Momentary Lily

Episode 12

Hey there, all. It's been a…strange season, I know, and for a myriad of reasons I have not been able to sit down and just cover an episode of Momentary Lily like normal. To be honest, I can't promise that things will get back to normal for a very long time indeed. Maybe not ever.

That said, I've found myself a moment to pause and reflect on everything that has happened since Momentary Lily began. From where I sit, I can look down and see the wind whip through the trees and stir up little funnels of leaves and detritus as the storm clouds descend upon Boston. It's not exactly a quiet moment, but it's the first time in what feels like forever that I'm not preoccupied with…well, with my other work. So, I thought I might take advantage of this reprieve and reach out to you all at least one last time before all of this is over and give you a completely straightforward and earnest review of a GoHands anime. For old time's sake.

Now, time has been working kind of funny for me as of late, but by my reckoning you should all be able to read this by the time Momentary Lily has aired its penultimate episode. Honestly, I can't imagine a more fitting way for our time together with this show to

[Sarah is the one who wakes first. She bursts out of the shallow pit of dirt she was buried in with a manic frenzy and rips off the oxygen mask that had been affixed to her face. There is a parcel wrapped in tape that has been fastened to her jacket, but she doesn't bother to open it. First, she clambors across the soft forest earth and begins clawing at the soil just a few feet from her own plot. Soon, she catches hold of Raúl's hand and pulls him free of the makeshift grave. He sputters and cries out in shock and anger as he rips off his own mask. As the two rise to their feet, at last, they notice the vivid orange glow of the fire that has been consuming Carl Barret's home. Finally, Sarah thinks to tear open the letter that had been left for them. She doesn't need Raúl's commentary to figure out that Carl is the one who left it, but she allows him the opportunity to feel like he has some sort of control over the situation. She scans through the handwritten pages of instructions, explanations, and apologies, though she says nothing to Raúl before she begins marching off toward the burning remains of the old southern manor. When Raúl asks Sarah what Carl's message said, she merely tells him that she will explain on the way back home. They have a long drive ahead of them, and there is so little time left.]

draw to a close. Granted, it doesn't seem like Momentary Lily itself is aware of its own imminent conclusion, but that's par for the course by now, isn't it?

Here's the thing: It's really easy to gripe about GoHands' house style. I've spent the better part of almost a decade trying to find ways to explain just how deliriously off-putting I find almost every aesthetic decision that this studio makes. People have tried to point out to me that the animation in their shows is technically not without merit, at least so far as the character animation is concerned, and sure, I could acknowledge that the girls of Momentary Lily at least have hair and boobs that have been meticulously crafted with all of the frames that the animators can spare. Does any of that negate the damage done by the hideous background art, the incongruous color palettes, the tasteless overuse of crappy SFX plugins, or the consistently deranged cinematography? Of course not.

Even then, though, what a lot of people fail to recognize about GoHands' anime is that everything else is terrible, on top of the visuals. This 12th episode is a perfect exemplar of all the ways in which this studio simply refuses to learn a single lesson from the legacy of failure that has clung to their coattails like horse dung ever since Hand Shakers was set loose

[She tries to explain everything she now understands to Raúl as they make their way back north across Georgia, though it is difficult. Like Carl tried to warn them, they are now dealing with the malevolent will of the Dreaming. It is a doorway into the void, it is that selfsame void, and it is every single monster that dwells within that void all, at once. It is an ancient machine of unspeakable visions that was built by mankind's deepest fears, even as those fears fueled the Dreaming's neverending, mangled birth-screams. To explain it would be to know it, and to know the Dreaming is to be consumed by it. Sarah knows that fact very well, indeed. It is all she can do to simply explain Carl's final acts. The Dreaming steals from stories and myths to give itself shape. It cannot be bound by any rules or borders, but it can be shaped along certain paths. They've already seen how an archetypically godawful anime has been able to wreak its wrath upon the waking world. Carl, in a desperate gambit, tried to shape just enough of the Dreaming with his own little horror story to hide Sarah and Raúl away from its sight for just long enough to give them time to get ahead of it. Raúl starts to make a crack about how much perfect sense that makes, but he falls silent before he can finish the thought. As they pass through the streets of Atlanta, they see the signs of the Dreaming's work all around them. The people laughing maniacally as they reach towards some unseen phantom in the sky. The billowing storm clouds that are twisted into all manner of horrific shapes. The girls with bright hair and vividly colored outfits who scream through the sky and wield their weapons on each other, so that their blood rains down.]

upon the world. The funniest thing is how the visuals might actually be the least offensive thing happening in Momentary Lily, this week. To be clear, I still hate every second I have to spend looking at any random frame of any episode of this show, but even I have to admit that the action scenes are mostly watchable. They're still bad, but they are bad in a very boring way. They won't make you question whether the entire medium of animation was a mistake.

The writing, however, is just as vapid and pointless as it has always been, and that is the real crime of Momentary Lily's that cannot be forgiven. Twelve episodes into a thirteen episode show, and we still have not landed on a single cohesive tone, or story beat, or even a scrap of meaningful character development. The worst thing about the show's early episodes was that it could never settle on what kind of show it wanted to be. Was it a science-fiction spectacle? A breezy sitcom starring a bunch of sentai heroines? Is it about Cute Girls Doing Cute Things? Is “Cooking Random Foodstuffs” supposed to be the “Cute Thing”?

