First Look: 2023 Anime Overview: Oshi no Ko (Patreon)

I ended up writing waaay more about this than I thought I would. Just describing the premise is an ordeal, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Oshi no Ko

Spoiler free premise: A doctor in a small town is a fan of a sixteen-year-old idol Ai Hoshino. But then Ai shows up with a secret pregnancy. Now he’s going to have to figure out how to deal with her secret and safeguard her from obsessive fans as he helps her give birth…

Spoiler for the complete first super long episode premise:

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…that is, until the doctor is murdered by Ai’s stalker and reincarnates as Aqua, one of the twin children Ai gives birth to. The other twin, Ruby, is also a reincarnated soul. She was a former patient of the doctor’s, a twelve-year-old who was a huge fan of Ai before dying of terminal illness. Both twins are unaware of the other’s former identity, but they both enjoy their new lease on life and come to love Ai all the more.

All seems well (I mean well for the twins, that is, not for the viewer who has to grapple with all this bizarre and creepy premise) until the same stalker that murdered the doctor murders Ai herself. Aqua realizes his father/Ai’s secret lover must have leaked Ai’s location to the stalker on purpose. The problem is that Ai never told Aqua and Ruby who their father was. So Aqua vows to track down his father and kill the man for what he did to Ai, whatever the cost. After becoming a teenager, he gets more involved in the entertainment industry and begins his search for his mother’s true killer in earnest.

Yeah, that’s a lot isn’t it? And it probably doesn’t help when I tell you that before he becomes Aqua, the doctor basically admits he, an adult man, wouldn’t turn down a date from the sixteen year old Ai, prompting the nurse to call him a lolicon (because anime will always insist on using that phrase where they should say ‘pedophile/ephebophile'). Or that baby Aqua refuses to breastfeed with Ai, but his twelve-year-old-girl-in-a-past-life twin happily does so with a huge, lascivious grin. (There’s also a discussion where Aqua says ‘he’ll let it slide’ when he learns Ruby was a girl in her past life too, she’s like ‘wow so great I was born a girl so I can enjoy mama's/Ai's breasts” and he’s like “no it’s not okay actually” and you just have to sit back and realize this is a conversation you’re watching on tv between toddlers. This is where your life has bought you. )

Why did you keep watching, you ask me when I say these things? Well, it was well-made and engrossing. The animation was great, the pace was snappy, and Ai was instantly endearing. Plus everyone was talking about it endlessly on a discord I belong to, and they said after the first episodes the weirdness of the reincarnation angle becomes less important, the horny baby antics go away, and it becomes basically a murder mystery and an examination of the entertainment industry. And that’s pretty much true. The show goes out of the way to handwave Aqua’s past life by saying going through puberty and infantile amnesia means he now doesn’t know where he starts and the other dude begins anymore, and he essentially feels like a teenager.

Where Oshi no Ko is truly compelling is it’s exploration of the predatory entertainment industry and the twisted misogyny and parasociality of idol fandom.

It hits some expected points- fans who freak out over their idols having a relationship and blame them for it are gross, and the industry that puts them in a box is gross- this is very basic stuff, but still underdiscussed in anime. A lot anime pretend all is well since the industry makes bank off idols. So it was a bit nice to see a character screaming ‘don’t blame women because you don’t have a girlfriend” at the endless twitter comments saying Ai ‘deserved’ being killed for ‘betraying’ her fans, but it’s clear the author did a lot of research on the entertainment industry and has a lot to share. A lot of what he has to share is really interesting, and I appreciate that he wanted to make sure Americans understand that Japanese people don’t have unions and it leaves them open to even more exploitation in its interviews.

(Even the bizarre premise of the anime is nod to a gross “joke” idol fans make- a lot of 2channers apparently joke about wanting to “be reborn” as their favorite idol’s child whenever there’s a marriage announcement.)

At the same time, Oshi no Ko doesn’t really go as hard as people act like it does. It’s not Perfect Blue, and it pulls its punches. It still goes for easy answers sometimes, and what’s worse, easy answers that lionize its male protagonist. Never is this more apparent that the cyberbullying arc.

First, let’s be clear- the cyberbullying arc focuses on a reality show actor, a girl named Akane, being driven to attempt suicide after a bunch of internet detractors harass her over something she did on the show (that the producers pressured her into doing in the first place). However, Aqua saves her at the last minute.

Hana Kimura lost her life in a very similar incident just a few months before this arc in the manga was published and the author’s spoken about it on record. Hana was a pro-wrestler who was on the reality show Terrace House, and what happened to her is the same thing in broad strokes, only she didn’t get a convenient rescue. But nobody bothered to contact Hana’s family about any of this, so Hana’s mother was blindsided when she heard about it, and claims some of the hate messages are identical to what the anime did. She pleaded that "Because it raises important issues, I would like to support a work like Oshi no Ko.  However, I don't think it needs to be done in a way that makes people  who have actually been victimized on social media suffer when they see it.”. Oshi no Ko fans, having just watched an arc about the serious consequences of internet harassment, were of course respectful to the grieving mother of a harassment victim- nah, they harassed Hana’s mom for criticizing the show.

All of that was already not a great look for the manga and show,and I think the kind thing to do would have been to conflict the family. But even if that wasn’t a thing, I didn’t like how this arc was handled. After Akane is saved by Aqua, he leaks her attempted suicide to the press. Though there’s a mention that this unethical, he’s never really taken to task or confronted with the fact this violation of her privacy could have led to another (potentially successful!) suicide attempt. Then he talks to the director, reminds him that Akane is a teenager and adults should protect children, the director has a change of heart and they’re able to release footage of the cast being friends, the harassment dies down and Akane immediately gets better offscreen, because that’s how trauma and depression works! God, ‘depression is nbd you recover quickly’ is one of my biggest fiction pet peeves. Considering how despicable the producers were to Hana IRL, the whole storyline wrapping up like this wasn't just sloppy and lazy, it was insulting.

Rather than explore with the actual messy fallout this would realistically have for Akane, it just had Aqua get to be the edgy savior who was In the Right even though his actions were horrible and could have had catastrophic consequences. Also the ‘adults should protect kids’ moral felt weak when Hana and many other entertainers who hurt themselves after being mistreated by fans and the industry were adults. Did they not deserve to be protected?

And I guess it sums up a lot of my problems with the show. It's painstakingly researched and talks about interesting stuff (though sometimes one character has to become an exposition machine just so we don't miss ANY of the author's research, which can feel awkward). It has some interesting and complex main female characters … but 3/4s of them have some romantic connection to Aqua, which grates. It’s more honest about the idol industry than most anime, but also pulls its punches when it comes to exploring actual mental illness and industry abuse. ‘Aqua is the smartest and all the girls are sooo into him’ gets so annoying. Two girls are already in love with him, and even without the really unnecessary ‘was a pedophile in a past life’ baggage, he barely has a personality. Aaaand there’s how we have to listen to him muse about whether he was in love with his mom. Aaaand there's the looming threat that the next girl to fall in love with him will be his sister, since she muses she was in love with the doctor in her past life.

Once she mentioned that, I started wondering if I should even come back to season 2. Leaning towards ‘no’ right now (definitely not if the manga really does…that). I don’t regret watching ONK- it was interesting, well animated and produced, and the theme song is a certified bop- but it’s also not something I could ever recommend to anyone. It’s the most fraught show I’ve watched in a long time, and in the end, I’m not sure all of its weird parts add up to a satisfying, truly subversive story.  It’s a mess, but time will tell if it’s an intriguing enough mess for me to come back to.