“Oshi no Ko” Season 2 – 10

Let the whitewashing begin continue…

Every time Oshi no Ko takes a turn that doesn’t work for me, I wonder if it’s the beginning of the end. This is the peril of covering (and following) a series which is such a fundamental mismatch for me. Up to this point it’s always managed to keep me engaged enough to get through it, because there’s enough here that I find genuinely well-done. But in the final analysis I’m out of alignment with Akasaka on almost every level, and I always fear one of these times our luck is going to run out.

Indeed “Tokyo Blade” effectively ended last episode, even if it still hadn’t finished its on-screen run. It was a pretty good arc on the whole but I felt like it had about run its course. The question, of course, is where OnK would turn its focus next. Since B-Komachi was a major MacGuffin in S1 and up to now has been largely AWOL in S2, it makes sense that the narrative should return there. That’s a danger zone for me anyway for reasons I think shouldn’t require much explanation, and certainly a contributing factor to my concern going forward.

Above and beyond that, though, I didn’t find this episode too interesting. The business with Himekawa and the DNA report was the big untied knot of course. Himekawa takes the news that he has a half-brother pretty stoically – almost unsurprised, one might venture. What he tells Aqua about their supposed father is a bit of a shock for the latter, because the long and short of it is that he’s dead. A B-actor, Himekawa says, who died in a double suicide and had a habit of getting with women he wasn’t married to.

What we don’t know for sure, of course, is if this is the whole story. Is the DNA test specific enough to guarantee that the link between Aqua and Himekawa is through their father and not their mother, for example? If it is, it’s obviously quite a bloody blow for Aqua. He’s lived his whole life questing for revenge against someone who’s already dead. What does he do with himself now? With “Blade” wrapping and nothing else on his docket, he can conveniently step back out of the spotlight and turn it over to Ruby, who’s been pretty much non-existent this season.

I found Ruby to be incredibly annoying here, to be honest – more so than I remember. Maybe it was just getting such a huge dose of her after so long, but she was a lot to take. Mem-Cho is important again too of course, with B-Komachi the focus of the episode. She’s managed to bulk the YouTube channel up to 20K subscribers (Kana is unimpressed but I’d sure as hell take that). But the income of the group is only about ¥100K a month (less than a grand) and some next-leveling needs to happen if B-Ko is to be relevant. That means content – and Mem-Cho suggests “room tour” videos (which conveniently allow the members to write off their stuff – in Kana’s case very expensive stuff – as expenses).

The big dog, though, is to make a music video. And Mem insists it has to be a new song, not another old B-Komachi Mark I retread. The President has commissioned one from an old friend named Himura, a well-known performer and producer. But he’s struggling and unmotivated. Until that is he sees a fan message from Ruby telling him how great he is, which immediately causes bluebirds to sing and Himura to veritably glow with inspiration. That sound was me throwing up in my mouth a little.

If we’re headed down the road of Akasaka (again) waxing rhapsodical about how wonderful the idol industry is, really, when you get past all the scoundrels – like a delicious soup underneath the scum on the surface – we may be getting close to check-out time. My sense is that he knows, on some level, that this is bullshit but wants so badly to believe it that he writes this stuff to convince himself as much as anyone else. Of all the elements of Oshi no Ko that grate with me, this one is probably the most critical. I hope that’s not where we’re going (at least yet), and we may not be – but I’m seeing a forest of red flags.