This Week in Anime

Jun Maeda Goes for the Jugular

Steve
Nick, I feel like there's been a dark presence looming over This Week In Anime this season, haunting every corner with its terrifying inevitability. And I fear it's finally here. We can run no longer.

It's time to talk about the Jun Maeda gremlin show.

I can't speak for the Son of God Himself, but I know if I were tiny Jesus, I would absolutely be running around rubbing my divinity in everyone else's faces, so I can certainly feel that degree of kinship with Hin—sorry, Odin, here.

Mr. Maeda sat down and took his pen to the big question "what if God were one of us?" Of course, the "us" in this case assumes we're all horrible little anime girls, which is not that far removed from reality considering the wildfire spread of the VTuber mind virus.

Bold of you to say that when Hina is extremely canonically a Gamer. I know what I'm talking about.

Only a God Gamer, which, coincidentally, she is. And that's pretty much how the first part of The Day I Became A God shakes out. Hina/Odin marches into everyday potato protagonist Yota's life and aggressively inserts herself into every one of his affairs and relationships, using her supposed omniscience to solve problems for him and his expanding circle of friends.

Well, most of the problems get solved.

In her defense, she's very clear about the part where she's omniscient and not omnipotent. Even she has limits, and those include the license fees of an Aerosmith song for TV broadcast.

Hey, that leather-clad scissor-handed man has a beak. That looks like an Original Character™ to me!

The first half of the show can be very silly, in the way that the first halves of Jun Maeda stories tend to lean very silly. And there's some pretty good stuff here. Like the one episode where Hina forces Yota to go full Kitchen Nightmares Gordon Ramsay mode on a struggling ramen shop

For the love of Odin, that freaking mahjong episode...now I understand why you came to me so utterly confused about it lol.

That's mahjong-speak for "you just got dusted," basically. The fourth episode is honestly incredible from start to finish. It's one long esoteric mahjong shitpost that will only make any sense if you've played riichi mahjong long enough to understand the game and all its frustrations. If that sounds like a good time to you, trust me, there's some solid gold material in here.


And if you don't know anything about riichi mahjong, trust me, the screencaps I just posted are very funny.

Yeah, the short version is that Hina teaches Yota the wrong way to play mahjong as a joke, and it ends up with the TV personality he has a crush on being so impressed with his blatant disregard for the rules that she all but drops her panties for him. I don't know what possessed Jun Maeda to do this, but I'm glad I was witness to it. Don't worry, though, the Maeda Classics are still here, like baseball!

Whiplash-inducing tonal shifts are another Maeda Classic.

I suppose, to an all-knowing god, there's probably not a whole lot of difference between wanting to get laid and wanting to move on from the death of a loved one many years past. However, we are but mortals.

Yeah, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief when it comes to mahjong tournaments, but Hina pulls some pretty heinous moves here in order to squeeze Izanami's resolution into one single episode. Like, there's some hard-hitting stuff when it finally comes to her and her dad hashing out their feelings, but I don't know if I'd consider the ends justifying the means here.

It wasn't a total failure, but it definitely feels like a going-through-the-motions Maeda. You can't just put a dead mom on a VHS tape and expect her to do all the work for you. Like, Kakushigoto covered similar material, but better, because that show built up its characters and their relationship to loss over its entire runtime, not 15 minutes.

Just two bros passing some balls, like God intended.

"Not respecting road safety" is putting it lightly.

Dudes, I understand this is a symbolic moment of taking control of your past trauma, but also, don't be jumping onto moving vehicles.

I sure hope this is a self-portrait of Jun Maeda after writing that scene.

I'm just glad she got some time to cool down.

It's doubly weird because, for a long time, we have no idea what Hackerman is doing outside of an abstract search for a missing physicist's research, and we have no idea how it relates to Hina outside of the fact that it's in the show, so it has to relate somehow. So we get these random vignettes of him doing espionage and digging through garbage without knowing why.

Like, it didn't take much for me to piece together what was probably going on, but its presentation is very strange and scattershot.

In truth, it turns out the physicist was Hina's grandpa, and the shady corporation is looking for the quantum supercomputer he invented and implanted in Hina's brain. Because it turns out we were forgetting the most important Maeda Classic of them all: a cute innocent girl with a terminal disease.

Not in this fiction, anyhow. And the frame around The Day I Became A God begins to noticeably crack once it starts shifting away from goofier stories and into all of the secrets behind Hina's past. It's one thing to accept that Hina pops up out of the blue and inserts herself into Yota's life. That's anime logic, and I can deal with that. The actual explanation for it is somehow even more bonkers.

Just a little something more than "I'm gonna dress her up like a freak so you all notice her. Good luck! Bye~"

Lol you're right. Anyway, once Hackerman pins down Hina's location, the Human Instrumentality Committee unanimously decides to capture her and remove her all-knowing quantum supercomputer brain because they don't think mankind is ready for that kind of power. Which is a thing, I guess.

I think I get where Maeda's going with it too, because this is on the tail of both Hina's awkward "reunion" with her biological father, and Hiroto's backstory with his own terrible parents. Adults are here making the decisions they want to make without care or consideration for these children, and that's a real, awful, common phenomenon. I don't think the high-concept sci-fi strappings add much to that, but here they are regardless.

Speaking of eggshells, lmao.

Without seeing how the show actually ends, I really don't either. To summarize: they remove the chip from Hina, and the trauma of that combined with her Logos Syndrome land her in a remote sanatorium for disabled children. Hiroto helps Yota pose as a research assistant so he can infiltrate the facility with the goal of reuniting and rescuing Hina. But, obviously, nothing is even remotely that simple in this situation.

It is really goddamn hard to watch. Yota is so tunnel-visioned on reaching the Hina he used to know that he unintentionally scares and hurts the Hina currently in front of him. On one level, I do appreciate the rawness with which this is depicted. Like, the trope of someone using the power of love or whatever to recover their loved one's memory/personality, like it's a magic spell being broken, is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect out of Maeda. But mental illness doesn't work like that in reality, and Maeda at least seems to be trying to grapple with that.

I've had similar experiences too. It's shattering. But it's still delicate subject matter that I do want to say I'm absolutely not qualified to speak authoritatively on. Except, if I were Maeda and this is something I wanted to explore, I probably wouldn't have created a fake syndrome to do so. That's just me though.

It's heavy stuff, there's no denying that. I like, too, that Yota's anime-protagonist-brand idealism gets a good reality check by the therapist currently caring for Hina. She might not be very nice about it, but she's pretty much 100% in the right about this boy bumbling in thinking he can just fix everything in two weeks.

She has much more nuanced techniques than Yota's Hail Mary of asking Santa for a PS5.

Yeah I'd really like for him to end in an unsatisfying and melancholy place for the sake of being realistic and respectful, because even that doesn't preclude the power of having hope and love for someone else. But I'm also afraid there's going to be some major Maeda bullshit on the horizon. Still, he's got me hook line and sinker for the finale, so he's doing something right.

At the very least, I have another folder full of gremlin reaction images now, and you can't put a price on those.