Flash Review: “Girlish Number"

My expectations for Girlish Number could hardly have been lower. I started up the first episode expecting that, within the first few minutes, it would show itself as a mess of cliches, clumsy dialogue, and otaku pandering, like Eromanga Sensei or Show By Rock!!, which I turned off about ten minutes into the first episode. I knew it was about voice actresses in the anime industry, and after all the articles I’ve read recently about working conditions in the anime industry, after noticing that voice actresses I loved just seven years ago have completely dropped off the map due to their ages to be replaced by newcomers, and knowing that anime about the anime industry always goes light on the anime industry for obvious reasons, that sounded like the makings of a disaster.

Luckily, Girlish Number found a way to be about voice actresses and go light on the anime industry while still being interesting. I never made it past Episode 3 of the much beloved Shirobako, because there was something about it that just failed to hook me. Girlish Number, on the other hand, hooked me immediately because it has two things right off the bat that Shirobako didn’t: an unlikable protagonist with so little going for her that I just had to see what would ultimately happen to her, and a villain, a slapdash anime producer more interested in spending company money on hostesses and yakiniku than making a good anime.

Chitose Karasuma, the main character, is stupid, lazy, and extremely arrogant. She refuses to read the source material for any of her projects, believes herself to be talented far beyond any available evidence, and blames her manager and brother, Gojo, a former voice actor himself, for not getting her any starring roles. She ignores advice on how to improve, and even though she complains about the industry’s corruption, when incompetent producer Kuzu feeds her a spiel about handpicking her for a role because of her great potential, she swallows it hook, line, and sinker. I don’t like her, but she is a compelling character: I kept watching, wondering when she was going to get her comeuppance, and whether she would ever become a better person. Towards the end of the series, she does get her comeuppance, but she doesn’t exactly get better afterwards. Gojo manages to get her back in the game by rebuilding her baseless confidence and arrogant bravado, mainly because, as he tells her, she’s not suitable for any job other than acting with her terrible personality.

I call Kuzu the villain because he primarily creates roadblocks for the other characters that have to be overcome, but he obstructs them not from malice, but from laziness and utter incompetence. He’s equally as lazy, stupid, arrogant, and petty as Chitose, more focused on vacations and drinking than his work. Thanks to him, the anime the characters work on turns into a disaster and sells terribly, but it somehow manages to get a second season, which benefits early on from his lack involvement. Like Chitose, he falls into a depression, but gets back into the game only because he wants to beat a rival of his from another company, who starts seeing his favorite hostess at the hostess bar. (I liked when he spouts off how he’s going to get her back in front of the hostess and the rival, and the hostess says “I don’t belong to you.”)

These two unlikable characters really drive the show, but the other actresses working on the project also play a part. There’s a sidetrip where we explore Momoka Sonou, a high schooler whose mom was also a voice actress and whose dad is an anime producer, and Kazuha Shibasaki, an intense and serious voice actress whose family runs an onsen in Yamagata. These two come off like they’re going to be villains, or at least antiheroes, in the beginning. Momoka seems slippery and deceptive, and Kazuha cops a serious diva attitude towards Chitose. As the show goes on we start to understand that these are defense mechanisms they’ve developed to get by in the industry and avoid unpleasant tasks like entertaining socially inept light novel authors or filming swimsuit cheesecake for Blu-Ray special features. My favorite episode of the show is Episode 8, which explores and contrasts Momoka’s and Kazuha’s lives and upbringings. Momoka grew up in the industry, and her parents have long treated her as a professional who can make her own decisions and always leave everything up to her. Kazuha’s parents, who are traditional and live in a small town, don’t quite understand her profession, and they worry about her and whether she’s happy and doing well. Episode 8 has two parallel story arcs where Momoka watches Kazuha’s parents worry about her and feels a little bit envious of that kind of normalcy, while hearing from Kazuha how she wishes her parents would trust her a little more, the way Momoka’s trust her. In the end, both learn to appreciate what they have, and Momoka exercises the power to decide that her parents allow her by turning down a role alongside her mother, who would have played the villain to Momoka’s hero in a Pretty Cure-like show that had also been her mother’s breakout role.

