Chained Soldier – 11 – A Common Enemy

While it looked like the humans were poorly matched against their opponents last week, the tables are gradually turned here in one battle after the other. While Kyouka takes on the Unihorn, Tenka finds that Yuuki’s sister (her sister-in-law) moves so fast, all she can do is flee by teleporting; there’s no time for an attack of her own.

So Tenka, who can teleport 666 times in a row, just keeps playing defense, counting on Kyouka to eventually defeat Unihorn and help her out. As she teleports away again and again, she’s also learning Aoba’s movements. That’s the DDF Commander Difference: extra attention to detail and above all, patience.

When Coco reveals that she’s super slimy and her trusty dog is nigh invincible, Shushu and Sahara switch it up. Instead of being huge, Shushu shrinks to the size of a baseball, and Sahara launches her into the dog’s mouth. Then she grows to huge size again, and the dog explodes in a grisly cloud of gore, bone, and fur.

This, of course, it’s the largest plot hole in Avengers: Infinity War: Ant-Man could have easily gone up Thanos’ **** and blown him up from the inside. Anywho, Sahara grabs one of the dog’s teeth and uses her highest-level Sheep power to launch herself at Coco, slashing her across the abdomen. Great creativity and teamwork from the muscle-heads here.

How does Yachiho deal with Hinami suddenly being choked out from behind? By simply rewinding time. Every time Naon and her spider show her a move, she’s able to go back in time and counter it. When she needs a rest, Hinami protects her in kind, by among other things sprouting a hundred guns from her hair and firing them in all directions.

When some of the bullets hit Naon hiding in the wall, Yachiho rewinds time and targets her directly. While they’ll alway be a little hostile or competitive with each other, it’s more than clear that Yachiho and Hinami love each other dearly and will always have each others’ backs—literally in this case.

That brings us back to Tenka vs. Aoba. She’s gotten into such a repetitive rhythm of dodging attacks and teleporting that Aoba is totally caught off guard when Kyouka breaks that rhythm with her katana. She makes it possible for Tenka to finally use her attack for offense. But when she has Aoba right in her sights, she hesitates.

Aoba strikes her down with a direct hit, and asks her why she hesitated. Tenka’s answer proves her love for Yuuki: she didn’t want to make him upset by killing her. Aoba assures Tenka she didn’t need to go easy on her, but she also beams as brightly as we’ve ever seen her as she thanks Tenka for thinking of her brother’s feelings. She’s decided she likes Tenka now.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean she wants Tenka to marry Yuuki, but in her battered, possibly concussed, yet mostly lovesick/horny state, Tenka can’t help but hear Aoba’s words and start visualizing a life with Yuuki  as her husband and Aoba as her sister-in-law.

It’s quite simply sweet as hell, and if it brings the battle to a screeching halt and serves as a momentary truce of sorts, so what? Battles are fun, but character stuff like this is fun too, and really deepens my connection with the characters. This isn’t good vs. evil. These battles only even started because hotter heads prevailed.

Turns out it’s a good thing everyone stops whaling on each other at this point. As soon as Naon and Coco appear before Aoba with Shushu, Sahara, and the Azuma sisters in tow, the two “godlike” humanoid Shuuki Shikoku and Jouryuu blast a hole in the cave ceiling and descend.

To the humans’ surprise, these two are not on Aoba’s side; in fact, they consider Aoba and her friends to be “mutts.” Shikoku introduces them as the “Eight Thunder Gods”, leaders of the Shuuki. One stomp from Jouryuu sends everyone flying, and when one of Shikoku’s snakes bites Unihorn, it turns on Aoba.

Clearly, these two are extremely powerful, possibly more powerful than Aoba, Kyouka, and Tenka, especially when they’re already extremely beaten up and fatigued. But that mighty wind Jouryuu kicks up? Aoba shields Yuuki and Kyouka from it, and when she’s down on the ground and Unihorn is about to deliver a critical blow, Kyouka comes between them—while riding a freed Yuuki.

If Coco can get herself and everyone healed and they find their second wind, I’ll take all of them plus Yuuki working together against anyone, any day. It’ll be an uphill fight for sure, but it looked that way for the humans last week. A lot can happen in twenty minutes, and Shikoku’s naked arrogance might be something that can be exploited.

Chained Soldier – 02 – Asserting Dominance

The 7th Squadron girls’ reactions to their commander’s new male slave vary: Nei is the friendly senpai, while Himari is the exact opposite, pointing one of her arm-weapons at him at every opportunity. Suruga Shushu is somewhere in the middle: more than anything, she’s curious about Yuuki.

