Well it’s the last Monday in 2021, and while normally this is a day for a full series review, I’ve decided that right at the end here, I should take the time to write a few words on second seasons for shows that I’ve already written about, where those second seasons don’t really merit a full reviewing on their own.
The Promised Neverland
This one I could almost make a full review of, because Season 2 is a very different show than Season 1… and it’s weaker for it. The season has a fairly terrible reputation, and while I don’t agree that it’s necessarily that bad in an objective sense, I can’t say that I don’t see why people would hate this one, given the heights it had to follow up, and largely fails to follow up.
We all knew that life in the outside world wasn’t going to be sunshine and roses, and that given the existence of the Gracefield house the demons weren’t going to be too terribly contained. The struggle to escape turning into a struggle to survive could be broadly expected. What couldn’t be expected was the fact that this turned into a barrage of rapid fire “and now for something completely different” fantasy plots. The kids are learning to live off the land in the forest, okay. Now they’re trying to build their own civilization in a fallback bunker, investigating the mysteries left for them while being hunted. That segue wasn’t too bad but then they’re living in secret infiltrating demon society while trying to plot their next move with basically no follow-up? Yeah, gonna need a better transition on that one. Oh, and Norman is alive, he’s escaped from a weird lab with some super-powered teens (brief flashback on that score) and he has an evil plan to utterly eradicate the entire demon species! Only there’s some sort of friendly demon macguffin that Emma wants to use to coexist, leading to Norman making a brief villain run as he engages in chemical warfare against a town of, let me remind you, obligate human-eating monsters that get a weirdly humanized treatment.
Then suddenly it’s time to liberate Gracefield, Isabella is a good guy with an army of maids to backstab her boss in their hour of glory, some crap about a magic portal and a pact between worlds, and to cap off the insults Emma and the other main characters go on an entire fantasy epic in a montage in the last few minutes, doing something very unclear to save both worlds and engage in some really creative visuals that would be nice if they weren’t still and they had a reason or explanation for their existence… yeah, it’s jarring. Repeatedly and badly jarring. And if my research is correct, it makes sense that it’s jarring and the pace is insane because while season 1 adapted probably five volumes of Manga, season 2 here goes for something like fifteen, cutting and splicing wantonly in order to tell a story that almost makes sense and almost feels complete in a third the time it probably needed.
I’ve said (not on the blog, just in life) that if you wanted to base a D&D campaign on an anime, Promised Neverland (at least the setup in season 1) might be a good one – just replace the Demons with Illithids and up the ages to when you can excuse level 1 characters and the rest kind of writes itself. But Season 2 feels like a D&D campaign, and not in a good way for a story. Rather, it has that feel because it’s whatever cool thing a sleep-deprived hobbyist thought to throw as the next twist to try to keep a pack of players invested (and Norman versus Emma has some echos of Gith and Zerthamon if you want to see it, but that’s just for insane turbo-nerds like me).
It really is a shame, coming off the amazing and tense first season, that the rest of the story went down like this. But, on its own? It’s not all that bad. It’s still a moderately creative dark fantasy. The creature designs are good, the struggle to survive is simple and sensible, and even some of the magic nonsense like the friendly demon can be kind of cool when it actually has the time to work. If you isolated Season 2 here from Season 1, it would be a moderately forgettable young adult sort of adventure, but that really stinks when the comparison to far better is so natural.
This one could really use the “Brotherhood” treatment, but even if such a thing happens it won’t be until some time has passed.
Restaurant to Another World
This is really just more of the same. The show was basically plotless in the first place, and that doesn’t change. We get more dishes, more new diners, and a few follow-ups with some of the characters from last time. Once again I tried to eat somewhat along with the show, and I need to thank it for introducing me to the wonder that is Souffle Cheesecake.
Quintessential Quintuplets
Nino is going to end up on a watch list, and possibly a wanted poster; she needs to stop drugging people who displease her. And the girls are still overwhelmingly bad when it comes to delivering academic results in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense with the fact that most of them seem to be normally-functioning people with decent heads on their shoulders. Honestly, the show as a whole would be extremely believable if the girls were just average or a little below average at their studies with their father (already implied to be quite the demanding jerk in S1 and seen as a realistic if downplayed version of the archetype in S2) insisting on stylized perfection. I suppose I can’t be too harsh as they do shape up and the emphasis slides away from that, but still it’s relevant.
But, this second time around, I did start to notice that there’s more to the show than the “cute girls doing cute things” appeal. That’s still probably the main draw, but there’s a degree to which the show is refreshing in its honest decency. Aside from the overdone academic considerations, most of the trouble the characters go through is very real trouble, with more extra cases of mistaken identity than a normal person would have to suffer because, hey, identical quintuplets. There’s no over-the-top fanservice (even the hot springs time is tame in terms of how it’s actually shot) and not a lot of forced melodrama; the fact that one of the Quintuplets is a girl our lead met five years ago who helped him turn his life around is basically it for contrivances. The rest is just five girls crushing on a guy with the density of a black hole, and even more than that what it does for their dynamic as sisters. The second half of the season is dedicated largely to romance, deception, apology, bonding, and growth… which is better material than “tee hee, let’s avoid studying.”
