This is a Bug Hunt, Man! – Mushi-Uta Spoiler Review

I thought I used up all my bug puns with Cagaster of an Insect Cage. Hopefully, I’ll prove myself wrong because today we’re looking at Mushi-Uta.

Mushi-Uta throws us into a world where insects eat people’s dreams in exchange for giving those people mystical powers, but you wouldn’t exactly know that from the first episode, which throws us in with rumors of bugs, yeah, but rumors more focused on how the government will disappear you to certain death if you’re found. Sure enough, a government goon shows up to disappear our useless starter individual, only for us to see him and his pet giant supernatural monster beetle have to battle with a bunch of interlopers who like to be cryptic and mysterious like the protagonists in the first act of The Matrix. They battle things out with their bug-type Pokemon (called out as having types and ranks, of course), the unimportant nobody gets axed, and we sort of follow this brooding kid with goggles from a sort of government side group who had to shoot some girl years ago and who we don’t otherwise really know anything about. He’s debriefed by his zany and eccentric teammates who feel like they came out of another, less bloody show and-

And then we’re at school. With schoolgirls. Where bugs are an urban legend. We get a taciturn transfer student who you can guess fairly easily is goggles kid from earlier (Daisuke Kusuriya) as he proceeds to mostly not interact with his classmates like an asocial downer, except for this one girl who seems to have self-esteem issues about her (award winning) art and also a serious unprovoked tsundere rage habit when they encounter each other in relative private. This girl, Rina Tachibana, we are later told is also the mysterious Lady, leader of the Interloper Group, Mushibane. We learn this when she gets a call from some contact that someone has escaped from the government force GARDEN. This probably links up with Daisuke meeting a total stranger girl who appears through weird mid-2000s RPG battle transition

For some reason, this causes him to emote so much he happily jumps a train crossing to see her. Subsequently, he takes her hand and they run off to a somewhat isolated scenic spot where they can talk. While the laws of narrative fiction suggest that there is probably something more going on, this is played off as a sudden and extreme case of if not love than at least fascination at first sight. Daisuke explains to the girl, Shiika Anmoto, that he has no idea why he did that, he just sort of felt like he had to, but even though he doesn’t know her and has to ask her name and they have never met before, he wants to see her. She gives her his number with an injunction to call if she needs anything, anything at all, and also manages to get a date from our quiet little shrinking violet here.

So to recap, he’s only just met her and admits this is crazy, but hands over his number so she can call him, maybe.

His classmates get in on the gossip, one group having witnessed the scene at the station, and after some Tsundere activity from Rina, we get the date, stalked by the gossips. At the conclusion of a long afternoon of generic staples, Shiika goes home. Once she arrives at home, she finds it covered in dust, and her memories return of how years ago she became a bug host due to a creepy encounter, how she used her powers to save her sister albeit at the cost of crushing a car (occupants and all), and how her own parents sold her out to the authorities. Evidently while she was being a guinea pig or something they were also disappeared on the spot, given the untouched state of the house. This prompts her to call Daisuke and set up another meeting with him the following day, which a double agent manages to get in on due to stalking her.

This sets up a rumble at the park. Shiika flees before it really gets bad, though, so this ends up being more Government versus Mushibane, where Mushibane is there to find “Winter Firefly” (aka Shiika) because she could increase both their firepower and their understanding of the insects, potentially leading to the future Mushibane fights for where hosts can live normal lives. What they find is a random little girl Host who seemed to be set up by the double agent. The government mostly wants to capture Rina, though the little girl is also on the hit list as Daisuke’s target. As she slips away from Rina, he finds her and shoots her Beedril dead, which seems to render her unconscious or braindead. It horrifies Rina, but on the other hand Daisuke seems sure that Hosts can be recovered so… which is it?

We get the answer as it seems that those whose insects are killed become “Fallen”, beings utterly devoid of emotion. The goal of Daisuke’s boss is to have Daisuke destroy the three beings that seem to originate insects, which will only leave the issue as a matter of cleaning up those already made. Of course, those who have their dreams eaten completely are said to die, fueling the transformation from mystic bug pokemon into BETA-esque biological terrors. During the park rumble, one of Lady’s minions – her protector with a crush who is often referred to as her “knight” by others, Centi(pede) – starts to go that way.

This leads to what could have been a cool team-up between Rina and Daisuke while neither know the other’s mortal identity, but the animation couldn’t really handle actually fighting the seething mound of shoggoth-like flesh much less doing so with a coordinated semblance of choreography, so it mostly resorted to talking the team up while Daisuke fought, and then having Rina take it in one hit, ripping Centi free but condemning him to lose all his feelings, including his love for her that he’d been keeping to himself, becoming a catatonic Fallen.

