A few years ago I watched between one and five episodes of a bunch of anime trying to find something to follow through on after I dropped Last Exile. I didn’t really like any of them except for The Ancient Magus’s Bride, and until recently I had not gone any further with any of them, including The Ancient Magus’s Bride.
However, I did go back recently and give two of those shows another chance—Kaleido Star and Konosuba. I liked both of them a lot more than I did a few years ago. In both cases, though, I don’t think my opinion back then about the first few episodes was wrong. Both take more than a few episodes to appreciate. I’ve always believed that anime pretty much set their trajectory in the first episode and if the first few episodes are bad, the show isn’t going to get any better. But in these cases I was wrong, and I’m reassessing that belief. If the concept is bad or the writing is fundamentally terrible, you can tell from the first episode. A little while ago I rewatched the first episode of The Soul Taker because I thought maybe it was actually better than I remembered. Nope, it was poorly written from the get-go. On the other hand, it can take a lot longer than five episodes to set up character arcs and relationship dynamics, and if the storytelling style is extremely subtle it can’t always be appreciated right away. Neither Kaleido Star nor Konosuba are subtle, but they do both get a lot of their appeal from characters and relationship dynamics, so to appreciate them you have to watch enough to get to love the characters and to notice how their relationships work.
Kaleido Star: Third time’s the charm
When I watched Kaleido Star for that older post, it wasn’t the first time I’d watched it. I rented the first DVD from Netflix way way back. Then I watched it on Crunchyroll during that brief period when Crunchyroll and Funimation were buddies and all the Funimation stuff was on Crunchyroll, and that was when I wrote that older post about it. This time I watched it on Funimation.
I kept watching Kaleido Star and trying to like it because I love the concept so much. A cute shoujo-flavored drama series about a girl trying to make it as a star in a Cirque du Soleil-style prestige circus is a great idea. There’s so much romance and style inherent to the setting, so much potential for character conflict and growth. Plus Sora is played by Ryo Hirohashi, the voice actress who played Alice in Aria, Rakka in Haibane Renmei, and Kyou in Clannad, who has one of my favorite voices in the business. (In a stunning twist, she also played disgusting creepo ball boy Mineta in My Hero Academia.)
The show does take advantage of its setting, but it takes a while for everything to coalesce in a satisfying way. At first it seems like everyone is just being mean to Sora for drama, but as the show goes on we start to see how the way they treat Sora at first comes out of their own personalities. Kalos, the circus owner, is always throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Sora with something crazy. At first it seems like he just behaves that way to create plots, but after a while it becomes more clear that this is his way of discovering and cultivating talent. He throws down crazy challenges at new talent because if they can overcome his challenges, they’ve proven their worth and he can inject some new blood into the show instead of relying on the same old people. Layla, the current star, is also constantly picking at Sora, but she turns around when Sora manages to learn her signature move, the Golden Phoenix, in three days. Layla is a hardcore hardass stone-cold hard-driver who’s so passionate about Kaleido Stage that she can’t help but take it as a personal insult if someone she deems unworthy is put on stage, but she respects hard work. Eventually Layla becomes something like Sora’s mentor. While she’s never the nurturing type, she does keep pushing Sora to improve and develop and uses competition with her as a way to motivate Sora’s growth.
The show ends up a lot more down-to-earth than I was expecting from the first few episodes. A lot of plots hinge on the idea that Kaleido Stage is still a business and has to make money for its investors. And once Sora reaches the top, she has to confront the idea of what it means to be a star and the constant competition someone at the top has to face. That helps keep the show grounded and the stakes clear even when there are elements that are unrealistic or straight up supernatural. The plot unexpectedly kept me hooked; there were plenty of times when I watched another episode just because I really wanted to know what would happen next.
Kaleido Star is an original idea by Junichi Sato, the director of Aria. And like Aria, it takes a while to get going. I didn’t even start to get on board until Episode 7 of Season 1, and I don’t think I was fully invested in it until around Episode 11 or 12. Unlike Aria, there’s plot going on from the beginning, so it’s easier to watch the first few episodes and think, “This is how the whole show is going to be and I’m not into it, I’m out” like I did the first two times I watched it. But by sticking with it I started to grow attached to the characters and get interested in how they and their relationships with each other would develop, just like Aria. It all leads up to an amazing finale for Season 1. Season 2 starts off a bit rough, and again takes a long time to get going. It’s never quite as strong as Season 1, but in the end it’s still satisfying and it brings a more nuanced and complex character arc for Sora to work through, and wraps things up in a good spot for all the main characters.
