“Oshi no Ko” Season 2 – 07

I’ll be honest, that was a bit of a snooze-fest for me. I didn’t hate it or anything, which is always on the table with Oshi no Ko. But it did swerve across the double-yellow line into oncoming traffic, that’s for sure. For me at least, this series and this author are always walking a pretty thin tightrope. There’s a little zone there where it works, but either side of it, there be dragons. I could probably fit a few more metaphors into this paragraph if I work on it, but it’s 40 degrees Celsius again today and I don’t have the energy.

So why did this fail to click? If I were to point to one scene that really face-planted, it was the end of Akane’s flashback sequence. That confrontation with Kana outside the audition room was the sort of bloated, preposterous nonsense that Akasaka is invariably prone to. There’s no universe where two nine year-olds (or whatever they’re supposed to be) are going to have that conversation. It was so absurd in context that I actually found it funny, but in the moment I’m about 99% sure that it wasn’t supposed to be.

There probably is the germ of something half-interesting in this whole manufactured drama over Kana’s acting style, but I don’t think this episode was very adept at drawing it out. Kana ad-libbing after the sound effects stepped on a crucial line of dialogue was the best moment – a very clever way of showing off her superpower (and I guess that sort of thing is a real hazard with these sorts of tech-driven 2.5D productions). But then that whole bit with the crucial Kana-Akane showdown scene just fell flat for me. I got nothing off of it – it seemed completely kit-built for drama within drama.

“Tokyo Blade” itself is a bit of a tightrope. We’re supposed to have some buy-in to the on-stage storyline playing out – I mean, the anime is spending a lot of time showing it to us from a theatregoers’s perspective. But that worked best when it was showing us the opening moments of the production, relying on the shock and awe factor. Once we get into the actual meat of the story, “Blade” is pretty obviously a generic modern bishoujoo-bishounen battle fantasy that’s more about how the characters look and speak than the actual story. I don’t know if it’s supposed to come off that way, but it does. It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but the more heavy lifting to play’s story has to do in service of the anime’s, the bigger a problem it presents.

But yeah, I get it. It’s all about the Tsurugi-Princess Saya showdown as a proxy for Kana and Akane’s meow-fest over Aqua, and general dominance. And given how closely the fanbase is split over those two if you go by character polls, in OnK terms it’s kind of a big deal. For me the problem is that just as I don’t care much about “Blade” itself. I’m not that invested in this feud either (I am Team Kana FWIW). There’s something sort of interesting in Akane’s borderline psychotic obsessive behavior over Kana, but again, with Akasaka he tends to do better when he’s at either end of the trashy-tragic spectrum. This was sort of in the middle and had some of the same issues as their confrontation in flashback.

Finally, I think it’s an issue that Aqua seems so trivial in terms of “Tokyo Blade”. His character would fall under the category of primary supporting cast I suppose, but he’s barely registered as a presence in the depiction of the stage version. And in the non-“Blade” storyline he just kind of pops up occasionally to offer cheat codes to story issues and looks pretty while Kana and Akane feud over him. And should Kana, the best actor of the lot of them, really be getting schooled on her acting flaws by these two? I think it’s pretty clear Akasaka is taking their side about how broken Kana is as an actor, but I’m not sure I buy into that. The next couple of eps are going to have a lot of work to do to keep me invested, not that anyone besides me gives a toss about that…

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4 comments

  1. B

    >It’s all about the Tsurugi-Princess Saya showdown as a proxy for Kana and Akane’s meow-fest over Aqua, and general dominance.

    It’s the reverse. Akane’s frustration and betrayal, Kana’s own stance on acting and her own baggage and opinion on a good performance, and their mutual competitiveness and pride as actresses forms the bulk of their rivalry. You quite fittingly see young Akane rewind right past Aqua to focus on Kana. Aqua is the cherry on top of their rivalry sundae; I have many gripes with Oshi no Ko, but I’ve always appreciated that nuance in their relationship, as it would’ve been much easier to make the rivalry all about Aqua.

    >(I am Team Kana FWIW)

    No one’s perfect, I suppose.

  2. J

    Oh yeah, this shit is where the blurred lines between fiction and reality begin to rear their ugly head (i.e. “Kana and Akane being enemies in the stage play is also reflective of their own rivalry in real life! And Aqua playing one of the villains in the stage play shows who he is more biased towards while they compete for his affections! I am very intelligent.”), and it only gets more self-indulgent as the series progresses as Akasaka starts patting himself more and more in the back for how clever and meta he purports to be for doing so.

    Just the fact that we had a whole bit of this arc dedicated to what’s essentially Akasaka’s author tract towards his thoughts on Kimetsu no Yaiba’s explosive popularity, depicting his KnY spoof (Tokyo Blade) as woefully generic and the author to be an overworked bitch, dulling anything he could’ve said about the issues of adaptation and rehearsing for the stage only made me wonder how much more indulgent he’s going to be as the series progresses.

  3. S

    For the childhood argument, I think Akane’s side of things was entirely realistic. There’s nothing impossible about a mature 9 year old getting upset over something they consider unfair and dishonest. I think Kana’s side was the unrealistically adult one.

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