What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

Before starting it I skimmed the description and saw pieces of some trailers. What I thought it was going to be about was an artist struggling with a mental block by retreating into media. For example, since she was having issues with writing a love story I thought the plot would largely revolve around her consuming love story media and, from the perspective of the audience, self inserting almost like an isekai (except we'd know it's in her head and she's actually sitting watching a movie or whatever). In those "retreats" she'd overcome whatever personal growth gap she was dealing with.

I was kind of right, but in a way that was less fulfilling than I was picturing. I was right in that the story does involve the main character, who is struggling to represent love in her own work, that is taken to another world that is a different piece of media. She is in that world the entirety of every episode except the first and last, and during most of that time it is made unclear if she is fully isekaied or may eventually return to reality.

I have to give the show big credit for it's visuals. It is very well animated. Character designs are good and all that. But, the show is pretty terribly paced and would've made a better movie than a show.

Most of the episodes take place in a fantasy world under attack by an alien race referred to as Voids. Many of the episodes can largely be summarized as "Voids attack and then Natsuko, the main character, uses her powers to save everyone" with a sprinkle of "I've seen this movie before so I know what's going to happen" thrown in. That cycle gets old fast. Her power is that what she draws comes to life and this more-or-less means she'll just draw the counter to whatever the Voids are doing, at worst she sometimes doesn't know what to draw for a moment.

Eventually Luke, the main character of the movie she's in, falls in love with her and from there on its a combination of Void attacks and him trying to get her to like him back. I'm not going to go too much into the finale, but it should be rather obvious at this point that the conclusion of her journey is confessing her love for him. When she finally does the world fades away and she returns to reality with a new found understanding of love and goes on to direct a hit love story movie.

Looping back to that I think it would've been a better movie: the cycle where they're just fighting Voids is like half the season and adds very little. It makes it feel like it's just a standard magic isekai monster fighting anime, causing it to completely lose the tone of a story about someone learning about love for most of it's runtime. I wish it had been tightened up into either a movie or to have been broken up differently. 12 episodes is a long time for the payoff "main character confesses her love to the hero of her favorite movie since childhood."

The plot revolving around Raticate's death almost crossed into a little too much fixation on a goofy fan theory, but it's neat that the author just wrote a bit backwards whenever he needed to give some extra weight in the present. The way Green's maladaptive response is starting to seep into resentment from his team is fantastic.