To that end, she exhibits her ability to shrink as well as grow, using the former to spy on Yuuki’s every move, then get him to accidentally pose for blackmail photos, simply to stir things up. But especially when he says he has a big sister (she has two) she seems to warm up to the guy—the first she’s ever spoken to.

When she challenges Yuuki to Strip Street Fighter and only his drawers are left, he warns her that she might be in danger if she takes them off. Shushu laughs heartily at this, then grows to five times his size, just to underscore the fact that she’s in control here.

She manages to get his underwear off and laughs at his little Yuuki, but their fun is interrupted when a giant shuuki (not one of the small fry Kyouka can defeat with her bare hands) appears and starts to crack the barrier around the dorm.

As it’s just Shushu and Yuuki at the dorm, she tells him “wimpy men should stay put” and rushes out to fight the thing. You can tell she’s also trying to put on a show for Yuuki to prove how badass she is, and it would’ve worked if she only had one giant shuuki to contend with. When a second kaiju-sized shuuki starts giving her a run for her money, Yuuki is desperate to pitch in, but he can’t transform without Kyouka … or so he thought.

He tests a theory that he’ll transform if his lips contact something Kyouka has worn…say, her boots. It works, and even if he only transforms partially, with Shushu holding the shuuki down he’s able to blast him into oblivion, though when he transforms back, he’s significantly weakened, naked, and falling to his death.

Fortunately for him his fall is broken by the soft embrace of Mega Shushu’s breasts. She’s definitely impressed a mere guy was able to save her, but in Yuuki’s state he fails to notice he’s fully on display, and furthermore the excitement of battle resulted in, shall we say, enhancement? That also impresses Shushu, though she doesn’t say that out loud.

While Kyouka also had a great first impression, Shushu stole the show from her this week with her charm and her novel size-changing ability that made for clever and unique dynamics in both battle and in rom-com situations.

After Kyouka gets off Yuuki after an intense massage and leaves the room, Shushu then hops on top of him, “asserting her dominance,” but also staking her claim to him. The first guy in her life has proven immensely entertaining; she’s not giving him up so easily.

Spy x Family – 37 (S2 Fin) – The Bestest Boy

After a completely unnecessary 1-minute recap of the premise of the show (who is tuning in on episode 37?), Spy x Family’s season 2 finale ends … with a low-key Bond episode. That’s to be expected; the Bestest Borfy Boy was stuck at home with Frankie while the rest of the Forgers were on the cruise. And with Yor’s arc long-since completed, this feels more like an epilogue, one that could have aired at any time during the season.

Bond has his first “Bhorck!” (“Borf!” mixed with “Shock!”) when Anya declines to accompany him and Loid on his walk. She’s too wrapped up in making origami Stella. So Loid takes him, and his precognitive ability enables him to save random strangers from cruel fates, it appears to Loid like he’s being a bad dog.

That is, until Bond leads Loid to an apartment building on fire. While every human is out, he knows someone named Daisy is still in the conflagration. Daisy turns out to be a pug puppy, and Bond and Loid manage to get her out and escape the flames from a window.

When Bond’s fur is singed, a bucket of water is dumped on him, revealing that he’s quite skinny under all that fluff! That doesn’t stop him from seeking out and holding down the culprit behind not just this arson, but a string of them in the city.

When they return, Yor is making Anya make weird faces with her eviscerated paper people chains. Loid says Bond got sprayed with a hose on accident, but Anya “hears” Loid describing all the things they did, and decides to properly reward Papa and Bond with their own crudely-made origami Stella.

After that we get what amounts to a panning slideshow of how everyone else is carrying on their lives, from Damian and his friends and Becky to Yuri, Fiona, and Franky. Then we’re brought back to the Forger family tucking into a supper. It’s a quiet, slice-of-lifey ending to season two, and there’s every indication a season three is on the way.

SSSS.Dynazenon – 09 – Teamwork Makes the BEAM Work

This week’s Dynazenon has a little bit of everything, which is only fitting because it’s about the merits of simply jumbling everything together. It begins with a much-anticipated laser focus on Chise, who has a surreal dream that perfectly visualized how she felt when she attended school—she was off, lost in her gorgeous, intricate doodles.

