Review

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Run with the Wind - Episode 5 [Review]

The biggest struggle for any ensemble show is developing the cast without leaving anyone behind. By episode five, “The Ones Not Chosen,” Run with the Wind has this down to a science. As the dorm begins to divide into factions of enthusiastic and reluctant runners, the show begins to delve into the specifics of students' motivations (or lack thereof). As forward momentum continues to push the team toward its ultimate race goal, brief but meaningful scenes offer up significant individual character development. Through glimpses, these moments define why runners want (or don't want) to be part of the team.

King already has a lot on his plate. As a senior in college, he's spending a big portion of his time on job hunting. He applies to the aptly named “Dream Top Co.”, but things don't work out in his favor. Most of us can relate to the tedious depression that is looking for a job, and King's relatable stew of emotions draws him out from the background of the show for the first time. What's finally going to bring him relief? Well, this is a show about running, so I have one guess.

It bothers me that King's arc is a cliffhanger because I don't think it has the weight to be a two-parter. But I'll save my judgment for the resolution next episode. There might be some additional reason for cutting his story in half while jumping around to other characters' perspectives in the same episode. This episode is particularly heavy on Nico-chan-senpai, the laid-back ex-smoker who spends this week trying to convey his motivation to Yuki. From his easy dialogue to the odd wire figures that litter his room, Nico's personality comes out through his quirks. Likewise, framing Yuki in contrast to Nico makes each character stand out more. It's all in the details this week, with Shindo's country accent coming out in his inebriated impromptu pep talk and the shots of each boy's sleeping habits. (I was particularly amused by Musa's sleeping cap and Prince's bed of manga.)

These focal scenes on Run with the Wind's B-team align directly with Kakeru's thoughts regarding who should be “allowed to participate” in a track meet. In real life, running is one of the most accepting sports around. Because it occurs on an individual level, it's easier to adjust racing for people of different paces and ability than it is for most other athletic events. It's typical for official races to divide runners into groups based on their predicted pace, or for people who use canes or other equipment to get an early start time. Haiji may be a demon coach, but he also divides his team into similar-speed groups, so even Prince, who runs like an Abnormal Titan, at least doesn't have to deal with the indignity of getting lapped.

More than their ability, the show differentiates the characters by their reasons for running. Joji and Jota want to be popular with the ladies. Nico wants to improve his health. And it's clear that Prince, who muses about how much this is like a “real track team,” wants to be a part of something too. They're not all track stars like Kakeru, but they each get something out of running. I hope that ends up being the message of the show, not that anybody can become super fast, but that everybody can at least feel better when they run or feel “clean,” as Nico puts it. I like the acceptance of different abilities and motives, and that Haiji is turning out to be much more welcoming than he initially seemed, but these are hardcore practice sessions with one-hour warm-up runs. My muscles ached sympathetically when the boys decided to go on yet another run after practice—they're going to get injured if they don't rest!

From the morning run to afternoon practice to a late-night drinking session, we get to spend all hours of the day with this eclectic running club. The lighting in each scene establishes the atmosphere for this beautiful show, and visual cues that carry from one episode to another show a story progression of their own—I'm thinking of Prince's butterflies, Nira the dog's excited sprint, and the multiple times a day that the team gathers around the table for meals. This show is slice-of-life in many ways, but its team perspective on running—which is frequently a solitary practice—elevates it to something multifaceted and new.

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Golden Kamuy - Episode 16 [Review]

With a title like "The Great Plan to Infiltrate the Asahikawa 7th Division!!" (complete with exclamation points!!) you'd expect a lot more plot movement than we actually get this week. Episode 16 fully lives up to its title in that there's a lot more planning than actual infiltrating. Still, it's a pretty thrilling quarter-hour of planning, and even if all the characters end up in the same places they started (including poor Shiraishi), it's a harbinger of more excitement to come.

The episode bounces between our two main factions: Sugimoto/Hijikata's and Tsurumi's. (There's a brief detour to talk about Cikapasi's little found family, who are obviously going to become more Important as the story goes on.) This has been the case with most of the series so far, with a few episodes that zero in on one group over the other. What struck me about Golden Kamuy is how well it balances its moral universe with fleshing out its large and growing cast of characters. The show has done everything it can to make Tsurumi as interesting as possible, and I didn't always feel that way in past reviews. Still, you're never unsure of who you're "supposed to" root for among the characters. Tsurumi and Hijikata's motives are understandable, but not as sympathetic compared to Sugimoto and Asirpa's. They're still fundamentally twisted in their own ways, but we love learning more about Hijikata and especially Tsurumi's twistedness.