The three other voice actors, Yae, Koto, and Nanami, don’t do a whole lot. They play the part of the more earnest and sincere voices, even though Koto is about to be kicked out of the industry because she’s already 26 and hasn’t had a big role yet. Nanami is earnest and innocent in such a stereotypical way, always spouting cliches like “I’ll do my best!”, that I expected her to turn out to be evil, or at least unpleasant, but apparently she just really is that earnest, which makes her kind of annoying and mars the later episodes a bit. The cynicism of Girlish Number is its strength; even though it pins the failure of the show squarely on Kuzu and portrays everyone else involved as hardworking and sincere, it’s unusual that it even admits that people like Kuzu and Chitose exist in the anime industry, and it took a fair amount of creative courage to put someone like Chitose in the center of the show. It’s hardly Wall Street, but it’s not bad for an anime about making anime.

Favorite “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" Episodes: Part Upper of a Journey of Obnoxious Fanboying

Last time I was more focused on connecting My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with the cute girls doing cute things genre, and only got in a little obnoxious fanboying, so this time I’m going 100% obnoxious fanboy and talking about my favorite episodes, story arcs, and character moments. I’ll be covering Seasons 1-6 since I watch on Netflix and I haven’t seen Season 7 yet.

While there are good episodes (and bad ones, though amazingly few of them) throughout the series, I’ve noticed on my two and a sixth trips through the series that you can block the seasons into three distinct eras. The tenor of the show and type of stories that get told change subtly between the eras. Seasons 1 and 2 focus more on slice of life, small adventures, and character and world building. They feel more like a children’s show, which makes sense, since they were produced before the brony bloc became a known force. Seasons 3 and 4 also have their share of slice of life and character building, but the adventures are more high concept and tended to be weirder—the Mane 6 get sucked into a comic book, Fluttershy turns into a pony-bat, Pinkie Pie clones herself, Rainbow Dash helps Daring Do on an adventure in real life. The character building in Seasons 3 and 4 is mostly deeper and the event stories are more complex, with a strong focus on the Mane 6 and occasional sidetrips to spend time with Spike or the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Seasons 5 and 6 get a little weirder still, with more side characters, more fan shout-outs (though Season 4 was the one that found a way to sneak the Wilhelm Scream into every episode), and event stories that borrow more knowingly from other sci-fi and fantasy stories (though again, Season 4 did a little of this too with its Dragon Ball Z-inspired finale).

While I overwhelmingly enjoy all the seasons, my ideal season would be mostly the same tenor as Seasons 3 and 4, but with less of the high-concept weirdness and more of the down-to-earth slice of life of Seasons 1 and 2. I find that Seasons 3 and 4 are the ones that stand out in my memory as the best, but Seasons 1 and 2 are the ones I want to revisit: both times I’ve watched the Season 6 finale, I find myself wanting to go back and revisit episodes like “Friendship is Magic”, “Dragonshy”, “Winter Wrap-Up”, “Green Isn’t Your Color”, “A Dog and Pony Show”, “The Cutie Mark Chronicles”, and “Party of One”, to say nothing of all the great episodes in Season 2. Still, as we go through my favorite episodes below, we’ll see that all seasons are represented.

Character Bests

These are my favorites among episodes focusing on a particular character. We’ll start with the Mane 6, roughly in the order I like them, and address other characters at the end.

Fluttershy

It’s tough to pick between “Dragonshy” from Season 1 and “Putting Your Hoof Down” from Season 2 as the first great Fluttershy episode in the series, but I give a slight edge to the latter. Both show Fluttershy having trouble being heard and standing up for herself and being underestimated and scorned by her friends, and both end with her managing to stand up for herself when she really needs to, but the setup of “Dragonshy” feels a bit more conventional, whereas “Putting Your Hoof Down” feels original, and I love how Fluttershy’s flat “No” and calm explanation to Iron Will at the close is both a little anticlimactic and a sensible, in-character way for her to assert herself. Plus, Iron Will and his stupid catchphrases make me laugh. “If someone tries to block, show them that you rock!”

“Keep Calm and Flutter On” from Season 3 shows the strength of Fluttershy’s resolve to be kind to others, and brings Discord over to the side of good in a way that seems in character for him and for her. Like “Putting Your Hoof Down”, the climax is very sudden but still feels earned.

I always enjoy episodes that show us another side of the characters, and “Filli Vanilli” from Season 4 does that for Fluttershy. Her reluctance to put herself out there and perform was something I identified with. I enjoyed the pony a capella group, as I always enjoy the variety of musical genres that the show uses. This episode also had one of the best composed shots of the entire series, when Fluttershy is standing on a bridge watching the Ponytones and swaying as she hums to the music, and the camera sits behind her pointing over her shoulder. MLP does a better job with compositional variety than most Flash shows (watching Equestria Girls made this very clear), but shots that artful still feel rare.

