Miko Club – Shrine of the Morning Mist Spoiler Review

Well, it’s that time of year… or it would be, but I’m going to do things slightly differently. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the first installment of Miko May! Yeah, when I said back in my review of Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister that I wanted to see more shows that put miko characters in the spotlight, there was an extent to which that was foreshadowing. At the very least I knew I was going to be taking on the arguable antecedent of the Magical Girl this year, rather than Magical Girls themselves.

As to Shrine of the Morning Mist itself (Asagiri no Miko in untranslated title, which is a little different), I suppose I’d better introduce it in its own right. What we have here is what seems like a very classical 2002 action-romcom, one of the pre-Shana examples of the urban fantasy lineage. The differences? This one has half-length episodes (Similar to Neo Ranga, which is from a somewhat similar era come to think of it) and five girls training as shrine maidens to be our action heroes.

Let’s get this started with the one element I know nobody really expects anything from: the Male Lead. In this show his name is Tadahiro “Hiro” Amatsu. He’s a heterochromic high school boy whose odd eyes are a sign of something for which supernatural evil that he’s not rated to handle will want him. This makes him the main character. To be fair, this isn’t the most grating type, but it is a common a dirt one, so I’ll let you know if and when the show decides to do anything interesting with that.

He’s returning to his home town after five years away, an event which the most central of our girls, Yuzu Hieda, looks forward to, seeing as they were childhood friends and made an important romantic-ish promise in the past which the show sees fit to burn its first scenes on. I’ll let you know if and when they decide to do anything interesting with that bit, too.

However, the elder Hieda shrine maiden senses danger, and rushes off with the youngest in her fast car to go contact and save Hiro… leaving Yuzu to go by bike for some reason. Abstractly cruel. This all turns out to matter when an evil sorcerer with blond hair and wearing a tengu mask goes after Hiro as soon as he’s off the train. The sisters who drove come in for the rescue once he’s done with exposition about Hiro’s eye letting him see the spirit world and call down gods or something, and when they get into a standoff stalemate, Yuzu arrives, running the guy over from behind without realizing it was a needed action. The sisters, together, do their ritual exorcism to banish his monster-spawning floating rock, and the reunion between Hiro and Yuzu is had properly.

Next up, the two start attending high school together, which is made tougher by an extremely suspicious blond student who seems to hate Yuzu, and more yokai (or “monster” per the subs) attacks. To combat the evil, Yuzu’s elder sister, their homeroom teacher, instructs Yuzu to found the Miko Club and recruit other students to the cause.

Naturally, Yuzu gets her two tagalong friends (the sporty one and the small one), and then rounds the group out to five by adding the alien nut and the sheltered rich girl.

And… these will be our main characters going forward. The show actually seems to know that Hiro having no agency means he’s not particularly interesting, and thus it rectifies that by not focusing on him or trying to make him interesting. He still shows up in most episodes and has a fair number of okay scenes, like an early one where he laments being born and gets some love and support from Yuzu, informing her odd comfort with becoming the target of the evil magic stuff just so the burden isn’t all on Hiro’s shoulders. But, all the same, he does more serve the role of the love interest, the person who motivates the real main character, Yuzu.

This gets even more pronounced in the second arc of the show.

So, first arc is just assembling the team and fending off tengu masked blondie and his summoned monsters. A bit before the halfway point, we get a little more story, how our enemy is a god called Yagarena, who appears cyclically trying to reduce everything to chaos. In a particularly challenging monster fight that occurs while Hiro is being made aware of this, we also get a new character, a bakeneko (previously seen as a black cat watching everything, from here on a catgirl called Koma) who is on the side of the priestesses and, particularly, Hiro and his family, due to having hangups about one of Hiro’s predecessors.

Koma is mostly pointless, but the episode rather far down the line where we get her backstory is one of the most effective in the show, feeling more like a bite of Mushi-shi than part of Shrine of the Morning Mist.