Case in point is the introduction of Lt. Gen. Anisaka in one of the 7th Division scenes. Anisaka is a genius weapons creator, and he's arrived with some new guns for Tsurumi's group. (He even makes a gun out of Nikaidou's new leg!) While Anisaka and Tsurumi joke about whether Anisaka's line of work is "cursed" or "beautiful", Sgt. Tsukishima begins to piece together a darker side of the 7th Division's goal. This is especially true after Anisaka reveals Tsurumi's previously secret goal of wanting to create poppies that survive in cold weather, all the better for making money off opium. Tsukishima realizes that centering Hokkaido's economy around items needed for war—guns for killing or morphine for wounded soldiers—would only mean bigger wars. It's dark enough subtext if you know what's to come in the 20th century, but also what happened before the events of the show. Golden Kamuy spells out that parallel for us when they mention how Britain's part in the opium trade had turned public opinion against it. What Tsukishima predicts is exactly what had happened in China throughout the 19th century, with Western imperialistic influence over the opium trade resulting in two wars. More recent to the time of Golden Kamuy was the Boxer Rebellion against that influence.

It's a reminder that Golden Kamuy is an explicitly anti-war narrative. For all that it revels in blood and gore, it's also clear that war has a destructive force on everyone involved. This can be forgotten sometimes because Golden Kamuy has such a dark sense of humor, which is on full display this week. After Tsurumi waxes rhapsodic about the "beauty" of blood spurting on the battlefield, Anisaka tells him that he's messed-up in the head. Tsurumi cheerfully responds that this is true, because he doesn't have his frontal lobe! These moments can seem like they make light of topics like war-induced brain injury, but the jokes also starkly remind us of the cost war has had even on its strongest proponents. Dark humor more often than not is a way for us to process the upsetting sides of life, and I think that Golden Kamuy's jokes follow in that tradition.

On Sugimoto and Hijikata's side of things, most of the episode is spent trying to rescue Shiraishi. While a lot of the group finds him irritating and might prefer not to have him around, Sugimoto disagrees, and they all realize he's still pretty useful even if they've traced his tattoos. He's the only one who can get them into Nopperabo, after all. The first attempt to rescue him is unfortunately met with failure, largely because of Shiraishi's lingering guilt about betraying Sugimoto, which keeps him from taking Kiroranke's offer of rescue quick enough. The 7th Division finds him anyway, and the group needs to find a new ally to help them break him out of Asahikawa. That comes in the form of Suzukawa, a "marriage fraudster" and another tattooed convict. They need to find someone who's important enough to gain that information about Shiraishi's location, without being so high up that he'd be instantly recognizable. They find the right guy in Hijikata's old enemy, the warden Inudou, and Suzukawa convincingly fakes him.

There are more reminders of how Sugimoto and Asirpa are slightly more "moral" than the rest of the group. While they disguise Suzukawa, Asirpa gets sleepy and winds up nodding off on Hijikata's lap. This causes Sugimoto to recognize Hijikata as the man in the herring longhouse and therefore realize Shiraishi's betrayal. Kiroranke says he thinks Shiraishi expects Sugimoto to kill him for it, and everyone else agrees that this is the sensible thing for Sugimoto to do once they find him. But Asirpa wakes up and reminds Sugimoto that he shouldn't kill anyone he doesn't need to, and while Sugimoto looks conflicted over it, I'm guessing he'll probably choose Asirpa's side over propagating more violence.

For all it gets done this week, perhaps the most important part of this episode of Golden Kamuy is how much it excites me for the rest of this season. The first few episodes felt like they were going through the motions, starting right where the last season stopped with no attempt to remind us why we were here. There are fewer and less-glaring animation mistakes, but other than that, not much change from what came before. While episode 16 is ultimately just more setup, its new developments pop with the action, thoughtfulness, and humor that initially got me invested in this series. Golden Kamuy is always full of new plot twists, but now that energy extends to the show as a whole.

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Tokyo Ghoul:re - Episode 16 [Reveiw]

I don't want to sound like a broken record every week, so I'm going to ask you, dear readers to take it as a given that this season of Tokyo Ghoul:re has atrocious pacing issues that I don't foresee going away. I'll be sure to comment if they do let up, but trying to condense about two cours worth of material into one is just not going to work without incredibly judicious and smart rewrites. Instead, this anime has taken the route of either excising material or rushing through it, and irrespective of my feelings on Tokyo Ghoul as a story, it's a shame to see any adaptation come out so patchwork. I feel bad for the people actually working on the show, because I speculate they're doing their best with a situation they had no say in. But I still have to call a spade a spade, and Tokyo Ghoul:re's anime continues to feel rushed and rough.

