To Your Eternity Season 2

Episode 4

I'm not sure how much longer this current arc of To Your Eternity is going to last, but I reckon your mileage with it will vary greatly depending on your tolerance for the specific antics of one Bonchien Nicoli La Tasty Peach Uralius (though I'm just going to call him “Bon" from now on, for the sake of my mental well-being). Now, I'm not going to outright besmirch the work of a veteran actor like Takehito Koyasu, lest he manifest some of his Dio vibes and take horribly elaborate and bizarre revenge on me and my loved ones; besides, he's clearly playing the exact kind of character that Bon is meant to be here. I just can't say that I have a lot of patience for his screechy, campy shtick myself.

That said, I do like some of the new avenues that his intervention has paved for Fushi's adventures. The prince's insistence that Parona!Fushi “find a lover" and “learn to smile" is more than a little obnoxious, but given where we are in the show, I am actually glad to see TYE explore Fushi's evolving understanding of gender and sexuality. His (thankfully) failed attempt to “sleep" with Hisame proved that Fushi's understanding of the birds and the bees is rather limited for someone who has inhabited all sorts of bodies and genders over the last few hundred years. It's neat to have him actively pondering who he might be into and why, if only on a cursory level, and bonus points to Kahaku being pretty open to the idea of same-sex romance, even if it is mostly in service of convincing Fushi that it would be totally cool if he ended up being attracted to men regardless of the time he spent as the Nameless Boy.

Granted, Fushi wondering about men-who-love-men is less about Fushi's own desires and more about Fushi's encounter with Todo, who literally wades through a small mountain of shit to fetch the prince's beloved handkerchief. I'm not sure if I can find a non-romantic way to explain why Todo would put himself through such a thing, but we at least get a somewhat reasonable explanation for why Bon would be so distraught over a lost hanky when we learn that it was a gift from one of the many ghosts that Bon befriended during his otherwise lonely youth. Oh, yeah, did I mention that Bon has seen and spoken to dead people Haley Joel Osment-style since he was little? Because that's definitely a thing.

Bon's whole backstory is perfectly fine, and I dig how his conversations with ghostly Tonari ended up directly leading to his desire to hunt Fushi down as an adult. My main issues come from two places. The first is the way that Tonari straight up admits that Bon needs to befriend Fushi to pass along his “gift" to ol' Orby, which only further reinforced how disappointing it can be when it feels like the show is focusing on the abilities that Fushi will gain from taking on his companions' forms over the relationships with those people (See Tonari's sudden and anticlimactic death for another example). It's a minor gripe, I know, and getting to talk to ghosts will be an admittedly useful gift; I'd probably be less irked by the show's casual approach to introducing and killing off characters if I didn't find this particular character such a pain to deal with. It basically makes me want Bon to croak already, so we can get on with Fushi's power-up and hook Fushi up with more endearing characters.

My other complaint is a much larger one, and I know it is going to make me sound like a broken record, but I cannot overstate how badly To Your Eternity's visuals are letting down its story right now. Practically every scene just looks and feels wrong, and while I know that not everyone is bothered by aesthetic shortcomings, in this particular situation I find To Your Eternity's ugliness to be legitimately distracting. It makes average scenes actively unpleasant to sit through, and it completely kills the really good scenes that should be getting me invested in the damn story. That flashback to when Bon finally laid eyes on Fushi, and we see that the spirits of his companions have been with Fushi this entire time, walking alongside him during this strange and sad endless life of his? That should have been a total gut-punch moment for us, a visual that would be seared onto our hearts after all of the time we've spent with this show. Instead? It was an awkwardly animated and poorly-edited throwaway moment. Such a waste.

So, as ever, we march on with this limp adaptation of To Your Eternity. While “The Young Man Who Can See” has its moments, and some neat ideas to keep stringing us along with, it has done little to assuage my fear that we passed peak To Your Eternity a long time ago, and the journey to the finish line will only lead us to more disappointment.

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To Your Eternity is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.