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With the Provisional License Exams over, MHA's third season is in a funky spot with having to pace its final episodes, which are more of a prologue for next season's arc than a finale in their own right. Since this series tends to alternate between more epic stories and low-key exam arcs, it's becoming a pattern for these seasons to be front-heavy. It's negligible in the big picture, but I'm excited to see what's next and I'm not ready to have to wait on season four!

The first half of this episode gives us a closer look at Twice, the kooky Deadpool-wannabe from the League of Villains. The real Twice is not at all what I expected, being more of a grizzled, sunken-eyed tough guy than a comedic goofball. His Quirk gives him the ability to duplicate things, including himself. His backstory is just straight-up the movie Multiplicity, except instead of being a fun romp for the whole family, he and his clones mercilessly killed each other, and now he lives in existential dread because he can never be sure if he's the original or not.

With Shigaraki and company, the villains of this series have routinely been vindictive, those who hate hero society and want to take it down a peg. The opening of this episode aims to shine a light on those who get lost in the shuffle of the more spectacular heroes vs. villains dilemma. For someone like Twice, the villains offer him a place to belong. He was a criminal in his past, so he was never going to be the type of person that heroes fought to protect. Twice's story is played alongside newscasters debating the merits of Endeavor as the new number one ranked hero, so this society caught between contradicting definitions of heroism is looking more and more troubled.

Heading back over to U.A. and the kids—sans Midoriya and Bakugo who are currently under suspension—are being primed on the next stage of their training, which will be hero work studies, a more intensive version of their internships. By the end of the episode, we're being introduced to a trio of upperclassmen, titled "The Big Three" (insert joke about One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach here), who are considered to be U.A.'s top students and the most likely candidates to one day take over All Might's position as the number one hero. This is another case where we've spent so much time with our 1-A kids that we forget that a world exists outside of them, meaning the series can constantly introduce new faces with "oh no, these characters are the actual strongest ones!" The most noteworthy of these three is the eccentric dead-eyed blondie who's a dead ringer for Vault Boy from Fallout/Lucas from Mother 3/Tintin.*

*Look, manga readers already took the best jokes a long time ago.

My Hero Academia's kind of stuck in exposition mode for these last two episodes, though that doesn't have to be a bad thing. I found the first half's vignette about Twice to be very effective in illustrating the state of a hero world falling apart, and I'm looking forward to getting to know The Big Three. This feels like a necessary step for the story as it digs into some nitty gritty world-building and manages to be pretty entertaining as we coast into the season's non-climax.

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Review My Hero Academia

کارآگاه کونان چهارشنبه 4 مهر 1397 ساعت 15:29

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Attack on Titan - Episode 47 [Review]

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Attack on Titan - Episode 47 [Review]

This week is Attack on Titan's big infodump for everyone's favorite Killer Cowboy, Kenny the Ripper. It's an interesting morsel of a much larger story that's still very much in progress, and as far as fleshing out more of Kenny's backstory and the general history of AoT's world is concerned, “Friends” gets the job done. That said, it's one of the bumpier rides the show has delivered so far this season, feeling less like a cohesive backstory episode and more like a combination of leftover scraps that, while definitely important to the bigger picture of Attack on Titan's narrative, don't necessarily fit together so neatly.

We'll start with Kenny himself, who gets the lion's share of the episode devoted to revealing how his relationships with the Reisses formed, and how his generally bleak and violent existence brought him to where he is today, dying of terrible burns under a tree while Levi watches. The opening scene sets up the most interesting thread of the episode, which is Kenny's begrudging friendship with Rod Reiss' doomed brother, Uri. In typical Attack on Titan fashion, this begins with Uri almost crushing Kenny to death with his Titan hand after Kenny fails to assassinate him, on account of the Ackermanns being exiled from society and demonized as traitors. Given how Kenny seems to respect power above all else, he convinces Uri to let him live and serve as an adviser, so thus begins a strange relationship that lasts until Uri dies and passes on the Founding Titan's power to Frieda.

This newfound power on Kenny's part leads to a couple of noteworthy developments, but “Friends” also takes some time to address Kenny's relationship with Levi, which is honestly less engaging than I expected it to be. Levi's mother was Kenny's sister, and after she died of starvation, Kenny took it upon himself to at least teach Levi how to use his Ackermann strength to cause a little chaos and get by in the Underground. To be honest, this sequence is probably more noteworthy for how much time we spend in the mysterious subterranean city that has only ever been hinted at before, as even Kenny admits that he was never cut out to be a father and just leaves Levi down there alone one day. If there are any more complications or nuances to be found in this relationship, this episode doesn't explore them, and I'll admit that I was hoping for more ground to cover between these two, especially since Kenny dies this week.