That said, this episode didn't blitz through its material as mind-numbingly fast as the previous three, and it afforded itself some time for contemplation, much to my relief. The Quinxes, for example, actually say things. It's not much, but we get a glimpse of how they've been handling things since Shirazu's death. For Urie and Saiko, their grief has manifested as a stern determination to not lose anybody else. Saiko was something of a cypher back in season one, mostly a source of comic relief due to her NEET lifestyle. In the interim, she seems to have become more serious about being an investigator, and she and Urie have a better rapport. I feared earlier that Urie had slid back into his cynical obsession with gaining power and prestige in the CCG, but his anger and desperation reveal that like Saiko, he has grown to appreciate his comrades above all else. His driving concern during this whole operation has been Mutsuki, who he finally finds alone in a pool of blood in the cave where Torso had dragged him. We don't know much of anything about what happened to Mutsuki, and if I had to guess, there's probably a ton of material in the manga that got cut out. Given that this is Tokyo Ghoul, however, it was probably extremely traumatic—something like Torso finally pushing Mutsuki past a point of no return, and Mutsuki killing (and eating) his captor. The last thing Tokyo Ghoul needs is more torture porn, so I'm totally okay with skipping past that, thank you very much. However, Mutsuki was my favorite of the Quinxes, so I do hope he gets more of a focus in the future. I just hope I'm not inadvertently dooming him by doing so.

The big reveal of the episode is the true nature of the guys who have been commandeering the CCG this whole time, the Washus. Turns out they're ghouls! Surprise! It's actually not that surprising after Eto hinted about as much in her final book, which was clearly a tactical play meant to lead to this conclusion. I'm not quite sure how to feel about Tokyo Ghoul leaning fully into this conspiratorial plot, especially because the Washus, while important figures in the context of the CCG, haven't been important characters with much focus. I understand the desire to escalate the conflict, but this development doesn't feel earned, and Tokyo Ghoul works better on a smaller scale anyway. I care about Kaneki's struggle to love himself and deal with his trauma. I don't care about him being used as a pawn in some three-dimensional chess game between competing ghoul factions. I will say that the Washu revelation falls in line with the all-too-common narrative of an elite class sowing the seeds of conflict between different oppressed groups in order to reap the benefits themselves. And now that the line between what constitutes “ghoul” and “human” is basically nonexistent, this unending war seems even more pointless.

Amon is already wise to all this, and it looks like his intervention last week was done in order to protect Mado and bring her over to his side. This becomes rather easy after Mado passes out from shielding Takizawa. I understand why she'd feel guilt about what happened to him—their rivalry drove Takizawa to prove himself in an ultimately fatal way—but I don't get why she doesn't react more to Amon's presence. Maybe she knew all along? I'm sure they'll have a big scene together at some point later. It's just wild to me that they don't even exchange words here, and it feels like a consequence of the story having so many moving pieces that it doesn't know what to do with all of them. It's comforting to see that Amon remains a good guy though, and that memories of his encounters with Kaneki pull him back from going completely berserk. After the dust settles, it'll be interesting to see if he and Kaneki end up finally working together.

The other big scene this episode is Kaneki saying goodbye to Arima. This takes up a good chunk of the running time, and I appreciate that there's an effort to wallow in the sadness of the situation. Unfortunately, Arima's dying breaths are saddled with a veritable ton of exposition, which detracts from the mood. Turns out he's another half-human half-ghoul (and who isn't these days?) who was born as a result of a breeding program spearheaded by the Washus, except that in most cases, the child doesn't become a badass one-eyed ghoul like Eto. Arima was born strong, but he was also born to die, with accelerated aging already claiming his eyesight (and hair color). And apparently, this makes him the One-Eyed King that Kaneki was supposed to kill, all as part of a plan orchestrated between Arima and Eto to turn Kaneki into some kind of ghoul folk hero. To what end, I don't know. I think I'm supposed to feel sad for Arima, but mostly I'm angry at him for being another awful parental figure who manipulated Kaneki under the pretense of a greater good for all ghouls. Our poor hero just can't catch a break.

Despite all of its twists and turns, this is a strangely hollow episode. The raid on Rushima is over, nobody knows who won, and at this point, it doesn't even matter. The Clowns show up, but they're not even some of the well-known Clowns. The big Clown is out on the prowl now that Cochlea is busted open. The Washus are all dead except for obviously-a-bad-guy Matsuri. Eto is dead, maybe. Kaneki is now the Chosen One. So much is crammed together that actions are now divorced from consequences, so it's difficult to discern where all of this conflict is leading, and it's difficult to care. This is still an improvement over prior weeks, but this is a story in dire need of some focus before it spirals out of control entirely.

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