This might have been emotionally effective if we’d known Centi for more than thirty seconds of screen time before he started throwing up death flags. As it is, he and his lost dreams are pretty pointless.

Meanwhile, the double agent goes full Mushibane, Shiika seems to be just sort of allowed to run free, and Daisuke’s boss thinks this is all Just As Planned.

We then leap blindly into a backstory episode where Shiika has been picked up by Rina who know she’s a host but not Winter Firefly. Rina talks about her sob story past with a dead abused mother and abusive evil father, they gossip about romance not realizing (from Rina’s cues at school) that they seem to be talking about the same guy they maybe-like, that sort of stuff. On Daisuke’s side we see his first mission, where he took out Winter Firefly’s insect (not her, like it looked in the opening) while pledging that there’d be a way through to a happy ending, which seems to have left an incredibly intense mark on both of them despite the fact that neither one is capable of recognizing the other as the person from that one little meeting.

Rina and Shiika continue to not tell each other about Daisuke. Rina even brings Shiika to school after hours to meet the gossips and have fun, somehow not getting her recognized in the process by the girls who were stalking the date back in the second episode. Does everyone in this universe just have prosopagnosia? Rina and Daisuke also run into each other, including a literal collision that in a minor miracle for this show’s age and general quality bar results in superficial injuries rather than a boob grab joke, all in all letting Rina show a little more Dere with her Tsun and figure out that she kind of likes Daisuke while he figures out she reminds him of big sister.

You know, if Centi’s interests had been reciprocated, which it almost seemed like Rina felt enough to be the case back when he was losing it, and that provided a deep trauma motivating her for the rest of the show, like that’s why she’d never let one of her friends become a Fallen ever again, then maybe his arc would have had a point. But if I said he was useless before, that was an understatement: he’s forgotten, too.

All is not well at school, though, as it seems the bug maniac has been infested with a bug that lets her do minor digital hacking stuff, delving into her photos. But this is on a fairly slow burn since the show only really has ambition for kind of puttering around with these characters in their “day to day life” identities, relying mostly on the technical dramatic irony of the fact that domino masks, goggles, or a couple of years are perfect identity protection.

Honestly, that’s the biggest downfall of this show: the pitch is pretty similar to Black Bullet but the delivery is more like a really awkward version of Spy x Family that doesn’t think like a comedy. Sure there’s the occasional joke, like Shiika being so bad at cooking that when she tries to make sandwiches for Rina, the fish are still alive, but the show doesn’t have the energy for comedy most of the time and certainly has the ambition to be taken seriously as a drama, given all the drive-by death and despair.

So, after this we introduce a trio if bug users from the central authority, who seem to have it out for Daisuke (well, the leader and one henchman do, the other henchwoman, who is a hacker-type, seems nice). They get redirected into that bug maniac girl and hunt her down by… mostly appearing and acting vaguely menacing. Again, this show does not have the visuals to realize its intent. She runs around a lot scared to death, but then everyone but the hacker gets sucked into her camera. Shortly thereafter, Daisuke shows up in goggles mode. He stops the mook from killing the girl and even destroys the mook’s bug, leaving it to be him versus the ringleader.

During that fight, the girl escapes her camera and starts working on deleting everybody. The hacker from the new team saved the data, though, letting the ringleader and Soul-dead mook escape but leaving Daisuke imprisoned. The leader then destroys the camera when the girl leaves it behind in her club room, which counts as a bug kill to remove her soul, and is strongly implied to kill Daisuke even though all narrative law says he doesn’t go out that way.

After Rina’s one good crying scene over the people she’s lost, we learn that Daisuke, of course, was saved by the nice hacker from the mean team. He has a bone to pick with his boss, though, as the mean team let slip that Winter Firefly had escaped, which he had not known. They have some cryptic ominous talk and then it’s time to leave the plot behind and have Daisuke and Shiika go on a date. It’s long and dull, but at least at the end of it one of those three original bug-makers pops up… to be spooky for a couple of seconds. The more important part is that Rina runs into them and both Shiika and Rina realize they have a crush on the same guy and flee the scene. Isn’t that what you wanted to see?

I know I’m being hard on this, but effort and presentation matter a great deal. In something like, oh, Macross Frontier there are powerhouse scenes predicated on the love triangle. But first, you knew those characters well enough and found them interesting enough to really care about their hopes and dreams. Here, Rina is vaguely worthwhile but neither “Insanely intense love for literally no reason” Daisuke nor “Shrinking squeaking violet” Shiika are very interesting. They might be the skeletons of interesting characters, but they haven’t been fleshed out as people. Second, if Macross Frontier was going to do both date stuff and danger stuff in the same scene, which it did a couple of times, it would know how to make both work and feel good. It wouldn’t just have a Vajra leer at the main couple from across the street and then vanish.

