I’ll be honest, that was a bit of a snooze-fest for me. I didn’t hate it or anything, which is always on the table with Oshi no Ko. But it did swerve across the double-yellow line into oncoming traffic, that’s for sure. For me at least, this series and this author are always walking a pretty thin tightrope. There’s a little zone there where it works, but either side of it, there be dragons. I could probably fit a few more metaphors into this paragraph if I work on it, but it’s 40 degrees Celsius again today and I don’t have the energy.
So why did this fail to click? If I were to point to one scene that really face-planted, it was the end of Akane’s flashback sequence. That confrontation with Kana outside the audition room was the sort of bloated, preposterous nonsense that Akasaka is invariably prone to. There’s no universe where two nine year-olds (or whatever they’re supposed to be) are going to have that conversation. It was so absurd in context that I actually found it funny, but in the moment I’m about 99% sure that it wasn’t supposed to be.
There probably is the germ of something half-interesting in this whole manufactured drama over Kana’s acting style, but I don’t think this episode was very adept at drawing it out. Kana ad-libbing after the sound effects stepped on a crucial line of dialogue was the best moment – a very clever way of showing off her superpower (and I guess that sort of thing is a real hazard with these sorts of tech-driven 2.5D productions). But then that whole bit with the crucial Kana-Akane showdown scene just fell flat for me. I got nothing off of it – it seemed completely kit-built for drama within drama.
“Tokyo Blade” itself is a bit of a tightrope. We’re supposed to have some buy-in to the on-stage storyline playing out – I mean, the anime is spending a lot of time showing it to us from a theatregoers’s perspective. But that worked best when it was showing us the opening moments of the production, relying on the shock and awe factor. Once we get into the actual meat of the story, “Blade” is pretty obviously a generic modern bishoujoo-bishounen battle fantasy that’s more about how the characters look and speak than the actual story. I don’t know if it’s supposed to come off that way, but it does. It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but the more heavy lifting to play’s story has to do in service of the anime’s, the bigger a problem it presents.
But yeah, I get it. It’s all about the Tsurugi-Princess Saya showdown as a proxy for Kana and Akane’s meow-fest over Aqua, and general dominance. And given how closely the fanbase is split over those two if you go by character polls, in OnK terms it’s kind of a big deal. For me the problem is that just as I don’t care much about “Blade” itself. I’m not that invested in this feud either (I am Team Kana FWIW). There’s something sort of interesting in Akane’s borderline psychotic obsessive behavior over Kana, but again, with Akasaka he tends to do better when he’s at either end of the trashy-tragic spectrum. This was sort of in the middle and had some of the same issues as their confrontation in flashback.
Finally, I think it’s an issue that Aqua seems so trivial in terms of “Tokyo Blade”. His character would fall under the category of primary supporting cast I suppose, but he’s barely registered as a presence in the depiction of the stage version. And in the non-“Blade” storyline he just kind of pops up occasionally to offer cheat codes to story issues and looks pretty while Kana and Akane feud over him. And should Kana, the best actor of the lot of them, really be getting schooled on her acting flaws by these two? I think it’s pretty clear Akasaka is taking their side about how broken Kana is as an actor, but I’m not sure I buy into that. The next couple of eps are going to have a lot of work to do to keep me invested, not that anyone besides me gives a toss about that…
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