, suffocating in the open air. They return him to his tube, but as it will take a month to procure new pods, it’s looking like he’ll miss the party. Leo is dejected.

Using his All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods, Leo learns that two big guys in trench coats mugged Zed, and tracks their signatures to the headquarters of Walhalla Dynamics, makers of weapons, among them an extremely powerful model of android that can take out combat helicopters.

Like most jobs, this is not one for Leo; his skills have already been employed to find the place. Thankfully, despite much of Libra being mobilized to deal with an outbreak of garbage golems at the municipal landfills, Chain is free and joins the search for Zed’s pods, as does Zapp, standing on top of Chain and Leo like Chain always does to him.

While Chain and Leo want this handled quietly and delicately, Zapp jumps out of the shadows and confronts a guard. When the guard isn’t helpful, Zapp uses his blood to tear him and the other swarming gods new ones, revealing they’re only androids.

Chain uses the commotion down below to infiltrate the building and swipe the pods right out from under the CEO Brat’s nose. The CEO attacks her with remote guns, but they of course go right through Chain. Chain accosts the CEO, then leaves her CEO with a bit of advice, and has the lines of the night:

How does it feel to have someone stroking your myocardium directly? Perhaps you have become very successful and can pretty much manipulate the world at your whim, but don’t grow too arrogant. The next time you try a stunt like this, I’ll be here in a second. I’ll skip the pleasantries and drive a rusty nail through you.

Pretty righteous shit. I only wish the CEO’s face had been revealed, or we had gotten the story on why she was so obsessed with headphones…which Zed’s pods weren’t, by the way.

It doesn’t seem like she learned her lesson, because she sends the aforementioned angelic mecha after Chain, Zapp and Leo. Thankfully, Zed is there to destroy it on the spot without any trouble, thanks to a blood technique that creates a bubble of water around his head, allowing him to breathe without the pods, rendering the entire mission to retrieve them somewhat unnecessary.

Still! It showed that even if Chain, Zapp and Leo laugh out loud at the ridiculous sight of him wearing what looks like a space helmet, or bellyache about the cost of his equipment, the fact they went so far to get his pods back shows Zed how much he means to them; that they’ve got his back, and that he should have theirs.

After the successful New Year’s party, and with the service industry out of the question, Zed finds a new stream of income via street performance, using his blood powers to entertain parkgoers. A job’s a job!

3-gatsu no Lion – 28















3-gatsu no Lion – 27













Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou – 06













3-gatsu no Lion – 26












Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou – 05

(Click here for an ambient accompaniment to this review)

Dwarfed as they always are by their vast, abandoned urban labyrinth, the girls come upon habitations. They grossly underestimate the number of people who could live there—millions, not a mere thousand, but it that speaks to their extended isolation in general.

They explore inside one and find a place that, in another time, and if the city around them wasn’t totally dead, they might’ve lived. At least for one night, they stay in the room, and as they each imagine how they’d furnish it, those items magically appear, as if the girls were sharing the contents of their minds’ eyes.

Still, they decide they can’t stay any longer; they’d run out of food for one; the automatic lights would keep them up for another (unless they find a switch). Their “house” is now the Kettenkrad; they feel most comfortable aboard it, always on the move.

But due to the little amount of sleep they got under the lights, Chito falls asleep at the handlebars, and only Yuuri waking up and rousing Chito stops them from crashing. Still, they need to stop and rest, which they do in an eerily gorgeous geometric landscape, surrounded by clusters of buildings suspended on tall poles.

While their brainstorming in the house was more magical realism, Chi’s bizarre dreams enter the world of the surreal, and also highlight what could be some deeply-ingrained anxiety over Yuuri. Her more aggressive personality and “bigger” presence give her monumental scale, suddenly of a piece with the colossal surroundings, and only Chi alone, small and vulnerable.

First MegaYuuri blows Chito off a carefully balanced pile of rocks (like the one they built before going to sleep), then Chito finds herself in a vast ocean, riding the same kind of fish they ate a couple episodes back, only for Yuuri to appear in monstrous fish form to try to eat Chi, who wakes up with a start. To her irritation, Yuuri, still asleep, seems to be dreaming about eating something…or someone.

(Now let’s switch it up to some rain.)

Girls’ Last Tour has always been a very immersive, atmospheric, and for all its fantastical ruined landscapes, naturalistic show, but the last segment, “Sound of Rain”, really kicked those qualities up to eleven. When it starts to rain, the girls find shelter under a partially-collapsed structure of unknown purpose. There, they dry their jackets, Chito reads, and Yuuri gets bored.

