When I started this anime I thought I was in for your regular ol' slice of life/fantasy anime. I wasn't expecting such a heart-warming, chilling, absolutely enrapturing, purely enchanting show. I certainly wasn't expecting to find such a masterpiece in an anime that I hadn't given much thought to before. From the end of the first cour all the way up until now at the very end I was hooked. Honestly I almost abandoned sleep for this show, but I thought for the sake of the quality of the post I left the last 4 or so episodes for today (2/27) and oh boy am I glad I did.
{LOL you can skip the next paragraph if you hate when I give lectures}
One thing I have to side note and apologize for is the fact that I don't have any screenshots. I was watching it on Netflix. You might scoff and say "what kind of trash anime watcher watches things on Netflix?" or even say "wow, how lazy" and while I do understand your sentiment and I do harbor some guilt about the lack of visual stimulation in this post, I also believe that not having to stop three or four times every episode at least to get some screenshots greatly increased the amount I enjoyed this anime. I wasn't thinking about which scenes would look especially great as screenshots. I wasn't thinking about which subbed scenes would be great to add in for comedic effect. I could just watch in the moment and laugh and cry and just feel whenever I wanted to. I think that's what I've been lacking for a while now. I've just been thinking about the screenshots and not living right there and then and just letting myself be fully immersed in the show. I recommend you watch like that. I think the best way to enjoy anything is to just let yourself be swept away by it which sounds like something so simple, but it's also one of the most moving experiences you can have. My ballet teacher used to tell us that while we were in the studio that we shouldn't stress about things going on outside of the studio, that we should cast away all of our worries in order to dance the best that we could. Watching anime should be the same way.
{Spoilers}
By the first cour, almost everyone's character has become fleshed out. You learn who's who and all about their different quirks. So with the beginning of the second cour you get a sense of who people are, and while for some of them they stay the same like Lotte, Sucy, and Amanda, for characters like Diana, Professor Ursula, and for Akko they change and grow in some fundamental way. Seeing the complexities of each character and how Studio Trigger is able to characterize each one of them so subtly with wordless scenes and hidden motivations and pasts make them all the more convicting and fascinating. It's almost like watching real people with all of their different facets and flaws.
Take Diana for example. For a while now she's been the privileged ojou-sama. She's been the aristocratic know-it-all that no one really likes because of how perfect she is. However, we're able to learn a lot more about her through other people and how she interacts with them. In the episode 19 when it's revealed what Diana's home life is and then later on in the cour when it's revealed that she's just as big of a Shiny Chariot fan as Akko is, your heart melts. At the end of episode 19 when she expresses how grateful she is to Akko, her humanity is revealed and you can't help but feel sympathy for this girl that was held up to all of these Herculean expectations and how she was crushed and molded into this perfect person that the Cavendish family was supposed to be. And we as people that are all held up to expectations, of perfection like Diana, of familial obligations, of anything that life tosses at us really, resonate so strongly with her. She is first and foremost portrayed as a perfect person, but underneath she has her own convictions and desires the same as anyone else. I think the glimpses we get of Diana as a hard-working and driven individual is something beautiful. She's not perfect naturally, she's had to work for what she has and against extremely unfavorable circumstances to get where she is. The way that her character is portrayed is just wonderful, and if you didn't like her in the first cour, don't worry, I didn't really like her either. But now, now she's just amazing.
