Spring 2019 – Week 11 in Review

The spring season just doesn’t seem to be ending that well, unfortunately. Though this week’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure was hindered more by the inherent limitations of an exposition-focused episode, both Demon Slayer and Carole & Tuesday felt like they were running out of momentum, and too often lingering on their worst elements. Demon Slayer in particular is definitely hovering in the drop range at this point – the show’s writing is consistently terrible, and the reintroduction of the insufferable Zenitsu made it feel like the show was outright challenging me to keep watching. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m only sticking with the show until the summer provides some new bright-eyed anime children to suffer my inevitable disappointment – but until then, I’ve got plenty of grievances to share with all of you. Let’s break down another resoundingly mediocre week in anime!

This week’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure was too burdened by exposition to be much of a highlight, especially since the whole body-swapping conceit hasn’t yet paid any dramatic dividends. Well, I say that, but the body swap has been good for one thing: forcing Polnareff to relay all of his final and most portentous speeches while in the body of a turtle. I’m genuinely pretty excited to see this arc exploring the nature of the arrows and Stands themselves in greater detail; Polnareff’s description of the “will of a Stand” went a great distance towards explaining this arc’s inclusion of both Spice Girl and Sex Pistols, two Stands with far greater agency and personality than any previous powers. But even though I appreciate the show somewhat solidifying its worldbuilding, the JoJo fundamentals I always come back for are embodied through shit like a turtle gravely explaining the true nature of his beloved magic arrow. That combo feels like Araki’s own assurance that “I might eventually try to make sense of this world, but rest assured, shit’s still gonna be nonsensical from here through the end.”

Demon Slayer was up to its usual tricks this week, with its often engaging execution and occasionally interesting narrative conceits once again crashing on the rocks of its fundamentally abysmal dialogue. In this episode’s case, the reintroduction of the cowardly Zenitsu was a grating chore that wasted more than half of the episode, relying on that classic shonen assumption that “loud noises are funny, right?” to tell exactly one joke (Zenitsu is a coward) as many times as possible. I basically never expect good comedy from shonen action shows (I mean, they’re aimed at ten-year-old boys, the most comically challenged demographic imaginable), so I instead tend to just hope for limited comedy, for all the migraine-inducing reasons this episode demonstrated.

In contrast, I enjoyed the way this episode set up the eerie, disorienting atmosphere of Tsuzumi Mansion, with the strong layouts and neat fusion of visual and sound design effectively capturing the sense of an almost Escherian prison. One of Demon Slayer’s stronger narrative qualities is its tendency to come up with novel enemy powers that force Tanjiro to assess the battlefield in new ways, and this disorienting house-flipping power is a strong example of that. But at this point, it seems clear that Demon Slayer’s writing is just too far below the level I need for particularly meaningful investment – I’ll probably ride out the end of this cour, but this show is likely gone when new action contenders arrive.

This week’s Carole & Tuesday was a step up from last week’s genuinely bad episode, but the continued preeminence of Mars Brightest still kept it from really shining. Performing on a gaudy game show stage just can’t match the unique charm of this show’s organically integrated song segments, particularly since the songs written for our leads’ competitors aren’t nearly as melodically compelling or compositionally interesting as the actual Carole & Tuesday songs. I at least appreciated this episode’s extended focus on the interview segments for each of its three contestants, which seemed intended to emphasize that even if their various forms of self-presentation and songwriting might seem steeped in artifice, they are all genuinely expressing themselves in ways that feel true to their goals and perception of self.

Fragments of earnest characterization like that and the fun beats between Tao and Angela seem like the most encouraging takeaway from Mars Brightest as a whole. Carole & Tuesday has generally succeeded more as an immediately engaging aesthetic experience than an emotionally heartfelt character story, so in this arc that sees its classic appeal so significantly reduced, I’m glad the character writing is at least picking up a little bit of the slack.

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