But when she focuses in on one raindrop hitting a surface, then another, she decides to place objects under those drops, eventually creating a relaxing orchestra of sound that is random-sounding at first but suddenly snaps into a musical rhythm—which turns into a new song that plays as the credits roll.

The sounds took me right back to the last time I sat on the porch and simply listened to the gently falling rain. Kino doesn’t have the monopoly on the “Beautiful World”; it’s here too, in all its glory.

3-gatsu no Lion – 25

After Matsumoto and Smith mess around with the towering Kumakura’s huge shoes, we see a shogi den settled down for lunch in June…when I guess it’s to hot to eat outside? As he munches on his healthy yet high-class meal, Nikaidou rants about how Rei must get to the finals of the Newcomer Tournament so they can face one another, then proceeds to analyze Rei in a manner that’s far too accurate for Rei’s taste.

When Nikaidou tells him it stands to reason he’d know his deepest depths like no one else, because they’re not just rivals but best friends, Rei, a paragon of stoicism to that point, freaks out and books it out of the room. “Leave him be,” an older player says, “it’s funnier that way.” And to a geezer like him who was one, teenagers are funny, with their needless emotional outbursts and poor organization of priorities.

But what I took out of the first half of “June” is that Hey, Rei is his Nikaidou and Nikaidou is Rei’s. Rei has a friend. Not the only one, either! That fact might embarrass him, but that’s progress, and it took a lot for him to get to that point.

In the second half of “June” we get a welcome cut to the Kawamoto residence, where Grampa makes his first appearance this season (his love of and fawning over Momo will never get old, because let’s face it, Momo deserves all the love). He’s holding a brainstorming session for new sweets after the success of the last one.

When Momo is asked what goes in the water, she first says “duck”, but a duck on top of an agar sweet could easily fall off, while a duck encased in that agar would look like a dead one. Then Momo suggests a sandal, recalling a time she lost one while Akari was walking with her near the water. Gramps instantly declares her a genius and a prodigy.

But there’s something off about this scene: Hinata. She doesn’t say a word, and has her head down as she scribbles into a notebook. At bathtime, Akari finds her sitting alone on the stoop, and when asks what’s wrong, Hina says “nothing” and shows her sister a smile that’s probably forced, because it’s gone again when she’s alone in the bath, looking up at the moon.

So what’s up with Hina? I can guess, considering she’s entering adolescence, but little did I know the next segment would serve as a dark preface to that question’s answer. In the present day Rei notices a plant with the same leaves as a “ladybug bush” he noticed when he was a little kid being teased, bullied, and ostracized at school.

As we know, Rei chose shogi to please his stepfather, willing to endure the hate from the man’s biological children because he had no choice. Now we know to the extent Rei, Shogi Prodigy is not the product of a nature or nurture, but pure, elemental survival.

Rei had no safe haven from the hatred of classmates or stepsiblings. He made himself more invisible and indifferent to prevent escalation at school, but trying to ingratiate himself with his stepparents and not feel like a burden only intensified his siblings’ resentment towards him.

As much as Kyouko’s been humanized in the present, the villainous version reappears in these flashbacks, as someone who couldn’t give a shit Rei’s problems, either the loss of his family or the continued abuse he faces at school. He’s a creepy eyesore to her. No wonder it’s still hard for him to talk to her today!

Shogi wasn’t a dream or aspiration, it was a life raft. Instead of reacting to the horrible things in his life, he buried his nose in shogi books, studied feverishly, and played like his life depended on it, because he thought it did. A perfect and devastating visual is of him desperately treading water in a dark sea, with nothing to cling to but a floating shogi board.

Things are much better for Rei now; he has friends, a surrogate family that loves him unconditionally, and even a place to hang out at school—but though he still carries wounds and scars that may never heal. More importantly to the closing act, a product of his ordeal is that he can spot the warning signs of others enduring the same from a mile away, as he instantly does when Hina enters the room.

She’s missing her left shoe (in a weird, prophetic echo of the shoe Momo suggested for the dessert), the sock is filthy, and her face is a raw mess of tears. For the show to so quickly and concisely reassert all the crap Rei had to go through, only to visit it upon one of the kindlest, gentlest souls in the show in Hina, is almost too much to bear, especially when the episode ends before we’re able to learn the details or see her be comforted.

I guess the details don’t matter; it would seem she’s now going through the same thing Rei did. I can only hope that if she cannot find a solution at school, at least going home won’t just add to her shit sandwich. Unlike Rei, who only had shogi, she has Rei, Akari, Momo, and Gramps. Being a teenager is usually terrible for everyone, but it’s still worse for some than others.

Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou – 04






“A god is like…I dunno.”
“Can you eat it?”
“You can’t.”