Pinkie Pie

Pinkie makes me laugh on a regular basis, but good episodes that focus on her alone are few and far between, which makes some sense—she must be a difficult character to write an entire episode around since you can’t fill a half hour with her usual antics without making her annoying (and that’s something the show never, ever does, which is an impressive feat on its own).

“A Party of One” from Season 1 is the first time we see a side of Pinkie other than happy-go-lucky. She’s childish in both the good and bad senses, which means she’s tempestuous and can be quick to jump to conclusions. Her crazed party with random objects is both fun and frightening. I also love how her mane and tail go flat whenever she’s depressed.

“Pinkie Pride” from Season 4 was an even deeper character-building episode in which Pinkie’s friends learn to appreciate her and Pinkie herself learns not to let her pride get in the way of throwing a great party. It’s a lot of fun and has Weird Al Yankovic playing a pony version of himself.

I also want to mention Season 2’s “A Friend in Deed”, which is one of the most out and out fun episodes in the whole series, even if the plot is a bit forced. They had to cram it all in so they could fit that glorious song where Pinkie sings about how she wants to befriend everyone and make them all smile, showing us how gentle and kind she actually is under all that random chaos and yelling. Plus, felt puppet stop motion.

Twilight Sparkle

Since Twilight is the main character, there are lots of episodes focusing on her, but most of the ones I really liked were in Season 1 and Season 2, before she was the fix-it girl, and focused on her obsession with order, organization, and details. For example, “It’s About Time” from Season 2, which is specifically about Twilight learning to stop fretting about the future. Twilight is the queen of freak-out scenes (only Pinkie even comes close), and her freak-out scene in this episode is both funnier and better motivated than the one in the earlier “Lesson Zero”.

“A Canterlot Wedding” from Season 2 has its problems as an event story, but as character building for Twilight it’s incredible. We find out that Twilight is an oniichanko who has a crush on her oniichan, Shining Armor, the awesome captain of Celestia’s royal guard, and see her get jealous when she finds out he’s marrying Princess Cadance. This inspired my fan fiction, “Ore no Poniimouto ga Konna Ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai!”, known in English as “My Pony Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute!”, which focuses on the time when Twilight was in middle school and became secretive and full of contempt toward Shining Armor, until he discovered that she was secretly a giant fan of the book series Stardust Witch Stardust Witch, in which a young filly named Stardust Witch becomes a Stardust Witch and fights monsters with her magic.

But seriously, I love how “A Canterlot Wedding” develops the relationship between Twilight and Shining Armor. I wish that relationship had paid off more in later episodes, but I love how it’s portrayed in these two episodes and that it explains how Twilight got along without friends in her life before Ponyville. (It does pay off a little in “The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows” when Twilight sets up the room with Shining Armor’s childhood paraphernalia, and goes on the scavenger hunt with everyone.)

Rarity

There are surprisingly few good Rarity episodes—the writers seem to have had a hard time figuring out what to do with her—but for me “A Dog and Pony Show” from Season 1 stands out. The villains are total idiots, but it’s a lot of fun to watch Rarity troll them.

I’m also fond of “Suited for Success” from Season 1, which focuses on Rarity as a creative person (er, pony) and the trouble she has when her clients want to have too much input on the creative decisions in her work, which I’m sure every programmer, designer, and writer for hire can identify with.

Later on, we started to get some really good Rarity episodes; Season 5’s “Canterlot Boutique” stands out for deftly telling a very grown up story about two well-intentioned ponies, one creative and one business savvy, trying to run a business together and clashing over vision. Plus, “Rules of Rarity” is my favorite Rarity song in the series. “Rarity Investigates!”, just a few episodes later, is extremely fun and surprisingly well written, even if the mystery only has one real suspect.

Applejack

Applejack’s personality allows for stories that touch on a lot of unique issues that other cartoons wouldn’t usually deal with. “Applebuck Season” from Season 1, for example, focuses on the importance of not working yourself to death out of a stubborn desire to prove how good you are. Since I live and work in Silicon Valley, the working-yourself-to-death capital of the United States, this message resonated strongly. (As a side note, I’m waiting for the pony parody of Silicon Valley to show up in an episode some day. They could call it Fillicon Valley. A pony with a lambda for a cutie mark would feature heavily in this episode.)

“The Last Roundup” from Season 2 was another good episode about Applejack’s pride that was both fun and character building. In a gripping scene in which Pinkie Pie is deployed as a weapon of torture, it originated the cherrychanga. (Or is it the chimicherry? Chimicherry, or cherrychanga?)