She wakes up in her cavernous, modern bedroom as an Alice stand-in, finding all of her possessions are either far bigger or far smaller than they should be. Turns out that’s the handiwork of a little golden kaiju born from the growth she found and carried with her all this time. Because the kaiju has imprinted upon her and has come to know her heart, it obeys her wishes. She names it Goldburn, after a band.

There’s a fireworks festival soon, and while neither Yomogi or any of his friends are that interested, Yume wants to give it a go, so Yomogi is in too. Chise is trying to tell Koyomi about the “hypothetical” good kaiju in her suitcase, but he’s distracted by Yomogi’s call inviting them to join them. When Chise then tries Gauma, he’s firm in his belief all kaiju must be defeated.

As she wavers over what to do, her friend suddenly grows in size, scooping her up and taking her on a ride through the skies over the city. It’s fun until it suddenly isn’t—when Chise spots her school. Goldburn almost obeys the momentary emotions in her heart wishing the school wouldn’t exist, but she’s able to steer Goldburn out of a potentially destructive dive.

Yume is walking home with her friend, who is curious whether she and Yomogi are dating, when Yomogi calls her back to school, reporting that Kano’s ex-boyfriend Futaba has arrived to talk to them. If Yume was hoping for some kind of groundbreaking revelation from him, then she’s bitterly disappointed by the resulting talk.

Futaba claims that while he heard about Kano being bullied in the chorus club, he never witnessed it first hand. When Yume asks then why Kano committed suicide, Futaba repeats the official line that it was merely an accident, and that “Kano wasn’t like that”, offering no further explanation. His answers not only don’t impress Yume, they downright upset her.

But just when she is overcome by emotion, they get a call from Gauma about a new kaiju, and she clams up for a moment to assure Yomogi that she’s fine, they should go, and she’ll be right behind him. Meanwhile, Chise is considering what to do with her enormous friend when Goldburn suddenly flies off on his own.

Yomogi arrives to find Gauma, Koyomi, and Gridknight in dire need of someone with wings to lift them off the suddenly soft and undulating ground (due to Juuga’s kaiju’s power) Yomogi ain’t that. When he tells Gauma what went down with Yume, the captain orders him to go back and get Yume, you jackass, because you’re the only one who can bring her back.

With Goldburn off on his own, a lonely, left-out looking Chise locates Yume perched atop the tower where her sister died. When Chise asks what’s wrong, Yume tosses out her boilerplate “it has nothing to do with you”, adding that “nothing good” comes of it whenever she fights. But Chise has tried to fight hard alongside everyone all this time, so she does not want to hear that it’s nothing to do with her.

Right on cue, Goldburn arrives, but of course both Yume and a quickly approaching Yomogi assume its foe, not friend, and Chise doesn’t have time to properly explain, because Yomogi is coming in hot to save Yume. Chise asks Yume who else would fly in to save her like this, and tells her she “doesn’t know what she’s got.”

But the wind from Dyna Soldier blows Yume’s ankh puzzle out of her hand and over the edge, and she dives off the tower after it with no regard for her safety. Yomogi lunges toward her to catch her in midair, but just misses. Fortunately, Goldburn is listening to Chise’s heart in this moment, and pluck Yume up by her cardigan mere feet from the water.

Chise, Yume, and Yomogi arrive at the scene of the battle where Gauma, Koyomi, and Gridknight are getting their asses beat by Juuga’s kaiju. Fortunately, with the aid of flight, a lot of the enemy’s advantage is lost.

More to the point, the minute Gauma, Yomogi, Yume, Koyomi, Chise, and Gridknight decide to all join forces into one big, beautiful kaiju-mecha melange, it spelled the beginning of the end for the Eugenicists’ chances of victory.

In an absolutely bonkers, virtuoso combination sequence paired with the most lavishly bombastic orchestral accompanied yet, Dynazenon merges with both Gridknight and Goldburn to create a big, brash, bulky and beautiful Super Dragon King Kaiser Gridknight, which is a mouthful of name for a framefull of robot. He’s even got a sheer purple cape, the better to dazzle the stage.

There’s nothing Juuga can do once all of his adversaries got “all lumped up”, which makes them stronger and faster and able to counter any attack thrown its way with tenfold force. After doing a little parkour off flying skyscrapers, Yomogi’s Dynamic Cannon delivers the beam-de-grace, and the team victory is immediately celebrated by the fireworks display amazingly not cancelled by the kaiju attack.

The ending scene is the perfect cool-down sequence after all that high-octane mecha madness. Much to Chise’s delight, Gauma accepts Goldburn as an ally despite being a kaiju, and while the whole team—including Gridknight and Second—make a run for it, they still miss the entirety of the festival. No matter; they all buy fireworks and have their own festival on the waterfront.

