Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror is a show about a girl called Yohane, who is trying to make it big as a pop idol when… let me start over. Yohane the Parhelion is a show about a girl called Yohane trying to fit in in her small town home, alongside her giant talking wolf… let me start over. Yohane is a show about a fantastical world with mythical beings, talking animals… one talking animal… magic music and… hold on, I think I need to start over again. This is a show about the bonds between a group of special young women and how they can hope to dispel a dark magical calamity threatening their town, and… You know what, I’ll try the simple version.
Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror is a show. Let’s talk about it.
So, as I alluded to in the opening, our main character is Yohane, a young woman who at the start of the show is an egotistical brat in manner, trying to strike out on her own and make it big in the big city of either Tokai or just Tokyo depending on what localizer you ask. However, after botching her auditions, probably due to that whole egomaniac act, she has to call home. Her mother refuses to send her any more financial aid without Yohane at least coming home, and so Yohane does.
There in the little town of Numazu, she learns that her mother will be out for the summer, and so Yohane is tasked with taking care of the house and finding something she can do before summer ends. Basic enough, really, and a fine little slice of life setup. Helping Yohane in her quest is Lailaps, her pet pony-sized talking wolf. What.
Yeah, it turns out that despite the opening seeming to take place in a more grounded universe, Numazu isn’t exactly your average small town Japan. We meet another Numazu resident, who seems to have a one-sided (at first) friendship towards the prideful and kind of jerkish Yohane. This is Hanamaru, who works as a baker selling bread with her giant truck-sized pink pig following her around decked out as the mobile stall. These are the only two characters to have giant animal companions, only Lailaps talks, and we learn later that it’s not just coincidence that she doesn’t seem to talk to others, it’s actually that only Yohane can understand her. What.
We spend a little time getting Yohane out of her shell as she tries to do work as a fortune-teller, even though she’s really bad with it, and in the process meet a few more friends. To Yohane’s credit she shapes up rather quickly, and it’s clear she’s not actually a bad girl at heart.
While most of the town residents we meet don’t have giant animals, they’re all a little eccentric. There’s the scrap dealer with her robot frog, the over-the-top “chief officer” with her futuristic command center, and so on. There are so many friends in this show, both in terms of the main group and in terms of the other side characters like the surprisingly normal trio of kids who bother Yohane time and again that it’s hard to keep track of them.
Out in the woods around town, Yohane finds a big tree stump she used to use as a mock stage. She gets up there again, swinging around a stick like it’s a magical girl want, only for the stick to actually transform by magic into a mystical staff, making Yohane something of a Magical Girl I suppose. She takes this entirely in stride and doesn’t do much with either her magical status or the staff for most of the show. What.
While out in the woods, Yohane encounters a dark miasma that seems to turn the normally peaceful animals like deer and such violently aggressive. She’s saved from this scenario by the arrival of some of the town girls in costume as masked heroes and the chief girl suited up in power armor and riding a magic motorcycle powered by a little fairy named Ruby who is also evidently her sister. They have themselves a completely out of place action scene with tropes from different genres and then pretty much never acknowledge this situation again, bringing any of this stuff back for maybe one episode towards the end. What.
Well, this miasma seems as good a plot hook as any, so Yohane looks into it. She learns that the histories of Numazu regarding the topic seem to be incomplete, but that she might be able to learn more if she goes to the dark magic island off the coast of Numazu and has a chat with the Demon King. What.
In any case, Yohane does just that, arriving on the island full of cute deep sea critters floating in the air and earning an audience with the Demon King who lives in the creepy castle on the island. Said Demon King is a young woman named Mari. Whose only difference from normal people seems to be that she has horns that give her super hearing. Mari is sad because she’s lonely and afraid that if she goes and meets normal people they’ll fear and hate her because she’s different. Yohane assures Mari that the Numazu folks aren’t jerks, and gradually helps her get to know people, while also learning more about the whole dark fog thing. Evidently it’s a periodic evil Calamity and it will be stopped if someone “gathers all the resonances” and other magic babble where singing is the answer. This is probably the most sober and lucid movement of the show.
The meat of the show ends up being sequences like Mari’s: getting to know and befriend various girls, each new friend adding a glyph to Yohane’s magic staff. Eventually they get the bright idea that they’ll all put on a concert at the summer festival, and we spend some time building up to that. The talk of Calamity and the dark fog don’t go away, but they sort of fade into the background, and it seems like everybody assumes their little idol concert is going to do the job of warding off bad, probably because Yohane is some kind of Magical Girl and that’s an encouraging thought.