Honestly the second cour was where it was at with the deep and complex characters. Like Croix who showed up in the second cour as the new and super high tech professor that was here to revive magic with the help of science. Side note, for the first couple of episodes I kept thinking about the carbonated, overpriced bubble water brand Le Croix every time I heard her name. But that's besides the point. I think what struck me the most in a very subtle way was the fact that she eats instant noodles. Don't take this the wrong way. I don't just fixate on random things. Like her eating instant cup noodles seems like such a menial thing, but why would Studio Trigger put that in if it wasn't significant in some way? Like she's doing all of this high tech magic and she's dressed super cool, but underneath all of that she's just a normal girl. When there's flashbacks of when Croix and Chariot were students at Luna Nova, Croix is always depicted in casual clothes, wearing a hoodie and sneakers and similarly in flashbacks Chariot is depicted wearing her performing clothes. At some subconscious level you compare Chariot and Croix to one another and while one impresses you physically, the other leaves something to be desired. Croix is what I imagine in our world to be like a CS major or an engineering major, late nights in a sweatshirt working on a project and eating cup noodle. She seems so relatable and her lifestyle relates so much to a lot of college students I know that prioritize their academics and their projects over their health, that it's easy to find similarities between her and real life people. Also the disparity that occurs when she's working on her energy absorbing cubes versus her eating cup noodle is insane. Like I can't get over it. I don't think I'll ever be over it. Maybe it's a subliminal message about the evils of cup noodle. And beyond her value as a relatable character on a mannerisms level, I think everyone can relate to her when the Shiny Rod picks Chariot over her. I think we can all relate to the thoughts that we have when things don't go your way and someone else seems to be put on a pedestal. You feel kind of betrayed by the world and you might even feel like the other person didn't work as hard or wasn't as deserving of whatever you had desired. And that might bring you to do something extreme. Perhaps not as extreme as Croix, but still.
The most plot twist-ish, I mean obviously this is subjective, character was Professor Ursula, or should I say Chariot du Nord. She was such a good mentor to Akko this whole time, helping her find the words, waking up early to help her with her magic. On the surface without thinking about it, it just looks like she's helping Akko out of the goodness of her heart, when in fact she's doing it out of guilt. She unknowingly stole some of Akko's magic back when she didn't even know Akko, didn't know the consequences of harnessing people's magic. It's heartbreaking really to think about her initial motivations, however they're also so real and so human. Sometimes you love and care about someone not because you're a selfless person, but instead you do it out of guilt or duty. And while that isn't a love born out of purity, it can become a strong and stable sort of love that can be beautiful in its own way. When you think about how Chariot was put under so much pressure and her smile was smothered out by the expectations held by other people, not unlike Diana, all because she wanted to make the world happy, it makes your heart hurt thinking about how she caved under the pressure. But I think out of the mistakes that she made when she was young, she was able to grow into a dependable teacher that never gives up on her pupil. Shiny Chariot was Akko's hero, but Professor Ursula was her mentor. And while for some people their hero and mentor are the same, I think sometimes the mentor is the unsung hero of people's stories.
And the star of the show Akko. She's a piece of work. But it was certainly a pleasure following along with her bildungsroman, how she worked her way through the difficulties of becoming a witch and succeeded for the most part. Put bluntly she plowed her way through and through perseverance was able to make her dream of meeting Chariot come true. Along the way she was able to overcome some of her shortcomings like her inability to be patient or her bull-headed nature. But I think it was her shortcomings and clumsiness which made her so endearing. Without Akko certainly the show wouldn't have been as entertaining and it wouldn't have been quite so uplifting. Because of her, LWA was a star. There were so many ups and downs and even times where Akko's spark almost flickered out, but her happy-go-lucky attitude and iron horse work ethic pulled her through. Why does this sound like I'm signing her yearbook? I can't quite put into words how determined and beautiful Akko is. Maybe it's because I can't relate to how driven and brightly she shines. I guess you'll just have to watch yourself to really see. I was talking to V about when she found out that her childhood hero Chariot was actually Professor Ursula and how she had stolen her ability to fly. We were talking about her reaction to that unpleasant reality bomb and how I couldn't relate to that and how V thought she should've been angrier. I was thinking about that and I thought it was interesting. Like we both had watched the same episode, but his opinion as to how Akko should've acted was different to mine which shows how people see Akko differently and react differently to her. It's fascinating really how characters can impact people in a multitude of variations. Just food for thought haha...I don't really know where I was going with that.
But in any case thanks for sticking through to the end of this blog post. It probably wasn't that engaging or exciting, but I enjoy giving my two cents. If you haven't watched it already I highly recommend you watch LWA. The music and art style have a very light hearted and cute feeling. And it's overall a very inspirational watch. I feel like this kind of story is repeated over and over again, but you can't really get tired of it because we all need a reminder of how we should keep reaching higher and higher to achieve our dreams. Because the real magic is inside of you.
