First Look: Fall 2024 Anime Overview: Acro Trip (Patreon)

I'm gonna try to post these early looks, as I think y'all on the $3 and above tier might still get my posts despite the freeze. Let me know if you can see this post! If no one does I'll make a switch.

Premise: Chizuko is a huge fan of her local  magical girl, Berry Blossom. The magical girl’s arch-nemesis is a villain named Chrome, but he’s…incredibly pathetic. He’s hardly a challenge for Berry Blossom, and Chizuko is disappointed because this means her hero doesn’t really get a chance to show her stuff. She has a lot of ideas on how Chrome could be a more effective villain, and he overhears her talking about some of them. Now he’s trying  to recruit her for his evil organization, saying that if she helps him, it will mean cooler fights for Berry Blossom that will make her rise in popularity. What’s a fangirl to do?

Acro Trip is a lot of fun, and I recommend it to any magical girl enjoyer. I also recommend it to anyone who loves pathetic failguys, because my man Chrome is the most hilariously pathetic of them all. You like bad boys? Well this man is literally bad at everything.

He’s incredibly endearing—his idea of  “evil” is flipping restaurant maps or littering, he trembles pitifully when a middle school girl hits him with an umbrella, he fucks up in every way possible. At the same time, he’s a sweetheart who clearly takes his responsibility to be a good “mentor” to Chizuko very seriously and cares about her a lot. The show loves him and so do I.

 But wait! Girl failures have their rep too!

Chizuko is incredibly relatable to all of us magical girl fangirls, and her matter-of-fact way of dealing with things bounces off Chrome's ditziness well well. She has her fair share of failgirl moments herself, usually caused by her…well, it definitely seems like it's her crush on Berry Blossom.

We’ve been there, girl. I do feel Chrome gets a little more of a spotlight than her, but we also get to see her actually develop, going from refusing to get involved with Chrome to embracing her power.

Meanwhile, one of my favorite running bits is her sweet lil’ grandfather who just rolls with every weird thing that happens and is way too excited to engage in criminal activity.

Berry Blossom herself is actually almost as big a dummy as Chrome is, with her mascot being the one who has to keep her on task. The classic dynamic! I do wish there was more to her, but I’ll discuss that later.

I felt a little concerned when it was confirmed Berry Blossom was a teenager and that Chrome was…probably in his mid-to-late twenties, because in the first episode there was a part where Chizuko seemed to think he was in love with Berry Blossom, and he was also very clear he was a masochist who is, uh, blissful when he gets punched in the face by Berry. However, the show immediately drops this. The idea of Chrome being in love with Berry Blossom never comes up again, and in fact it’s made clear he isn’t, as he repeatedly is more focused on being a good surrogate big brother to his “apprentice” over her. The masochism is mostly dropped too. On the other hand, Berry Blossom does seem to be developing a crush on Chrome, which makes me wary, but thankfully it’s extremely one sided right now. He’s completely oblivious to this, clearly doesn’t think of her that way, and it’s built on her constantly misunderstanding him requesting gifts to cheer up Chizuko (like her autograph).

It's not exactly a perfect show though,. As fun as it is, not all the gags hit, some side characters kind of dull, and my enthusiasm waned a bit as the series went on. The animation is…pretty rough. This anime clearly did not have a lot of resources allocated to it.

There’s also a bit of missed potential. It takes Chizuko way too long to get in the action, Chrome’s backstory would probably be more effective if his “rival” was a little more complex and sympathetic, there’s an interesting part in the finale where Berry Blossom mentions she doesn’t really have interests or hobbies and her mascot gave her purpose and then that’s just…brushed aside. Like how is it she doesn’t have any interests? She lives alone too, is she like, depressed? It feels like a major thing for her to say, and something Chrome should acknowledge but it’s like. "Well fight for your fans! They love you”. Perhaps it gets addressed in the manga or an (unlikely) season 2, but it sort of felt like the show wasn’t putting any thought into this heavy, kind of sad character detail they introduced. Whenever the show attempts to give its characters some depth and pathos it always seems a little half hearted.

The finale also set up a really dramatic conflict where various truths come out, and then just. Undid it all immediately. One of my least favorite tropes. There was obviously more manga left, but it really felt like the season just came to a stop rather than ended in a satisfying way.

However, the show succeeds at it’s main purpose- it’s a cozy good time for those who enjoy goofy, incompetent villains and goofy, incompetent magical girls. It’s a very sweet, silly, and occasionally funny show. Don’t go into expecting anything deep, but you can certainly have fun with it.

I implore you to give it a shot, because it’s fantastic that the lazy dark and edgy Madoka ripoffs are finally dying off, and we’re getting more variety again. We’re finally getting magical girl shows with fun premises, ones that aren’t reboots or Precure! So if you care about the genre at all, it’s so important to support them!