And the growth of the girls as individual people is pretty well handled. Since it’s not getting wrapped up in stand-up comedy, soap opera bull, or wasteful ecchi shots, Quintessential Quintuplets is spending all its energy on showing these characters experiencing and moving through their problems like actual people, which is especially refreshing when it comes to the uptick in the overt Romance angle. The first season had a lot of work just introducing the Nakano siblings and thus put a lot on some very basic paint-by-numbers portrayals – The mature working one, the mean-spirited one, the cheerful sporty one, the nerdy one, and the Tsundere. Season 2 has the ground work done and is better able to explore why they are the way they are, what their situation and identity means to them, and how they can move forward from where they began. Honestly, in showing this competence, the grade for the full Quintuplets package should now be significantly higher than it was in Season 1: probably a flat B rather than the C+ I gave the show originally. Character matters a lot.
There’s also a little more done with the visuals in Season 2. Season 1 was pretty enough, with (of course) five flavors of cute redhead and some excellent colors. Season 2 has all that, and also uses its visual chops better to tell the story in a unique way, including several times where the girls are actually drawn differently (either like each other or like the ‘neutral’ appearance they actually have) in order to represent how other people in the scene are seeing them, rather than the distinctive designs that are normally up for viewer benefit. It’s little touches, all in all, but stronger for them.
It’s still not a favorite of mine by any means, finding its place as a rather distant alternative to Toradora! or Kaguya-sama: Love is War, but I have to admit I see a lot more of its charm than I did before.
Kaguya-sama: Love is War
Speaking of Kaguya-sama, that one also had a second season. It was pretty much similar to the first season in terms of what its strengths and weaknesses were, but in a lot of ways it goes just a little bigger and better. We get a new major character, strict disciplinarian first-year Miko Iino, rounding out the student council to five for even more opportunities for interplay. Kaguya continues to grow (and Miyuki grows some himself) and the relationship between the leads progresses even as we get our new girl in on this mess, delve more into Ishigami, and so on. The first season was great, and this one is too, if even potentially a little better.
I’m afraid that while I love this show, there isn’t much to say about it that I didn’t say the first time. I could walk everybody through the plot like I usually do, but frankly at this stage it’s an unnecessary disservice to the material, which is the whole point of offloading things into this sort of recap episode rather than giving them full reviews. Sometimes “more of the same” is alright, and this is one of those times.
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid
New weird dragons, same old fanservice and mayhem… and then some extras. As with the first season, there are some moments that are earnest or heartfelt, but they’re easily forgotten in favor of the next gag… which is alright, this doesn’t want to be a show about feelings as much as it wants to be a show about an insane dragon who has turned herself into an overworked business woman’s maid and all her other insane dragon friends and how they manage to fit in (or not) in ordinary life.
As before, there’s some good character building and even a fascinating fantasy world lurking in the wings, but that kind of stuff stays more or less compartmentalized. It’s markedly well-animated, at least, but really so was Season 1. I feel if you liked the show the first time around, you’ll probably like it again. For me, I wasn’t amazingly enamored the first or the second time around, but neither time did I dislike it or resent the time I spent with the show. It’s perfectly acceptable and maybe even a little more, depending on what you’re up for going into it.
I will say, I noticed more of the earnest and heartfelt moments this time around. They can be kind of hit or miss, in as much as it can feel out of place when the silly fanservicey dragon maid show reaches for some heavy material… but it is at least legitimately heavy, and doesn’t feel like going dark just because as much as it is doing slice of life rather than “slice of nothing” fluff. I do think there was a marked uptick in that sort of material this season, getting to the heart of why people might feel the way they do, how they get along, and what their relationships mean.
But does that really make it that much better? To me, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid will always be compared against Helpful Fox Senko-san, in that they’re trying to accomplish similar things in very different ways. Senko-san thrives on being calm, inviting, and inoffensive, while Dragon Maid has a kind of “go big or go home” approach to everything that sometimes benefits the show and sometimes doesn’t. Neither one is wrong, it’s just a matter of setting their goals and living up to them. I gave Senko-san the first season of Dragon Maid the same final grade, C+, reflecting that they were doing something very basic and average, but with high marks for their achievement in that arena. The question is, is the material in Season 2 here markedly better enough to breach into the next letter grade?
On one hand, much like Quintessential Quintuplets, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid uses being fully set-up from the first season to do new and interesting things with its time. We don’t spend a lot of material on the running gags from before. Yeah, Tohru tries to feed Kobayashi her tail once or twice, Lucoa still has her gag boobs unleashed on her poor little summoner for humor now and again, Saikawa still faints with joy when interacting with Kanna, Fafnir is still all about curses… but most of that has kind of moved into the background, leaving us room to explore “why?” rather than just experiencing “what?”
On the other hand, it’s still this heterogeneous mix of nonsense with epic dragon battles right alongside cute kids doing low-key cute things, mixed up with boob jokes and now the emotional drama. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is not the craziest show I’ve seen, but it might be in the top ten. You can’t fix that kind of mess with a quick transition.
But then, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid doesn’t really try to staple its bits together with transition, it just compartmentalizes them and lets them be. Each episode typically has a couple vignettes, which may or may not be interconnected, and each vignette at least (and to a lesser extent each episode) is basically one thing. In a sense, you could almost consider this a variety show, in that you don’t necessarily know going in if you’re going to get fluffy cuteness, raunchy comedy, or legitimate emotions… but you find out pretty fast, and it sticks to what it’s giving you. And when dealing with all the parts the show has to put together, that’s probably the best way to do it.
Whether to bump the show up, and if so how far, was always going to be determined by the skill shown in the execution, and honestly… it does work, better than I gave season 1 credit for. I’m still only going to place the second season of Dragon Maid at a B-, but suffice to say I can understand why it has an audience and why people stick with it.