Yume takes her leave, promising she’ll be back, but I already knew exactly what she was up to, so there was no need to be wary. Sure enough, she returns resplendent in her gorgeous yukata, which understandably took a while to put on, but was worth it. While she plumbed the depths of despair after interviewing Futaba, here Yume rises to new heights of joy as she and Yomogi and everyone else enjoy each other’s company, all lumped together, and all the better for it.

Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle – 04 – Do You Want to Build a Bathtub?

Despite being a hostage and captive, Princess Syalis is still entitled to the occasional bath, same as all the other inhabitants of the Demon Castle. However, the Red Siberian ordered far too small a tub based on inaccurate information about her size, so it isn’t long until her frustrated fists have pummeled the tiny tub into rubble.

So she sets off in search of water and materials for a new tub. She uses the communication piping to pipe hot water directly from the public demon baths into her cell, then happens upon Rocket Turtle, which features a fuse for a tail. Upon blowing the turtle up, its shell is left behind, making for the perfect basin in which to luxuriantly bathe and eventually sleep.

There are no consequences of Syalis setting off the largest explosion to date in the next segment, in which the Summer heat has afflicted everyone in the castle. Searching for releif, Syalis hears about the “cold area” of the castle, and “borrows” the outer body of the Tire Genie in order to brave the area without freezing.

The ice demon subjects of the area, who have long harbored resentment for the perceived better treatment of fire demons, mistake the princess for their leader, Ice Golem, and she uses that mistaken identity to issue them orders to equip her cell with an igloo, three seals, and some shaved ice, even claiming that Syalis will be the next Demon King!

With Syalis having acquired both leisurely sleep in a hot bath and a wonderfully cooling setup in the summer heat, the third segment offers something completely different: While on another excursion to steal supplies, she shakes an hourglass and ends up shrinking herself to half her normal, already-petite size.

Her clothes don’t shrink, so it’s hard to move, and she can neither lift her stolen goods nor climb out of her present location without help. When she uses the Procupine and Minotaur as a ladder, Quilly won’t let her go, as there is apparently something uniquely pleasant about holding a small human child—especially knowing what a menace she is when full-sized!

As a result, other demons flock to the suddenly-tiny princess, leading to the fiasco she had hoped to avoid (and her strategy of repelling the others by shooting Quilly’s quills only goes so far). But, to her surprise, she doesn’t have to return to her cell to get a good night’s sleep; simply being in Quilly’s warm embrace eventually bestows upon her a child’s sleep that comes after a full day of play. All’s well that ends well!

Sket Dance 9

By gum, that was a fan-bloody-tastic episode of Sket Dance, which embodies everything that works with the series, and has a little bit of everything. A mangaka named Hinohara Enta visits the Sket-Dan looking for ideas. Initially, it becomes a critique of Bossun’s merits of leadership (or lack thereof). When Enta leaves, Bossun drinks a soda that’s actually a potion that makes his body three years old. Hilarity ensues.

And by hilarity, I mean virtually non-stop laughs. Both Himeko and Switch take on the roles of doting parents, annoying Bossun to no end. Paritcularly Himeko’s manic maternal energy is a sight to see, as is Switch’s creepy, bawdy “dad”. Then they bump into pretty much every character they’ve interacted with, and he wins over everyone (save one student council member who scolds him for not getting permission to shrink). As Enta notes, the school is a “garden of characters”, and a lush one, as they’re all so dramatically different and neurotic in their own ways.

But what made this episode truly genius is that it forgets nothing from this or any previous episodes and doesn’t treat the manga or shrinking story as throwaways, but brings everything to a rousing conclusion, complete with a tight little bow. Bossun, returned to normal, and the Sket-dan prove their worth, leaping straight into action when Enta’s bag is snatched (the original mission Bossun wanted to take on in the beginning), which completes a tale Enta draws a manga for. It’s a good one from where we’re standing, but in the very end, it turns out Enta wrote about everyone but Sket-dan…

In any case, this was a surprisingly complex web of little moments and stories all mixed together and played back at seemingly 1.5 times the speed of the average anime. There are tons of painterly, nicely-textured stills and really diverse and interesting animation throughout. It was hilarious and very well-done, I daresay Sket-dan’s finest moment yet. If there’s a second season that can maintain this level of quality comedy, I shall watch. Rating: 4