Friends, I have spent so much time watching and rewatching every episode of Momentary Lily, and I still cannot answer any of those questions. It certainly doesn't work as sci-fi spectacle, because the spectacle makes the audience regret having eyeballs, and the scripts could clearly not give less of a shit about doing anything interesting with its science-fiction tropes. We almost, kind of, sort of got something going when Renge and the Gals met Yuri and all of the other originals, and our DoppelWaifus had to reckon with their abominable existence as lab-grown weapons meant to usher in humanity's extinction. Except, of course, Momentary Lily swept all of that potential for functional narrative conflict under the rug in less than one episode, all so we can spend the first third of this penultimate chapter with even more mindless banter.

Naturally, this demonstrates why Momentary Lily fails at being a sitcom about Cute Girls Doing Whatever, because even literally doubling-down on every member of the cast has amounted to a Collective Personality Quotient that is still less than zero. It is almost impressive how the dialogue in Momentary Lily can fill so much time without ever once communicating a single syllable of import or meaning. Eri is still a ditz. Hina is still a gamer. Saza is still a gyaru. Ayame is still the boring one. Everyone is still ranting about food. There are just more of them now. It is

[It takes Sarah and Raúl three days to make it back to Boston. It is chaos, everywhere, and more than just the girls from the show, now. They see people chased through the street and devoured by black shadows. They watch as behemoths made of light and twisted metal emerge from holes in the sky and crush entire city blocks. It is impossible to get ahold of any of their family or loved ones. To even survive the madness takes every ounce of resolve and ingenuity they have. The world is beginning to fall apart.]

lunacy. Sheer, agonizingly boring lunacy.

The only way I can describe it at this point, I think, is to imagine a mobile gacha game. Don't picture Genshin Impact, or even Revue Starlight. Those products are way too classy for this analogy. I'm talking about the cheapest of the cheap shovelware that you can find, with generic artwork and borderline-incomprehensible, machine-translated text that exists only to fuel the most predatory monetization scheme you can think of. No pull-rate is too low. No random, extraneous currency is too expensive to purchase with real-world cash. And, yes, the servers will almost certainly go offline before the end of the calendar year.

Momentary Lily feels like the soulless cash-grab tie-in for that specific gacha game. It exists purely to provide vaguely marketable character designs to be fed into a machine of corporate greed that can exploit as many players as it can before taking the money and running. Except, in this case, the gacha game part of the media project doesn't even exist, which leaves Momentary Lily somehow feeling more spitefully avaricious than if it was just another over-blown commercial. It can't even serve that one, terrible purpose.

So, when Renge goes off to land her big, self-sacrificing final blow on “Balor-kun,” and the show tries to wring genuine pathos out of her imminent demise, my only response was to stand up on my feet and applaud. The audacity of it. The unmitigated temerity. Here is an anime that regards the humanity of its characters with the same amount of respect that a horny dog has for the old anime body-pillow that its master was unfortunate enough to leave out and within hump's reach, and it wants us to cry over it.

[She is separated from Raúl when they finally return, because it's been a week since Raúl has heard from his husband, Eddie. He offers to bring Sarah home, but she knows that she cannot do that, and that Raúl cannot come with her. She tells him where she is going, and he promises to come find her after he is sure Eddie is safe. Sarah thinks Raúl even means what he says, but judging by how hard his hand has been trembling as it clutches that little silver crucifix, she also thinks that Raúl knows better, deep down. The sky is darkening to black as pitch, again. The streets are a mess of crashed cars, broken glass, and bodies. The behemoths are gone, for now, as are the shadows, and the girls…but they always come back in the night. Sarah waves goodbye as Raúl makes his way down what remains of Boylston street, and soon she is alone. She isn't far from her dormitory, as it happens. Walking the opposite direction of her friend, towards the last stop she needs to make on this journey, Sarah surprises herself by laughing out loud for the first time since this all began. It's just so ridiculous , everything that has happened to her. The whole world gone to ruin, and all because some studio in Japan had to go and make one of the worst cartoons ever made, again . She knew, of course, that it wasn't the anime's fault. Not really. The way Carl explained it, this fate was waiting for us in one form or another. It's the natural consequences of cramming the planet full with seven billion screaming, confused, and creative souls; it's the inevitable end point that comes after connecting all of those souls together through time and technology so they can wallow in the miasmatic maelstrom of the collective unconscious. Still, Sarah cannot help but think that it would feel a little less stupid if the apocalypse had come on the heels of a zombie uprising, or maybe an alien invasion. On the other hand, maybe this is what the species deserves. An absurd finale to an absurd empire on Earth.]

Hand Shakers may be a singularly wretched landmark in the history of recent anime, but for my money, Momentary Lily might just worse. You could, at the very least, attempt to write off Hand Shakers as some kind of bold but hopelessly doomed venture, like the last voyage of the Titanic. This, though? This is the anime equivalent of that rich idiot who got himself, his son, and a bunch of other poor fools killed when he took his rinky-dink submersible on a suicidal tour to visit the Titanic's wreckage. The signs were all there, the warnings were given, and anybody with a functioning brain-stem could have seen this catastrophe coming from a thousand miles away. And yet, here we are, all the same.

It is with that, dear readers, that I must bid you farewell. We've still got one more episode of this mess left to go, and I'm sure Momentary Lily won't disappoint in how disappointing its ending ends up being. Right now, though, I am looking out of this hospital window with an old professor of mine, and I need to keep an eye out for a visitor we're both expecting. The storm outside is getting worse, and it will be hard to make out anyone in the darkness and the rain, but I'm sure we will see her coming. She has nowhere left to go, and the end is here.

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