Kenny and Uri's friendship is much more compelling, although it's not necessarily due to how the pair interacted when Uri was alive. Rather, I liked how Kenny's motivation for potentially stealing the royal family's Titan abilities for himself isn't just about seeking pure power, but about trying to connect with humanity. It isn't clear if Kenny is a straight up sociopath, or if his hard life as both an Ackermann and a person forced to live in the Underground has ruined his ability to form connections with others. Either way, it seemed to Kenny that Uri became a more empathetic and emotional person as he lived with his powers over time, and part of the reason Kenny formed his Anti-Personnel Control Squad to begin with was for Kenny to see if such a transformation was possible for him too.

Even with this backstory episode, we still haven't gotten enough details about the APCS to justify their undying loyalty to a man like Kenny, who admitted to gleefully killing his followers' comrades for years before they joined up with him. The one nihilistic speech we get from the blonde girl that died in the cave collapse a couple of weeks ago wasn't quite enough to make up for that lack of development. And since Kenny and Levi have shared so little screen time, it's hard to get invested in Kenny's apparent death this week either. Knowing this show, I wouldn't be surprised if Levi secretly injected Kenny with slow-acting Titan Juice for a surprise reappearance down the line, but for now I'm considering Kenny's role in this story to be more disappointing than anything else.

The rest of the episode feels similarly rushed; we get Historia's coronation, which was nice, though I wasn't a fan of the awkward way the episode reexplained the reasoning behind Historia's gambit last week. I understand her need to assert her royal authority as quickly as possible, but it ends up making the way the team took on Rod Reiss feel even more contrived, and the way the crowd conveniently keeps shouting how impressed they were with Historia's kill was another bit of uncharacteristically lame writing. Still, the scene where everyone cheers on Historia's revenge punch for Levi was pretty cute.

Then, out of nowhere, the episode ends with a cut to Titan Reiner getting the snot kicked out of him by the Beast Titan, with the final shot showing us the mysterious blond man inside of the Beast from the end of season 2. I understand why this scene would arrive now, at the conclusion of season 3's first story arc, but it's still a janky way to reintroduce a plot point that we haven't gotten hints of for over a year. I'm looking forward to the Titans coming back into the narrative more regularly now that this coup is over, but I do think this arc started much stronger than it finished up. Even with all of the manga's fat trimmed off, I can see why this part of AoT's narrative wasn't everyone's favorite part of the story. I loved many parts of it, but it's clear the series is still figuring out how it wants to handle its more complicated long-term story beats. Historia is the Queen now at least, so I'm prepared to consider these first ten episodes a net positive overall.

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Review Attack on Titan

کارآگاه کونان چهارشنبه 4 مهر 1397 ساعت 15:29

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Banana Fish - Episode 12 [Review]

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Banana Fish - Episode 12 [Review]

My friends who've read the manga told me that this episode of Banana Fish would make for an exciting one, and they were not wrong. Much of it is setup for the gang warfare to come between Ash and Arthur, but there's a lot of action too, even if most is off-screen, with how much of the episode focuses on Ash eliminating his adversaries. There's also some strong character drama in expected and less-expected places, as all this violence slowly takes its toll on Ash.

One of the interesting ways the episode frames all this is setting up Yut Lung as a foil to Ash. This isn't the first time Banana Fish has done this, but the conversation between Yut Lung and Sing at the beginning of this episode really hammers their connection home. Sing remarks on the similarities between them and Yut Lung seems to agree, particularly in how they come from similarly difficult backgrounds. That gives Yut Lung insight into Ash that some other characters might not have—but like any good foil, this also highlights their differences. Yut Lung seems to take joy in hurting the people he needs to hurt, while Ash regrets this necessity of revenge. That's what makes Yut Lung one of the "bad guys" while Ash is our hero, setting up the central conflict of this episode. It also makes me wish there was more Yut Lung around than in just those early scenes.

This episode really ramps up Ash's descent into murder and darkness. To some degree it comes out of nowhere, as a way to set up a fresh conflict. Why Ash is suddenly willing to take things so far, and not consider that some of Arthur's men he's killing are cogs in the machine just like Shorter, is not explored as well as it could be. At the same time, it makes sense that Ash is consolidating his power and realizing that he can't be too choosy about his victims at this stage. Still, Eiji is worried about what he's hearing—that Ash has been killing unarmed people, people who beg for remorse. Ash has his reasons, and we know Eiji loves Ash too much not to eventually forgive him, but it does lead to real conflict between them. It also conflicts with Ash's personal desire not to let Eiji be corrupted by his cruel world.