Applejack’s other important trait is honesty. “Leap of Faith” from Season 4 shows how a white lie told with good intentions gets Applejack into trouble, while “Where the Apple Lies” from Season 6 shows the origin of her honesty. The antics get a little too implausible at times, but after sitting through dozens of characters who tell big lies and get into trouble week over week when I was young (and also when I was whatever age I was when I read Love Hina), it’s refreshing to see one who reformed and chose honesty. And it lends weight to Applejack’s decision to always be honest to know that it came from hard experience.

Rainbow Dash

Rainbow Dash is actually not a very likable character when the show starts, but she grows a lot as the series goes on. I particularly like “Read It and Weep” from Season 2, where Rainbow starts reading (you could even say she becomes a reading Rainbow, har har) and becomes a giant fangirl of Daring Do. The message is awesome—not only is reading good, it’s good whether you’re sporty, a farm girl, an egghead, or whatever Pinkie is. And it’s not good because you’ll do well in school, or because you’ll memorize some random fact that will later turn out to be exactly what you need to know to escape the villain’s trap. It’s good because you’ll enjoy it. But don’t take my word for it!

The two episodes where Rainbow comes into ethical conflict with the Wonderbolts, “Wonderbolts Academy” in Season 3 and “Rainbow Falls” in Season 4, helped me like Rainbow a lot more by showing that she does have a good heart after all, even if she’s sometimes thoughtless, overbearing, and conceited.

I like a good episode with the Mane 6’s pets since the pets were pretty obviously invented as add-on toys you could package with the pony, and a good pet episode helps justify the pets’ existence. “Tanks For the Memories” from Season 5 is possibly the best. The climactic scene, where Fluttershy bluntly tells Rainbow Dash the truth so Rainbow will cry and work through her feelings, then ends up crying herself, then ends up dragging in Rarity and Pinkie Pie so that all four of them are curled up in a glob crying together, was adorable, touching, funny, and genuine.

Other characters

It would have been easy to make Spike into a throwaway comic relief sidekick, but instead he’s an interesting character in his own right, sometimes acting greedy or stupid but just as often heroic, supportive, and wise. Episodes that focus on him are, unfortunately, mostly pretty uninspiring, but the ones that focused on Spike’s fame in the Crystal Empire stand out as exception, and “Equestria Games” from Season 4 was one of the best. Spike has to learn to recognize his own self worth and have confidence, even though he’s always getting sidelined from the big action. I also enjoyed “The Times They Are A Changeling” from Season 6, even though the climax felt rushed: it was nice to see Spike use his fame in the Crystal Empire for good, and really nice to see how his actions influenced into a larger plot in the season finale. “Gauntlet of Fire” from the same season is a lot of fun and another episode where Spike gets to have a big impact. I also enjoyed Spike’s small parts in “Lesson Zero”, where he shows how well he knows Twilight and how much he cares about her, and “The Best Night Ever”, an instance where he understands friendship better than the rest of them.

I’m not a big fan of The Cutie Mark Crusaders as a group. Their joint episodes are mostly on the lower end of the scale, but their individual episodes from Season 4 are all good, and “For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils” is my favorite. Sweetie Belle is the least dim-witted and most interesting of the three (highly relative, of course), and this episode has a nice plot about her relationship with Rarity as well as a rare appearance by Princess Luna, who counsels Sweetie Belle on working through jealousy of your big sister without trying to bring eternal night to the land and getting banished to the moon for a thousand years. “Sleepless in Ponyville” is also really good and makes up for how Scootaloo annoyed me in “The Cutie Mark Chronicles” by constantly whining “Rainbow Dash, Rainbow Dash!” (Seriously, get a room! No, I don’t need to see fanart of that.)

“Maud Pie” from Season 4 introduces Maud Pie, Pinkie Pie’s sister. She writes poems. They’re all about rocks.

Since I have roughly as much experience with friendship as Discord, I can assure you that the events of “Make New Friends but Keep Discord” from Season 5 are definitely accurate in regard to the feelings of people who have only had one friend ever when they discover their one friend has more than one friend. I also like how this episode contains evidence for the fan interpretation that Princess Celestia is a troll. She pretty much admits at the end that she invited Discord to the gala to troll everyone. She’s also the only person in the room to laugh when Discord mocks Twilight’s flight skills.

