[Oshi No Ko] Season 2

eksratu★ 10

Season Two continues Oshi no Ko’s two-pronged approach to storytelling, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the Japanese entertainment industry while simultaneously serving up a long-form murder mystery. This season shifts its spotlight onto a fictional theater production, opening in media res with an unusually long static shot of the stage. It’s a fun scene as part of an anime adaptation of a real-world manga, which has an arc about adapting a fictional, in-universe manga into an in-universe stage play that you then get to experience as if you were part of the in-universe audience. As fun as these meta-layers are, though, Oshi no Ko is moreconcerned with exploring the conflicting perspectives of its characters. Many of them are involved with the aforementioned stage play, and their attitudes and creative methods constantly clash throughout the thirteen episodes of this season. Oshi no Ko also features some brilliant animation work that elevates its already-solid source material to new heights. Episode 6 in particular ends with a spectacular, wordless sequence on how a side character’s life changed as a result of his involvement with the play. For me, the main highlights of this season are the in-depth, humanized exploration of the manga-to-stage-play adaptation process that covered a lot of unexpected perspectives, the compelling narrative arcs of several recurring characters (but not all of them, unfortunately), the much smoother transitions between low-stakes and high-stakes scenes (compared to the first season), and the striking visuals. I was not a huge fan of Ruby’s general absence or the (expected) soapy melodrama. As a whole, this season was rewarding to dig into. It’s a treat for your eyes and a rollercoaster for your emotions. After seeing what it accomplished, I would highly recommend giving Oshi no Ko a try, as it was one of my favorite shows this year.

1stDecame4Danime★ 1

This is what happens when an artist self-inserts about being an artist. Even worse this is a self-fellationary product placement ad for a Japanese theater. The writing tells the audience what to think about everything through braindead dialogue: "This is cool" "This acting is amazing" "this person is the greatest star ever" it will spend every moment dialogue-dumping exposition for the audience to tell you their feelings and motivations, and literally narrating what is being shown, on top of telling you what to think about everything. It is shamefully braindead. Rather than actually make a good show it just has characters tell you "this is thebest thing ever" about a play that is the most boring unoriginal shonen-action slop ever. The play also doubles as boring self-inserts for each character, adding another layer of uninspired artistic self-fellation to rehash the same braindead artistic melodrama as s1 ("I need to deliberately act poorly to make the performance better just like last season, believe it! I said it so it's true!") The new characters are dumb and further bloat an already bloated cast in a meandering 1-note story. Unsurprisingly the author shows the play script get shat out overnight just like how it's by an artist who shits out weekly manga slop prioritizing quantity over quality, but this is good because they said so. They go into detail expositing all about how important it is to properly adapt a work by taking advantage of the different medium and do an entire scene about removing all the dumb exposition dialogue in favor of conveying information through subtle scene writing, while ironically doing nothing of the sort to fix the show itself. The entire play is braindead. The source material writer character explains that nothing about the adaptation's script matters aside from that her precious OC characters have the same personality as the source material. The adaptor explains that the generic shonen slop needs to be even more dumbed down to spoonfeed to the audience... Braindead. Story: almost the entire season was wasted on a pointless theater arc that never mattered before finishing with pointless sidetracking with braindead reasoning. Characters: these aren't even characters anymore, they're just whiney exposition machines the author shoves around to do whatever as needed for the plot/filler melodrama. The author frequently self inserts to tell you that good characters/acting is the opposite of real people and dumbed down spectacle garbage is the best, among many other misguided notions about art. Art/direction: high budget, however it was almost entirely superficial spectacle adding nothing beyond jingling keys over a baby. 1/10 (where 5/10 is average)