The two boys talk about girls, and Ash ends up telling Eiji about a girl from his past he liked who was killed under suspicion of being his girlfriend. I suspect that some people might take this story as confirmation that Ash and Eiji's relationship "isn't like that," since he likes girls, but the episode makes the opposite clear. First of all, interest in the opposite sex doesn't automatically mean lack of interest in the same sex. Ash is likely intended as bisexual, and that's just fine. (It would also fit within the aesthetic and tropes of the era that influenced Akemi Yoshida. Male bisexuality was seen as trendy and glamorous in the late 1960s and 1970s.) But more importantly, this story comes up in an episode that constantly reminds us how much Eiji is in that position with Ash now. He's the person from "outside" who has a hold on Ash that nobody else does. And in his effort to protect Eiji from succumbing to that world like he has, Ash makes himself more vulnerable, in a way that someone like Yut Lung—who is only out to protect himself from further harm—is not. Everybody against Ash knows that Eiji is the way to get to him, just as this mysterious girl from Ash's past once was.

Comparing the character's past or current heterosexual desires with their same-sex ones is also a common trope in BL, the genre Banana Fish would help influence. It's a way of reinforcing that this desire is "for real," by juxtaposing it against other desires that we take for granted in that way. To be honest, as many frustrations as I have with some LGBT tropes in anime and manga, I wish more Western media representations of bi characters could take a page from that. I don't like the way it's so often used to suggest that the character is "just like straight people", but I do like how it shows the character's desires for the same and opposite sex as being on equal footing.

We also get more into the political side of the Banana Fish plot. For as many parts of the show's "MK Ultra But For Real" story feel implausible (like that Pizzagate restaurant), this sounds like something that Cold War-era America might have actually used such a drug for if they'd had it. The U.S. in that era was constantly trying to overthrow democratically-elected leaders who were seen as insufficiently supportive of the U.S. or too pro-Soviet, replacing them with right-wing dictatorships. Something like "Banana Fish" allowing them to take over the minds of local politicians, rather than having to search for someone who was already on their side, would make that even easier. The focus on "Kafghanistan" and its role in the global drug trade seems like a way to bring this into the modern War on Terror landscape, even though that would also fit right into the 1980s setting of the original manga. Since this reflects real-world geopolitics, this is a lot more interesting to me than the other aspects of the drug plot, though it's still something the show could bungle. I'm curious to see where Banana Fish takes this. What's interesting is how Ash, this kid who hasn't had much in the way of actual schooling, is so easily able to piece together this political situation.

One thing I haven't discussed as much in this series is the meaning behind the episode titles, which are all references to famous literary works. Besides the "Banana Fish" of the series title and first episode, which are references to J.D. Salinger's famous story, these episodes largely take their cue from works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other American writers from the so-called "Lost Generation"—people who came of age in the bleak aftermath of World War I, having lost so many of their compatriots to that brutal war and the Spanish flu outbreak that accompanied it. The focus on Fitzgerald in particular, as in titles like last week's "The Beautiful and the Damned," also reinforces the "New York, city of sin" focus of the anime, as much of Fitzgerald's work focuses on the decadent lifestyles of the rich and famous in New York during the 1920s, the height of the Prohibition era. (The Beautiful and the Damned is also largely about Fitzgerald's infamously fraught marriage to his wife Zelda, so read into that what you will for an episode centering on Ash and Eiji's relationship and intimacy.) The Hemingway novel referenced this week, To Have and Have Not, focuses on a goodhearted fishing boat captain in Florida who is forced by larger economic forces into darker ventures like smuggling. The similarities to Ash's situation couldn't be more obvious.

By invoking these famous works of American literature, Banana Fish is also situating itself as sitting alongside their caliber. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to put it there yet, but there is definitely more to this criminal love story than meets the eye. Even with its pulpier elements (and it's not like Fitzgerald and Hemingway didn't indulge in those too), Banana Fish paints a compelling picture of the way that society can force otherwise good people into horrible things. There's also a bit of hope in the way it shows that love can redeem people. Eiji may be the person who brings Ash back from the brink, even when he's fake-tormenting him with Halloween pumpkin displays. Here at the halfway point of this anime adaptation, I think it's clear that this element is what gives this story such staying power.

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Banana Fish Review

کارآگاه کونان چهارشنبه 4 مهر 1397 ساعت 15:23