My favorite supporting character in the show (maybe aside from Maud) is Princess Luna, but we got precious few episodes focusing on her, and all of them had flaws that kept them from greatness. “Luna Eclipsed” from Season 2 had a great premise but the resolution felt too rushed. It probably would have worked better if Luna’s problems had gone partially unresolved at the end of the episode and we’d seen her slowly work on them across a few more episodes. “Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?” from Season 5 is a good episode with a very sweet finale. It resolves much more cleanly than “Luna Eclipsed”, but it again felt like we needed more motivation to make it really land emotionally. Luna is one of the most complex characters, definitely the most complex outside of the Mane 6 and Starlight Glimmer, but she never gets the longer arcs she needs to develop since there are so few episodes focusing on her, so when she does get an episode it doesn’t always work as well as it could. It’s a shame, because I really like her, and a few more small appearances like the one in “For Whom the Sweetie Bell Toils” could do a lot for her.

Of the reformed antagonists, Starlight Glimmer gets the most screen time and most intricate characterization. I go back and forth on whether I like her or not. Her incredible skill at magic is not very well set up, unlike Twilight, who’s constantly studying and practicing. She needed to be powerful when she was a villain to be a credible threat, but after her turn to good it makes her seem too perfect. On the other hand, her nervous demeanor and antisocial tendencies make her fun to watch and easy to sympathize with—what person utterly lacking in normal human social facility hasn’t thought it would be so much easier to maintain relationships with people if you could just gather them all in a castle, put them under mind control, and circulate from station to station spending five minutes at a time with each one? So much more efficient than all this natural human connection stuff. That’s why “Every Little Thing She Does” was one of the standout Starlight episodes for me. Plus, I love how neither Spike nor Starlight has any idea what “chillax” means.

I also want to put down “A Hearth’s Warming Tale”, even though it’s good less because of Starlight and more because of “Pinkie’s Present”.

Event Stories

All the two-part events that open and close seasons are solid, top-tier episodes, but the best for my money is “Twilight’s Kingdom”, which closes Season 4. Season 4 was probably my favorite season for its good mix of really fun episodes (“Castle-mania”, “Three’s a Crowd”, “Trade Ya”) and excellent character building episodes, even if it does have a few high-concept clunkers towards the beginning (“Daring Don’t” and “Power Ponies” for sure. I go back and forth on “Bats!”). “Twilight’s Kingdom” was the perfect close to the season. It had everything: a character growth opportunity (Twilight figuring out how she fits in to the princess picture); an amazing song (“You’ll Play Your Part”); a villain, Tirek, who makes up for lack of personality with naked evil; a betrayal and reversal by Discord that both felt in-character and set up his transition to clingy, socially awkward, but loyal friend in Season 5; a great theme that tied together the season; and an awesome pony Dragon Ball Z fight, with Twilight hurling the power of four alicorns against Tirek, wielding the magic he stole from all ponies in Equestria, in a midair duel, followed by all of the Mane 6 turning into Super Ponyans while imbued with the power of the Elements of Harmony.

The other event episodes are all pretty equal in my book. They were overall excellent, but had slight flaws that put them below “Twilight’s Kingdom”. I’d put Season 5’s opener, “The Cutie Map”, next highest for a unique story that really hangs together. It was interesting to see an episode draw on dystopian science fiction, and it introduces Starlight Glimmer. I put it lower than “Twilight’s Kingdom” because it didn’t have a very strong character building aspect. Season 2’s “A Canterlot Wedding” draws about equal. It has excellent character building for Twilight and an exciting story whose one flaw is the halfway comedic pony kung fu sequence during the rush to escape the changeling hordes at the climax.

Season 6’s “To Where and Back Again”, Season 5’s “The Cutie Re-Mark”, Season 4’s “Princess Twilight Sparkle”, and Season 3’s “The Crystal Empire” are all solid event stories too. I could nitpick tiny flaws in them that put them lower, but they’re still in the upper tier of episodes of a consistently excellent show.

The only events that come up a little short for me are Season 2’s “The Return of Harmony” and Season 3’s “Magical Mystery Cure”. They both had story problems and neither did much character building. “The Return of Harmony” bothered me because Discord was able to just cast a magic spell to make the Mane 6 behave exactly opposite to their Element of Harmony. We know he didn’t have to prey on something inside them because Fluttershy resisted his influence, so he just snapped his fingers and there we go, she’s a meanie. It felt too contrived, and no one had character growth because they were under a magic spell, so no one had to grow. “Magical Mystery Cure” also has kind of an illogical plot that raises too many questions for a serious event story. I’ll forgive a lot of “plot holes” and inconsistencies in normal episodes, but I hold the events to a higher standard, and “Magical Mystery Cure” fell short, no matter how much I loved the songs in it.

Next Time…

Since this is getting really long, it’s time to end it. We’ve covered the main series here, but next time I’ll talk about Equestria Girls and the first bit of the comics.