By one thing and another the summer festival comes. People enjoy themselves and, ultimately, Yohane and all her friends put on a concert for the whole town. This concert busts into a full-on produced music video. Costumes the characters weren’t actually wearing, transparently overdubbed singing, non-diegetic musical accompaniment, lights, a different stage, the works. You know, stuff that we haven’t used in this show following a theme we hadn’t really touched on since episode 1. What.
However, it seems that Yohane and friends having their out-of-body singing might not have cleared up the Calamity. At the same time, a talent scout from Tokai saw the whole thing and has decided to give Yohane a second chance, meaning she’s all ready to leave Numazu and become a star. This comes much to the displeasure of Lailaps, who seems to have a lot on her mind.
We dig into the past and psyche of Lailaps, and the Calamity striking ruins Yohane’s going away party. Between it all, Yohane reaches an emotional low and even tries to throw her magic staff into the river and be rid of it, only for Lailaps to fish it out in an attempt to actually support Yohane. Most of the last arc is focused on the relationship between those two, with the other girls being accessories at best, even as the Calamity goes from angry deer to something that looks like an actual brewing magical apocalypse. Among other things, we learn that Yohane was always magic and in fact being able to understand Lailaps was a spell she cast. The two come to terms about their relationship, which ends the spell but empowers Yohane’s staff with the last bit of heart-to-heart she needed.
Thus, in the final episode, as everything is going to hell, Yohane faces the Calamity, now in the shape of a giant black flower in the sky with thorny roots forming a dome of lightning over Numazu. Her voice reaches out to her friends, and they all join her on the beach to strike up… another magic idol concert with full production, choreography, and dubbed singing that basically inserts an out of place music video into the show. The Calamity doesn’t like that and sends Yohane to a dark space to think about what she’s done for the shortest “all hope is lost” beat ever, and of course the voices of Yohane’s friends reach her and return her to reality along with them She starts to sing – actual diegetic vocals that sound like the character… for a couple of seconds before the music video cuts back in with the same song and dance as the first one, making the interruption from the Calamity entirely pointless. This time, they get all of Numazu to sing along, and the dark flower is no more. What.
Following that day, Numazu puts itself back together into the quirky magic town it always was. Yohane has learned to love it so she’s staying, it now being okay that she still doesn’t have a normal job, but all her friends are with her and I guess they want to kind of be idols at home, so she clearly isn’t too bad off. Lailaps (after a brief spirit realm talk in the no hope spot) gives us a bark, and we can leave this show behind.
I repeat: What.
Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror might be the most scattered show I’ve seen. Individual scenes, even most of the individual episodes, are perfectly well constructed, and the plot as a whole, while bonkers in some senses, does technically have a fine beginning and end and clear chain of cause and effect.
But the choices made in this show are loud and bizarre and don’t fit together in any sense. It wants to be an idol show and a slice of life show and a magical girl show and a fantasy epic and it refuses to even try to blend things. It’s going idol today? Full music videos! Magical Girl? Let’s bust out all the urban fantasy tropes with masked heroes and a fairy motorcycle. Fantasy Epic? Every fantasy epic has a Demon King, right? Let’s put one of those in local to the scenario.
The closest element to being done right is the slice of life. This is the show’s comfort zone and when it’s just depicting Yohane befriending these girls, some of which (like Mari, and a naturalist from out of town) have their own issues that they need help overcoming and some of which help Yohane with her issues, it’s actually kind of strong.
Sure, most of the girls don’t have enough time. I remember Hanamaru, the Chief, the Natualist, and Mari in terms of personality, Ruby and the Mechanic as being there… and then there were at least two more who contributed sigils to Yohane’s staff who I’d really have to rack my brain to recall anything about. I think they were the delivery girl (air mail by Legend of Zelda “Shoot yourself out of a cannon and deploy glider” means) and the innkeeper (normal) but without picking back through the material I’m not actually 100% sure that those were the friends who joined her up on stage.
But on the other hand, I do remember some of those pretty well, and the scenes with them were enjoyable. Of special note is Lailaps. Lailaps and Yohane have really good chemistry for most of the show, with Lailaps making Yohane bearable at the very start when she’s being an unlikable egotistical jerk.
There are some shows that seemed to have been created by an order of succession, like Bubuki Buranki changing halfway through. Others seem to have been created by committee, not being entirely one vision but still agreeing on some major guidelines. Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror feels like it was written via outright mad-libs, and that’s not a good look for a show.
I hate to do it, but my final rating for Yohane is a D+. There’s good material in this show, but its constructive bits are just too broken to recommend it as a viewing experience. There are bits and pieces that are a fine enough watch, even a good one, which is why the grade isn’t any lower, but I can’t actually suggest watching the full product.