‘Kimetsu no Yaiba’ has not been the only anime that has started its new season in theaters (although logically it has been the most popular), because ‘Oshi no Ko’ also premiered in style happening on the big screen in Japan.
Now it has already reached streaming, and with the surprise we can also watch it for free for a while through AnimeBox. But already basicOshi no Ko’ it comes with several surprises and twists, and not all of them pleasant.
Being an idol is not as pretty as it seems
After ‘Kaguya-sama: Love is War’ aka akasaka launched as a screenwriter with ‘Oshi no Ko’, which is illustrated by Mengo Yokoyari and already has 10 compilation volumes. The plot follows Ai Hoshino, a teenage singer who takes a break from public life leaving his fans hanging.
The reason is that she is pregnant and needs to keep it a secret, so she goes to a rural doctor’s office. Gorou Honda, the doctor who treats her, turns out to be a big fan of hers and promises her that everything will be fine and that her babies will reach the world safely, but if there was little drama on top of it, the doctor is attacked by Ai’s stalker. And when she wakes up, it turns out that she has died and has been reincarnated as one of the babies of her favorite idol.
‘Oshi no Ko’ opens with a 90-minute episode covering the early lives of Ai’s twins, Ruby and Aquamarine... and the truth is that everything happens and the reincarnation twist is only the first in the series.
I am not going to go into bursting more of the plot, because the truth is that it seems to me that ‘Oshi no Ko’ manages to play very well with all these moments that you don’t see coming. Because although you can guess where the shots are going to go, the first chapter has served as a perfect prologue but it also completely shakes up what looks like it’s going to be the plot.
Besides the wow factor, the other big draw to anime is Doga Kobo animation. The art of the manga is already beautiful and they have been able to transfer the style very well and take it one step further, especially in the musical performances. And now, in the most sinister and disturbing moments, they have also cast a very different finish that manages to make those scenes much murkier.
big yikes who are there
Thanks to all this, a good rhythm, great songs, the balance between drama and comedy and a beautiful animation, ‘Oshi no Ko’ has achieved a score of 9.35 on My Anime List, surpassing the unbeatable ‘Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood’ as the best anime ever. It’s quite common for the first chapter of an anime to score so high as to sneak into first place, like ‘Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War’ did, but that of ‘Oshi no Ko’ It has managed to be even higher than normal.
Now, although the first chapter has started with a very strong bombshell, it remains to be seen if it maintains it from now on. Above all because There are several red flags that accompany ‘Oshi no Ko’ and one of them is that sometimes it’s not quite clear whether it romanticizes the idol industry or criticizes it.
From the outset, Ai is presented to us as an ideal doll who lives to smile and make her fans happy, and everyone seems to be more concerned about the fact that an idol is pregnant than that she is 16 years old and does not know who she is. the father or how we got here. But as the point of view of the story she is almost all the time a doctor in her thirties turned into a baby, we also don’t get too deep into what’s going on in Ai’s head nor how he is leading his career or the drama of raising his children in secret.
Yes, we touched a lot of the shady industrysuch as that singers and actresses cannot admit in public that they have a partner or that they are married, because that would break the fantasy for his fans. And for an idol to have a boyfriend (or in Ai’s case, children) makes her impure and a con artist.
Breaking a spear in favor of ‘Oshi no Ko‘, the way in which these teenage singers are romanticized and sexualized is not a problem of the anime itself, but rather a cultural and social issue and it is enough for an essay in itself. so though It talks about the pressure these girls are under and about this whole world full of disappointments, anxiety and the need to measure oneself with others.Yes, there is a little aftertaste of lost opportunity to scrape a little more on some issues.
Because although ‘Oshi no Ko’ is full of shady moments that seem to want to criticize the subject, it also turns the page very happily… And it adds very strange moments with a baby sexualizing his own mother because he has the mind of a man in his thirties who drools with a teen idol. Anyway, there’s a lot to unpack here.
The good? That if you manage to set aside these normalized moments by putting on a firewall, ‘Oshi no Ko’ is quite addictive and really pretty to look at. The first chapter is an ideal prologue to start with the story, and on top of that it leaves us with an explosive cliffhanger that makes us want the next chapter to arrive, so it couldn’t start on a better footing.
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