At least Rina learns (and Daisuke seemingly begins to suspect) that Shiika is Winter Firefly. You know, the big important Host who escaped GARDEN and is a huge deal, the lifeline of hope for Mushibane and the government’s most wanted as well as that girl Daisuke met for maybe five minutes years ago that shaped his entire personality. That should move the story forward, right?

Well the story does sort of move forward, but it’s predicated on other things, like that double agent (back to being a double agent due to a crush on Daisuke’s boss) setting up Rina for a trap by giving her details on how to get to the GARDEN detention facility. Rina prepares to go, basically putting her affairs in order like she expects to die. She leaves Shiika with her Mushibane friends and then tries to finish her Daisuke portrait only to be confronted with him revealing himself and that he now apparently knows everything. He tells her it’s a trap and begs her to not go, but after making some impassioned speeches she decides to walk into the trap anyway.

This turns out to be, you know, walking into a trap, facing Daisuke’s boss.  Shiika gets hunted down by that double agent – after a visit where that member of the Original Three who was vaguely spooky at the end of the date, the Devourer, shows up, monologues, and gives her the “I’ll eat you later” treatment before disappearing.

On Rina’s side, things go pretty bad, and she starts to get that lethal bug maturation like Centi before her. Except while his transformation was a big monster that at least had a creatively disgusting idea behind its lack of competent animation, hers…

It’s a bit tragic, isn’t it? It does get a second form, but that’s not much better: form two is like the Stay-Puft marshmallow man with an eyepatch and an eight-pack of breasts.

Daisuke and the Devourer (now with a creepy kaiju butterfly form) both show up to Rina’s fight, where Daisuke seems to be degenerating as well. For Shiika, her bug freezes the double agent to death (at least her insect, possibly her person). She manages to wrangle control of it just in time to get impaled by a shot from a government agent’s beetle, which makes the Winter Firefly itself run wild and start freezing the whole city.

Rina and Daisuke have this weird mindscape talk where they’re both naked and Rina reclaims her dreams and realizes her true foe after trying to kill him and finding she can’t… except this leads to basically nothing in the real world since she’s still unconscious and not in control of her maturing insect. So Daisuke just super jumps up and pulls her out of the core in one hit like she did for Centi. This turns out to be too late, as she just up and dies, shattering into dust after having a little crying scene with Daisuke and asking him to save Shiika. He finishes off Rina’s insect monster, Devourer disappears laughing, and Daisuke shambles off with his boss seemingly dying as well. For that matter, I think all the various agents and Fallen in the GARDEN were unlikely to get out of that unscathed.

Meanwhile, Shiika just sort of… walks off the gaping, bleeding hole in her torso to have an even easier to animate mindscape talk with herself. During this she talks down her insect again, just in time for Daisuke to show up and hug her.

Cut to some time later with Shiika waking up in a hospital bed, mostly fine, and getting the bad news about Rina from Daisuke. Also, the epilogue shows that Daisuke’s scheming jerk boss seems to have made it despite being squashed, shot, and left for dead. You figure that one out because the show’s over.

This was a hard one to get through. It had a fairly decent concept for an urban fantasy battler. The idea of these superpowers that are also living things that eat the hopes and dreams of their hosts to their eventual doom has a lot of pathos and establishes well a “power at a price” dynamic that’s solid for putting stakes into action as well as a deep connection to a character’s inner world that can be explored. But the only character the show actually explores in a meaningful way is Rina, with perhaps partial credit for Shiika in the last episode or two.

I liked Rina at least a little. Sure, her Tsun start of the Tsundere game was off the wall arbitrary, but she at least had wants and convictions that were dynamic and led to conflict both inner and outer. When she doesn’t want to forgive Daisuke on learning his government agent identity despite having already admitted to herself that she loves him, it’s a decent scene. When she died in Daisuke’s arms, face streaked with both her tears and his and lamenting how she was so stupid (recalling a much better tragic heroine, Sayaka Miki), I felt a little sad. But that’s the absolute best that can be said about Mushi-uta.

Mostly, the show is just dull. The visuals aren’t uninspired – rather, they take whatever inspiration someone along the line had and directly, emphatically throw that in the trash. It doesn’t know how to be an action show, and doesn’t know how to maintain the tension while puttering around everyday life like a proper thriller would. Every once in a blue moon the show will do something worth watching, at least sort of, but for most of it’s running time it’s throwing up little aside from dead air.

I’ll let Mushi-uta scrape by on a D-, because of Rina and because the concepts for some of the monsters are delightfully horrific even if the studio absolutely could not deliver on those concepts, but at D- the show itself is still a net negative on value. It’s not even particularly close. If you’ve ever thought about watching this one, do yourself a favor and think again.