As a final note, I actually watched the dub for a lot of Kaleido Star (as well as Konosuba). It’s a real mixed bag. It’s an ADV dub from back in the day, which means uneven quality and obnoxious creative liberties with the script. Luckily they didn’t go too far with the creative liberties on this one; all their dubs after about 2005 or so fall somewhere on a continuum between “liberal translation” and “troll dub”, but this one’s closer to “liberal translation”. But it’s still uneven. Some of the actors really didn’t read their lines well, like the actress who plays Layla. There were some scenes where Layla was performing in a movie or a play, and the dub actress tried to read the lines with worse acting to make it sound like acting so it would be differentiated from Layla’s actual emotional moments. Unfortunately she already wasn’t very good at acting, so when she played Layla performing it was so bad that it made me wonder if she was trying to slander Layla by implying she was shit at acting. Some of the actors can read their lines okay, but were miscast and don’t fit their parts at all. Ken’s voice, for example, sounds wrong for the character, much too old for one thing. Rosetta is even worse; the actress can deliver her lines well, but Rosetta is twelve and she’s cast to sound like she’s thirty-five. Sora’s voice actress, Cynthia Martinez, definitely plays Sora as more obnoxious and throaty than Ryou Hirohashi, who plays Sora with more strength than she does Alice but still with the wispy, creaky quality that’s natural to her voice. At first I didn’t know if I could spend a whole series listening to Martinez’s performance, but I got used to it and I think she found the role a bit more and struck a balance where she still sounded youthful and energetic but not as obnoxious. A lot of the supporting and minor characters were actually pretty well cast, like Anna and Mia, Anna’s father, and Layla’s off-Broadway director friend Cathy. Yuri and Leon were voiced with accents, which could have been a disaster, but they went light enough on the accents that it at least fit with everyone else’s performances and didn’t go into parody territory.
Konosuba: More than just girls getting horny over weird things
I’m not a very big fan of isekai. I haven’t watched much of it because what little I have watched I haven’t particularly enjoyed. I’ve got a raft of problems with the genre. In its purest form it’s basically the otaku horny version of The Chronicles of Narnia, which in my opinion was a good enough concept for like two or three shows, but now there are like fifteen of them per year and the genre is flooded. I recognize the irony here: the same thing happened to cute girls doing cute things, and I still love that genre. But I liked the basic tropes of that genre, while the basic tropes of isekai, the very things that make it isekai, are already a stumbling block to my enjoyment. I like interesting and unique worlds in my fantasy, but the worlds of isekai shows are always the most generic Dragon Quest knockoff thing you can imagine. The real-life video game mechanics in a lot of isekai shows annoy me. I don’t find it interesting or clever that the characters basically learn new abilities by leveling up in a menu after they kill some number of monsters to gain experience points. I prefer something more like we see in shounen anime, where learning a new ability requires good teaching, a strong conceptual understanding, and intense training, because it’s more realistic and it gives you chances to build character and plot. And I really can’t get into shows about the characters playing an online game, like Sword Art Online or Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? I just find it an uninteresting premise for a story. There are some angles to the premise that would interest me: exploring how people construct identities, maybe, or how they make real connections with other people in an artificial world over artificial goals. Or more cynically, how people ignore or detach themselves from reality and substitute the game world, and the effects that has on their psyche and worldview. Or some angle that uses the created and artificial nature of the world to comment on something else, or to play with the nature of perception or reality. But shows about online games never go in those directions. They’re always some fantasy action-adventure story that loses even the slight bit of interest I would normally have in a fantasy world because it’s not even a real world and nothing they do there actually matters. I don’t care if dying in the games means they die in real life and I don’t care if the creator of the game hid some secret message in the depths of the programming; it just doesn’t do it for me. I watched .hack//Sign back in the day and it was one of the most boring anime I’ve ever seen. The fact that I watched the whole show week over week for half a year when it was on Cartoon Network still astounds me and really speaks to how desperate I was for any anime to watch back then. And even setting aside all those personal problems I have with the genre at a conceptual level, a lot of isekai shows just aren’t very well written from a plot or character standpoint.
Anyway, now that I’ve pissed off literally everyone with that establishing rant, I’ll say that Konosuba is the exception that proves the rule. Zombie movies are another genre I’m really not that into. My favorite zombie movie is Shawn of the Dead, the parody of zombie movies that’s half a romcom. It’s a similar situation with Konosuba. It’s the only isekai I’ve seen so far that I liked, and it’s the parody of isekai that’s half a harem show. It turns all those pet peeves I have about isekai shows into strengths by using them as sources of humor and plots. I liked Konosuba so much that I’m planning to check out some of the other newer isekai which people have pointed to as standouts in the genre, like Re:Zero, to see if I might enjoy them too.
