Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night
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Random Name
Posts: 649 |
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Overall I loved the series and was satisfied with the ending. Really my only issue was that they didn’t address the relationship between Kano and Mahiru. It’s disappointing that they spend the whole series beautifully building up this romantic relationship between them only to have them not speak for almost 3 episodes and have no actual pay off in the end. I mean I’m pretty used to it by this point as yuri relationships rarely pay off in the end but still left me disappointed in an otherwise fantastic show. Guess it’s because this one was way more explicit than most throughout.
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Yune Amagiri
 Posts: 982 Location: France |
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I share the same thoughts as many here, Jellyfish has never been bad, even very good for 3-4 eps, its strong potential gave me high expectations early in the season... However after that until the last moment they have tried to pack too much into a very small box to reach the widest possible audience and ended up with something not even half-baked, full of inconsistency and featuring the most conveniant/unoriginal decisions. If this was an unapologetic comedy series I wouldn't have minded, but not in such a dramatic series, by the end the only character I still liked was Mei even if she only had one "real" key scene, add to that the fact that the very similar but much better in all aspects (in my opinion) Girls Band Cry was airing 1 day earlier and Jellyfish will quickly be forgotten, too bad, the potential was there, that's very frustrating.
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Florete
Posts: 365 |
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I thought it was really good and promising in the first half. Back half just got weaker each episode, with episode 11 being downright terrible. But I thought the finale was pretty good.
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Thesarum
Posts: 428 |
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Yep, this is pretty much it. |
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DolFun The Dolphin Vtuber
 Posts: 7 Location: Phinland/Australia |
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I really enjoyed this anime from star to finish, I will definitely miss it.
I am really happy that things worked out for everyone in the end. There was something in their past that haunted them, but they were able to overcome them, and I enjoyed seeing them all being happy at the end. |
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Eilavel
Posts: 65 |
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Overall, I enjoyed the series, unsubtle and straightforward but with pretensions has its own charms. It had some character beats and tried to look at new media and at least come vaguely touch on some queer issues, even if it never really succeeded I appreciated its effort.
However, this was a show that set up a lot of melodrama and plot hooks and chose to resolve them by having there be nothing to overcome, after all. Everyone was and is nice really and so everything is now fine. The final episode doesn't resolve any conflicts- they just evaporate. Nothing is solved, its just that there was nothing to solve in the first place. I'm fine with a show being clumsy, especially when it stars a bunch of kids, but ending on a nothing is a downer (unless, as per the review, you count what aren't even very grand gestures). If you are going to max out the conflict and melodrama at every previous turn, you can't then have this resolution of everyone just actually being lovely to one another without having actually hashed anything out. |
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MiniMarps
 Posts: 77 |
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If you'd have asked me 7 episodes in, I may have called this show an Anime of the Year contender. Then, as seemingly a lot of anime have done lately, it shot itself in the foot by trying to become more "serious" in the second half. And in this case it wasn't all bad, but it wasn't what I had initially gotten hooked on, and it wasn't what I was tuning in hoping to see.
Still overall balances out to be a really good anime imo. 9/10 through the first seven episodes; more like a 7/10 through the back five. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4107 |
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This encapsulates every point I've been arguing against since the first episode. I'm impressed that not only can one person be that single minded but also contradict themselves multiple times within one tirade. You told the show what it is from the start, that's... both of you hate watched until the final episode? That's too much for me. |
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2420 Location: United States |
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Huh? I only saw the first episode out of curiosity and that's it. But the person I mentioned before did watch the entire series and pretty much ranted about it on every post about it he made on a Discord server I follow. I didn't tell them anything about it. |
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MiniMarps
Posts: 77 |
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Then how would you know what "describes it best?" Either you're lying about not watching the show, or you're letting someone else decide your opinion for you. Not a good use of this forum either way. |
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CrowLia
 Posts: 5509 Location: Mexico |
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My overall feelings might be more negative than most in that I feel the ending kind of undermined the whole thing for me. Which is very sad because the first episode was one of my favorite of the season, I fell hook line and sinker for that emotional climax in front of Mahiru's mural. But I just can't get over how absolutely atrocious the Mahiru storyline became to the point it also dragged Kano's story down.
