TruckBus-kun claiming victims back then too.

Thanks for sharing!

Really interesting perspective on this issue. Out of curiosity at one point, I got my hands on the porygon episode and the flashing is certainly jarring. It didn’t really bother me, but my wife said it gave her a headache (just a minor one, not a migraine fortunately). I had no idea that there was so much that came out of that incident. Really neat!

Wow, that sent me down a rabbit hole of searching. I am old enough to have messed around with lots of VHS tapes in my day, but I was still too young to know what was going wrong with the picture. Reading how Macrovision screwed up the picture through desyncing the scanning explains why some of the “non-authentic” tapes I got never played right for me.

At least the kids have some way to defend themselves now instead of having to rely on conveniently placed large pieces of equipment.

I was surprised to see Madoka there, but after thinking about it, she would probably be the easiest person to socially pressure into helping out. I am pretty sure that Karasuno likes Kujaku and that is why she is leaving the stuco. Not sure yet if anyone else realizes.

I was really looking forward to this reunion and I enjoyed it thoroughly. My wife has similar feelings to Kanon, wanting to be more independent in spite of her limitations, and I have to have a conversation like this with her periodically. It usually goes very similar to this chapter; that I will have times I need to rely on her, and I appreciate that she will be there for me at those times. So, she doesn’t need to feel bad about the times I am helping her.

Man, I relate to Nagisa so much in this chapter. Sometimes, you just have those days, you know?

This one had been gone for some time, it’s nice to see the TL come back. I have enjoyed this one so far.

Japanese puns are next level sometimes. So, if I understand jisho correctly, when it is written in kana (ナメる) it usually means underestimate, but with the kanji (舐める) it usually means to lick. I would have never picked up on the pun due to the writing difference. In the actual native title it is written as ナメる, so that is why the English title probably went with the underestimate translation, but the lick pun is fun.

Glad you are enjoying The Moon On a Rainy Night. I have been really into it since I found it and am glad that I have gotten a couple people to read along with me now.

Yeah, I don’t particularly mind this ending either. I mean, yeah, it’s rushed, but it’s far from the worst endings I have seen. Out of curiosity I went and checked out the reddit discussion thread for the end, and you would think Aka was the stalker that killed all their parents or something.

Yes! It’s the kind of thing that you could only notice on a rewatch.

I try to keep the clips I choose to under two minutes. Sometimes I go a little over (like this), and other times I am way under. The real limit I try to stick to is <100MB to make it not too unreasonable for people on less than stellar connections. I usually just skipped over the clips people posted to the anime subreddit that are 5+ minutes long.

I had similar criticisms of AoT season 1 and dropped it. I might have to find time to pick it back up again sometime in the future.

Hearing a lot of good things about Orb

Give it three episodes and see what you think. The first three episodes provide a nice little arc and set things up for the future. Next to Dan Da Dan, Orb has been my favorite of the season.

Things make so much more sense now. It all kind of lines up with where the shifts happened. Thanks for the explanation! Those old days where anime would blaze ahead of the source material were sure interesting sometimes.

I think the most surprising thing to me was Ruby managing to forge ahead. A couple chapters back, I was sure it was headed towards a Romeo/Juliet style complete tragedy. Her character changed a lot over the course of the series. In the early days of re-forming B Komachi, she was so insistent on never lying to where now she has adopted a similar view to Ai, that constantly lying is what she needs to do.

Yeah, I wish we got more of this series post-Aqua (as much as I criticize other manga for dragging things out). We have spent so long with these characters that ending things with just a panel or two after a traumatic event like that feels dismissive. It’s already been announced that he has a new series starting next year, so I guess creative passions can come and go.

Long post ahead. tl;dr - This ending is very effective at framing the whole series as a criticism of the Japanese entertainment industry, as well as the futility of the criticism itself.

After letting this ending stew in my brain for a little bit, I have actually developed an appreciation for it. Let me explain…

From the beginning, OnK has been praised for its frank portrayal of the Japanese entertainment industry including all the backroom dealings, the power of connections, and the profit motives behind stoking the fires of drama. If we zoom out on this story as a whole, we have basically ended the story in an almost identical place to where we started; a young star idol without any family members has become an object of fascination for the public. To keep this up, the idol lies, both to the public and to herself, viewing that as the way to live up to the expectations of others.

Almost the whole story that happens between those two points happens within the bounds of the industry itself; a movie here, a play there, a music video, a concert, etc. All the drama that Ruby and Aqua (and everybody else) dealt with in their lives ultimately ended up being monetized by the industry machinery: that dating show got really popular after Akane’s trauma, Aqua redeemed Sweet Today by channeling the stalker that killed Ai, the life and death of Ai depicted in the movie (the director even won an award!), etc. It’s telling that after all of that apparent success within the industry, everybody left standing seems incredibly sad this chapter.

So, I think an interesting way to view this series is that it depicts the wheels of the entertainment industry slowly turning, grinding people underneath it, to provide the dramatic fuel for the industry itself. It is some kind of perpetual machine that takes in human tragedy and leaves further tragedy in its wake in the pursuit of profit.

The ultimate irony from this interpretation is, of course, that Oshi no Ko itself is being used in the same way. It can criticize the entertainment industry all it wants, but it isn’t going to bring about any lasting changes because it is an incredibly popular (and profitable) franchise. It reminds me of the famous quote by Audre Lord, recontextualized in this instance for the entertainment industry:

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

In addition to the manga, there is anime, merch, novels, stage plays, live action adaptation, etc. All of these ventures are making money for the people involved. At the same time, it has dredged up tragic victims of the past as well as created new ones. All of this makes the industry criticisms in Oshi no Ko ring just a bit hollow.

I do think the animation for the Anaak/Ran fight was a step up from some earlier low points, but that is a pretty low bar to clear. I wholeheartedly agree about the rules of these games though. I have stopped trying to keep track of the rules for these things since that team-building game earlier in the season. The rules always end up getting changed, people exploit some loophole, or they are just ignored entirely.

The second half of the episode (post fight) felt like three episodes in one it moved so fast. They literally only showed one panning shot of Endorsi before she was sneaking around again. Like, what is the point of even showing that party if nothing happened there. Then we conveniently have a group of major characters literally run into each other. For elite warriors, they seem to be pretty clumsy.

As for Lero Ro, I was waiting for him to show back up at some point. At the end of last season, he had quit his role of administrator because he knew something wasn’t right with how that last test went down. He took Quant with him and decided to climb the tower to try to find answers. As an aside, what does climbing the tower mean to somebody that is already a ranker? Anyway, after this season got underway and we learned more about FUG, I figured he was going to be investigating them behind the scenes since they are the ones that organized Bam’s apparent death in season 1. So, I am pretty excited to see him return.