This Week in Anime

Akiba Maid War Deserves Your Attention

Chris
Well, Nick, this is it. I'm told the enforcers from the Kadokawa Group will be by the TWIA offices any day now. If we aren't able to pay our dues to them, they may resort to more...extreme measures of confirming our loyalty.

Oh yeah, we're going to make this new arrangement work seamlessly.

You and everyone else's new wife. And it certainly isn't every day that a new object of anime-fan adoration is a thirty-five-year-old mafia murder maid.

But that atypicality is what makes Ranko and Akiba Maid War so special.

We all knew something was coming, thanks to the carefully-cut trailers. Heck, that curiosity was enough to make this one of my most anticipated series of the season, even though I'm generally not one for maids unless they're dragons or skateboarders. So the glorious absurdity of that revelatory rampage, followed by the resultant understanding that the whole concept for Akiba Maid War was one with plenty of potential apart from the one joke, pretty well cemented it as one to follow in this already packed season.

Except for newcomer Nagomi, we all know that's just a matter of time.

This is a series that started with one calculated conceptual swerve, and it does seem just a little suspicious that Nagomi is the one person who was unaware that the "meido" in this show's title actually meant 'Underworld.'

Though for my money, I'm also suspicious of what might be going on with her new, oh-so-helpful friend from another café who happens to keep checking in on her with guidance.

Rule #1 of the world of Organized Otaku Crime: Trust no one.

Did we learn nothing from Jujutsu Kaisen? That panda is not a panda!

It means, even with all the frilly set dressing, the show also gets to work as a conventionally-entertaining hard-boiled crime thriller. Though even then, many of the plots you expect from such a genre, like a high-stakes poker game or underground fight club, come off here more like irreverent sitcom schemes.

Staying on brand is an important part of a maid's job! It's a detail driven home in one of the later episodes, so I'm not surprised to see that so many of these girls can't turn off their marketable vocal tics even when they're using their last gasps to hurl grenades at their attackers.

As with any gimmick like this, the secret is a commitment to the bit, and you know you're in good hands when the show ends each episode with a 'Moe Moe Kyun' enka performance by the aforementioned biggest badass Ranko.

It's the subversion the show started with and loves using for perfectly achieved conceptual comic effects. I've got my favorite example of that, with the previously mentioned trailers giving us this shot of the Oinky Doink Café's Chief:

"Aw, cool," I thought, "A badass boss lady in a suit. Exactly the sort of archetype this show knows I'll love!"

Only for the actual show to come out and it to be made immediately clear that Chief is much more akin to a female George Costanza who became middle-manager of this C-grade Murder Starbucks.

I still love Chief but for way different reasons than I anticipated.

Lest any of the readers think that is hyperbole, no, Chief quite literally winds up eating out of the trash for an entire episode.

If the polar opposite ends of the Badass-Pathetic spectrum that are Ranko and Chief aren't to your particular tastes, no worries, as Akiba Maid War has plenty of in-between characters for the discerning Masters and Mistresses patronizing the café. Such as Zoya, the MMAid who trades blows with Ranko in the third episode, her face having been obscured in the OP up to this point in an attempt to hide the fact that she'd be joining the crew by the end.

She, like Nagomi, doesn't seem to initially be on the up and up on what the real deal with maids in this setting entails.

Fun fact: Her VA is actually Russian. This explains the perfect inflection of the language in which the whole flashback is narrated.
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Just another example of how committed Akiba Maid War is to all this wildness. Along those same lines, that whole third episode is a needlessly yet hilariously detailed Ashita no Joe homage.

You already alluded to Birdie Wing in comparison to this show's style, and here we have Akiba Maid War, like that one, lovingly aping those Dezaki Postcard Memories.

It clarifies a sincerity to Akiba Maid War's execution that is so instrumental to its charm. Like Ranko's gratitude for Nagomi's hair tie, there isn't a throwaway gag of a line: it's made apparent here and in later episodes that she has a real appreciation for the camaraderie and support of her fellow pigsty participants.


That's important as a through-line since, from the very opening, the show makes clear that Ranko's quest for revenge will inform the overall trajectory of this plot. We need to get a sense of her as an actual person to invest in for that to work, apart from the plain gag of her and the others' overall existence.

That one was going to be an easy sell for me since it winds up centering on Shiipon, the cool-ass gyaru maid.

Now she is the working hero we deserve.

The psychologically manipulative Maid Drill Sergeant teases the episode's opening by hucking Nagomi off a roof. Because even with sincere effort backing its characters and story concepts, Akiba Maid War always remains A Show.

What follows is just enough backstory for Shiipon and some of that now-trademark Maid War subversion. Her attempted-escape chat with Ranko seems to culminate with Shiipon deciding she doesn't want to end up dumpster-diving like Chief. But actually, she's just inspired to feign going along with the drills until she can get the Sergeant to leave and bring her old boss back.

You wanna talk about commitment? Shiipon was so dedicated to the café's old ways that she was willing to subject herself to Style Crimes for the interim training.

I'm not 100% how Chief goes from irreverently riffing The Grave of the Fireflies to procuring WMDs, but the way it results in the climax is worth it. I won't question her.

It also concludes in one final scene of Shiipon aggressively asserting her individualistic expression, which feels right for the gyaru character and the scrappy nature of the Oinky Doink crew compared to the more Organized Crime elements of the broader Creatureland Group.


This has been a good anime season for seeing bullies get laid the fuck out.

If parallels with Gundam are one more thing that Akiba Maid War has in common with Birdie Wing, I'll take it. Though this one prominently features a guest appearance by a sheep rather than a goat, it's not a direct riff.

As someone utterly repulsed by the taste of tomato juice, I might prefer G-Witch's traumas to the torture inflicted on Nagomi and Ranko here.

Nagomi let it stand on top of her head to have a better chance of surviving longer. That's how you know she's the nice one. Being the only one who at first also seemed enthusiastic about celebrating Ranko's thirty-sixth birthday party might also have been a clue.

That is, this is also the episode where they mash up the story of a birthday-possessive serial-killer sheep maid with the age-old sitcom surprise birthday party plotline and somehow make the latter land as more of a shocking swerve.

It all rounds back to that earlier bit about Ranko being more prone to violence when someone insults the café or her co-workers, as here we see the others are just as willing to extend that care to her.

It builds off of that lesson from the fourth episode: cultivated loyalty to comrades over any demanded loyalty to an organization. All before a gag about Chief eating some of Ranko's birthday cake and hoisted up like the lovable scamp she is, roll the song-and-dance credits number!

And they can grow bigger, better tomatoes than the ones in that Gundam greenhouse!

I hope all those chainsaws can help these maids carve out a niche for themselves in a season like this one. I've seen plenty of positive reactions to the series so far that I'm not worried about it getting lost in the shuffle. That's part of the power of a notable original series backed by an innovative marketing campaign. It's always neat when a 'gimmick' show, even one with a good gimmick, proves to have plenty else going on besides said gimmick.