My original assessment that Konosuba was just going to derive humor from cute girls getting horny over weird things was fair given I was only looking at the first five episodes, and also given that even if the first episode of an anime has clever jokes, you never know if it’s going to maintain that energy or if it’s just going to get lazy and fall back on the same two jokes over and over. But Konosuba does keep bringing clever jokes, and it does have more jokes up its sleeve than just cute girls getting horny over weird things. Even the jokes about cute girls getting horny over weird things worked better on an ongoing basis than I expected. It’s not just the same weird things making them horny over and over; the show keeps escalating the weirdness so things stay interesting.
Konosuba’s best moments usually boil down to three things that it does really well. First, the characters. Like with Kaleido Star, it takes time to learn what makes these characters tick. It takes time to realize that they do have actual personalities which the jokes stem from, not just one joke they do over and over that represents the sum total of their personalities. It takes even longer to realize that these characters actually have relationships and interplay with one another. They aren’t just crazy comedy weirdos thrown together for laughs. They start out looking sort of that way, but soon you notice that they actually have dynamics to their relationships. When Kazuma and Megumin fight over who gets to go in the bath first after they both get slimed by giant toads, and then end up going in together, it’s not just a stupid harem situation. It’s an actual expression of their personalities and relationship. They’re both petty, so when Kazuma raises the stakes by saying they should go in together, basically challenging Megumin to a game of chicken, Megumin can’t back down. Then they do go in together, and it ends up not being sexy at all. They just casually sit around and have a bath, because neither of them (at least at this point) considers the other attractive or sexually interesting in any way. Their bath together is only interrupted because Aqua comes back, and Kazuma is worried what she’ll think about them casually sitting around naked together.
The supporting characters are more of a mixed bag; some are really good (I like Yunyun a lot), some are pretty much just one joke, or just whatever joke the story needs at the time (Wiz feels like a plot device, but at least she gets Yui Horie into the show, so I appreciate her for that). But the core quartet has a real bond. Not a sweet bond or a wholesome bond. It’s more like shitty friends who constantly razz each other and laugh at each other’s misfortune, but they stick together because no one else will put up with any of them. But that’s what’s best for the comedy and the tone this series sets, and it also makes the infrequent sweet moments land that much better.
Second, the world. The world of Konosuba is (intentionally) the same sort of generic Dragon Quest-style fantasy RPG world seen in most isekai shows. But in its search for jokes, the series subverts, deconstructs, or comments on elements of that generic fantasy RPG world, and in doing that, it often creates a world that feels, despite its absurdity, somehow more realistic and logical. For instance, we find out a lot about how regular people live in this world that we don’t find out in other similar shows, because Kazuma is dropped into this fantasy world with no special abilities and has to build himself up from nothing. He doesn’t instantly fall in with royalty or have any way to stand out and make a living from the get-go. He has to start out sleeping in a stable and doing day labor on construction sites. It’s funny, but it also shows us what it’s like to be a commoner with no powers trying to make it in this world. He also isn’t the only loser otaku from Japan who died and came into this fantasy world. There are others who did have magical abilities, and their presence has had a profound impact on this world. And some of the trope subversion makes for more original takes on the usual creatures. For instance, there are no male orcs in this world, because adventurers kept killing them off. Orcs are an all-female species. It’s played for a joke (one which I enjoyed), but it was also a logical conclusion of the trope of the evil orc army.
Third, the plot. Konosuba’s plot is surprisingly well written. It’s not just a regular fantasy adventure story with jokes and silly world elements thrown in; the plot itself contributes to the humor and usually stems directly from the characters’ actions. The stories in Konosuba could only be done in Konosuba, because only characters as immature and foolish as these ones could get themselves into these situations. And because the world actually works consistently, the characters can actually use the mechanics of the world, no matter how weird or stupid they are, to their advantage to resolve situations. Because the characters and world are so well done, the plot just needed to stitch them together in a satisfying way, and it does that as well as you could possibly ask for.
I enjoyed Konosuba so much that I watched it twice in about two weeks’ time. First I watched the dub, which, as dubs go, is fantastic. The casting is all on point. The actors nail the line reads and comedic timing. Comedic timing is a major strength of Konosuba, so it had to be right for the dub to work, and they got it right in my opinion. Next I watched the subtitled original Japanese version, which is also fantastic. I didn’t know much about any of the actors playing the four leads. Sora Amamiya, who plays Aqua, also played Kaori Fujimiya in One Week Friends; and Ai Kayano, who plays Darkness, was also Menma in Anohana and Utaha in Saekano. Those are all characters I liked and vocal performances I liked, but not ones that I loved or which stood out in my memory. Rie Takahashi, who voices Megumin, had only done one character I knew: Ena Saitou from Yuru Camp. And Jun Fukushima, who voices Kazuma, is like an eternal background voice. His listing has very few main roles and very few shows in general. But they all did great, striking the perfect notes for their characters and getting the interplay right.
Conclusion
Anime is good. Kaleido Star and Konosuba are good. I’m glad I gave them another chance. That’s all.
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