Spring 2022 Summary – Weeks 4-6

Wooper: A midseason offering from Wit Studio is as good a reason as any to write a check-in post, so here I am. There are a couple other anime I’m saving for a rainy day (Paripi Koumei and Healer Girl), so no thoughts on those for now – just continuing my Kaguya-sama streak and revisiting my premature claim that Summertime Render would be tops this season. Hope everyone is enjoying their spring so far, both in real life and in the world of animation!

Vampire in the Garden 1

Turns out Wit’s new vampire show is a five part mini-series, so I’m only previewing the first part here. I was disappointed by the length at first, but even 12 episode shows can collapse under their own weight these days, so concentrating your ambitions into a smaller space seems logical. And Vampire in the Garden is an ambitious project, make no mistake – it’s set in an alternate universe and centers on a costly human/vampire war, resulting in societal stratification and technological advancements that slot neatly into its world. What it doesn’t offer is innovation, since it borrows heavily from other dystopian fiction, especially ‘humans vs. monsters’ series like Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress and Attack on Titan. There’s even a “wall of light” that keeps vampires out of humanity’s central stronghold – you probably don’t need three guesses as to where that concept came from. The story of a human and a non-human leaving their feuding tribes to search for a better life is similarly derivative, but Vampire in the Garden does a fine job selling the human side of things; Momo’s gentle temperament, love for outlawed art forms such as music, and fraught relationship with her mother leave her with few options but to flee her oppressive surroundings. We still need more details about vampiric society and Fine’s place within it, but now that they’ve escaped together, those ought to be forthcoming. I’ll watch this one until the end for sure, but based on the first episode, my expectations are set to “competence.”

Kaguya-sama S3 4-6

The main event of Kaguya-sama’s third season thus far has been, of course, My Nonfiction, the style-shattering ending to episode 5. I love these sorts of seismic shifts in art direction, so I was glad to see that the creative team went above and beyond the Chika Dance from season one in designing their new viral ED. It also wrapped up the rapping Shirogane plot, which wasn’t my favorite chapter in these three episodes – as a follow-up to the President and Hayasaka’s karaoke encounter, it felt like a continuation of a story that didn’t need one. I wasn’t big on the resolution to Ishigami’s “ace the exam to get the girl” plan in episode 4, either. Following Kaguya’s advice to study hard, then cutting straight to his failure to achieve his desired score – it felt perfunctory, as though all the show wanted to communicate was that he liked Tsubame and had tried to do something about it. There were elements of both stories that I liked, though: the misunderstandings caused by Hayasaka’s multiple identities and Ishigami’s elaborate plans to court his crush, respectively. As for my favorite moment of the past few weeks, it would have to be the introduction of Hayasaka’s mom, who shares her daughter’s reserved yet mischievous personality. I was prepared for another suffocating parent-child relationship in the vein of Kaguya and her father, but Hayasaka seems pretty well attached to her mom, which I appreciated.

Summertime Render 3-5

Summertime Render really just skipped to the end and then hit the reset button, huh? It would take me an entire paragraph to list all the reveals in these episodes, especially number 5, which involved a murderous ritual intended to revive a glowing red figure named “Haine” (who seems to be our final boss). So, rather than focus on the amorphous shadow monster attempting to resurrect her or the scenes of the entire island being engulfed in darkness, I’ll stick to the stuff we learned before the show went nuclear.

First, the appearance of Ushio, who believes herself to have returned from the dead despite being a shadow. I thought the series handled this development pretty well, dipping into unpalatable comedy in order to highlight the difficulty that her friends and family had in processing her “revival.” Ushio was shown to have washed ashore on July 22nd, indicating that Shinpei may do things out of order in future time loops and discover her before the summer festival. He’s got an immense amount of information now, but his shifting save point means he’ll have to adopt a slightly different strategy each time he comes back to life…so to speak. I still think there’s a digital element to what’s happening here, given the visual glitches, the shadow monster’s use of video game logic, and the fact that Shinpei’s narration was occasionally divorced from his personal experience of the most recent loop (as though another version of himself were trying and failing to control his thoughts). I’m terribly interested to see how all of this plays out, but I’ll leave it to more dedicated bloggers to break down the show week by week.