After learning the tutorial on Yagarena, we get another round of monster fights, with some individual work episodes for each of the girls. We then introduce a new evil element, the Twilight Miko or Priestesses of Twilight, a trio subordinate to Tengu Mask and Yagarena who appear as mysterious transfer students and have more powers to mess with our main miko squad.

Shortcutting a little, this is where we learn the suspicious blonde boy is, in fact, Tengu Mask. We also ultimately learn that of the three Twilight Priestesses, the two that seem to have the dour mood down are Yokai, while the one who is a cute clumsy girl that inadvertently bonds with various heroes is a human medium.

And that’s the big deal material for this arc. Otherwise it’s just another round of monster attacks. They make each one feel a little more involved here, but it’s usually to highlight one of the heroic priestesses and have her face up to her everyday issues by being the only one who can really take on the monster of the week. This show, as a whole, is mostly filler arc after filler arc, and the one with the Twilight active is no different.

That said, I kind of like filler arc here. They do some real if basic work with all our protagonists, and it feels like they’ve been through something when finally the umpteenth summoned nasty goes and snatches Yuzu.

This actually is what leads to the endgame. Yagarena, it seems, needs both Hiro and Yuzu’s specialness to manifest, and after nabbing them both with a successful monster of the week, Tengu Mask tortures Yuzu in order to browbeat Hiro into calling out to Yagarena and ruining everything. I have to assume he didn’t know the whole world would go kaput from just the first callout, but that’s basically what happens.

Yagarena claims Yuzu as a vessel and unleashes its dark power, which is to shroud the world in fog and return all to primal nothingness. This takes a little while to work, though, which lets the other priestesses give chase.

While they’re catching up to Hiro, we resolve the baddies. Tengu Mask, who just wanted to die, fails to kill Hiro due to attachment, so Yagarena curses him to have an eternal existence as the warden of The Nothing, turning him into a magatama in the process. The yokai twilight priestesses find this (the human one fell ill and was being cared for by the good guy team) and since their motivation was devotion for Tengu Mask showing them kindness when the rest of creation refused to do so, they sacrifice their existences to mitigate his curse to living as a normal human. He’s horrified at this, and blabs to the miko that Yagarena is still scared of Hiro, because Hiro could still turn things around with a miracle.

This miracle turns out to be astrally projecting to the last light of Yuzu’s soul and calling her back with the power of love. Hiro remembers all the important childhood promises and does his damndest, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s enough Yuzu left to answer his call.

Awakened by Hiro’s love, Yuzu does one last ritual purification, sealing Yagarena away if not for all time at least for longer than usual, and restoring the world from “The Nothing, as fog” to just covered in normal sacred morning mist.

Winter comes and goes, Yuzu and Hiro are an item (Alert! They did something interesting with that! The Childhood Friend ship sailed!), the Miko club is still a club, blondie and the surviving human twilight priestess are still going to school, and everything is looking up.

The end.

So, I kind of spoiled my conclusion on this one a few paragraphs up: This show is mostly a series of three filler arcs with slightly accelerating stakes, punctuated by actual plot… but it wears the filler arc well. The characters aren’t the greatest or most memorable or unique, but at least they are characters. The fighting isn’t that exciting, relying a lot on Sailor Moon style recycled attack animations, but it is at least a little funny that they call out the girls naming their attacks in character (they range from okay names to flagrantly silly), and the Sailor Moon style combat is kind of fine in light action. At the very least, there are some neat setups to a couple of the fights to make them more than just sacks of hit points in a non-game.

You’re not learning anything about Shinto or the duties of a shrine maiden in this one, it really is just a sort of halfway house between generic urban fantasy supernatural battlers like Shana and action-heavy Magical Girl. That’s fine. It is what it is.

And, for my money, that ends up earning Shrine of the Morning Mist a C+. It’s short, basic, and a little dated, but it has some charm in its datedness, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to check it out.