Mahiru taking the job with the SunDolls was just a terrible story decision that not only didn't make sense for her character but actually ruined the story in lieu for an easy resolution in which no one ever did nothing wrong. That immediately after their fallout, Kano started blaming herself and seemingly forgave Mahiru automatically was a dead giveaway that the writers just didn't have the courage or the skill to actually develop that conflict. Of course Kano was completely out of line with but she shouldn't have forgiven Mahiru right away. Mahiru straight up betrayed them. She took on a job with a competing group, one that nearly destroyed Kano's career, and with a timeline that basically fucked over her own group. And she also immediately forgave Kano for the extremely hurtful thing she said, which also didn't even have any repercussions on her character arc or cause her insecurities to worsen, or basically anything. So what was even the point of making them fight if it was not gonna affect their relationship nor their character arcs in any capacity? I'm not even gonna comment on how she straight up didn't seem to care about her group almost disbanding, but yk, that's also up there as horrible character writing. But what I hated even more was how that episode began with her all but explicitly giving Mero complete absolution, as if what she did wasn't a horrible, selfish, unjustifiable thing. We don't even see any indication that Mero even regrets what she did or that she stopped doing it and yet Mahiru's just all too quick to be like "it's okay, you just ruined other people's lives for your personal gain, nbd". Then as if Mahiru hadn't already been made into a horrible person and friend (though I don't think the writers realized that), she also signs her group up for a performance with their competitors, with whom she knows Kano has a very strained relationship, without consulting it with her friends whatsoever. And unless I blinked and missed it, it wasn't even Mahiru who encouraged Kano to sing when she was panicking at the start of her live, it was Mero. Mahiru just stared blankly at her friend struggling and couldn't be bothered to do anything for her. The last three episodes just turned Mahiru into the worst character in the show and I actively hated her by the end of it. On a more technical level, the final concert didn't even work that well for me because I found the song significantly less musically interesting than most of the others throughout the series. Moreover, I didn't even understand the concert concept. Why have the mo-cap avatars if they were gonna have a live stage where the performers would be visible?And the stage itself, for all that it was purported to be a huge event, was minuscule, the crowd looked to be less than one hundred people, plus it was comically sparse, spectacle-wise. And you might say that was because the mo-cap animated characters were supoosed to be the main attraction, but then why make the performers visible at all? I don't know if I'm just not familiar with the modern music industry but this felt barely more eventful than the improvised performance in episode 1. So not only the much hyped song was a dud, but the concert itself was also pretty underwhelming visually, rendering the performance scene impactless. Add to that how terrible the emotional resolution was and I just can't imagine a more mediocre way to end this show. Which is sadly ironic given how, as I mentioned before, I thought the performance in episode 1 was one of the strongest openers of the season. This was one of my favorite series throughout the season, but these final three episodes turned it to something I wouldn't really reccommend to friends. It's almost maddening. As an aside "we got 50k viewers on the livestream which counts as selling out at the Budoukan" is just silly, but I also don't think Kano owes her mom anything so i'll just say that was just self deceiving cope so she could move on from that toxic relationship, even if that's not the takeaway the writers envisioned |
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MartinWisse
 Posts: 20 |
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In the end Jellyfish tried to go for something real, but fell into anime cliche too often to entirely succeed.
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braket
Posts: 10 |
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Girls Band Cry was written and series comped by Jukki Hanada: you can see from his resume how long he's been on top of his game; while the writer for Jellyfish was someone who, relatively speaking, was definitely inexperienced and reaching outside of their depth |
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Takkun4343
 Posts: 1522 Location: Englewood, Ohio |
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In terms of anime scriptwriting, at least. Jellyfish's chief writer is also the author of the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki light novels, and his only other anime credits were two episodes of its second season, so it's pretty clear where his strong suit lies, and it ain't TV.
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q_3
Posts: 145 |
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Jellyfish definitely felt like the author's first attempt at an original series, but maybe he has room to grow. It's not like anyone remembers Gen Urobuchi's first anime either...
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