This one looked easy enough to ignore. Girls at school. Girls in an anime club. Girls gataring about anime? Guess there’s an audience for that, but it ain’t me. Then someone posted the series description on Twitter and I saw this line:
While they stand against the student council’s continuous efforts to disband their club, and they ignore the impending end of the world…
Impending end of the world? Really? Yeah, I was interested after that.
If not for that bit of text, this would still be a solid, not at all annoying example of the sort of thing it appears to be. Quirky characters will inevitably come together to create an anime club. One of them is an anime newbie. One of them is a kinda awesome rich girl who has a servant bit very much like Nanami bossing around Mitsuru from Revolutionary Girl Utena. We get glimpses at a quiet girl who likes light novels, another girl who likes anime figures (maybe the cosplayer of the group?), a chuuni dude who talks about grimoires and magic, and a pretty boy whose love is likely focused on idol singers. There’s even a weird cat mascot. If anything, this feels more like Sabagebu in its set-up than any other similar club anime– more of a cast of oddballs doing bits than the cute girls being insufferably cute routine. If that was all that was going down, I’d probably still keep up with it.
But there’s still that nagging bit about the end of the world. It’s never outright mentioned in the episode. There’s an ominous bit in the opening credits with a blood-red moon and the main girl staring at it, but without the context from that description it could mean anything at this point.
There’s another ominous bit that wouldn’t be obvious either, but I think this may be the crux of the show. The main girl has recurring dreams about an anime she vaguely remembers watching as a kid. It involves a mecha and a transforming idol singer and people being visited by angels after seemingly dying. By itself, it feels like a parody of Macross and maybe some post-Evangelion stuff. But anime-loving rich girl has no idea what it may be. She throws out all sorts of anime parody titles while trying to pinpoint the series, but none of them match with the main girl’s memory.
I don’t think it’s an anime.
This is some prophetic vision, or memory of a past life, or some other mystical thing going down. Maybe it’s literal and there will be mecha and magical girl idol singers later. Maybe it’s metaphorical and she’s using anime imagery to make sense of some impending crisis. That cat mascot also talks in a very manly voice, so it’s probably more literal than metaphorical, but who knows at this point. I wouldn’t even be saying any of this were it not for a single sentence in a description that Crunchyroll doesn’t even use.
But yeah, this whole youthful half-remembered dream anime thing has my interest. Also, I’m getting some serious Haruhi Suzumiya vibes here. Part of it is the assumed premise. Part of it is the make-up of the club. Part of it is the end credits. Part of it is my projecting my desires for Haruhi to come back and actually be good this time around.
Either way, keep an eye on this one.
SHIN MECHA GUIGNOL 