Episode 1171 of One Piece is a solid weekly entry that keeps things at a low ebb but isn’t too slow.

The major players of the arc are moving into place and taking their dramatic positions on stage. Luffy and Zoro have set Loki free, and he’s about to make that everyone’s problem. Gerd, Road, and the gang do a bit of Straw Hat delivery and a bit of transit. Usopp and Brook get wasted and Nami – poor, sweet, innocent Nami – is left bereft of treasure. Meanwhile, the Knights of God are about to descend on the defenseless youth of Elbaph with terrible intent.

The needles on all the gauges are tilting into the red zone, and the steam whistles are blaring. Dinner ain’t ready, but the pot is about to bubble over.

Which is all to say that it does a terrific job of establishing the stakes and tension. We as the audience know that It’s About to Go Down in every area where there’s a down to go. And it’s going to get real ugly real fast, whether it’s old feuds or new atrocities.

My favorite nod to this is the way the Holy Knights are portrayed in this episode. Last episode gave us their rather silly transportation and goofball introduction as they suited up, but this week there’s none of that pretense. All that we get is a slow, merciless walk up the tree towards the kids playing innocent little games. They don’t say a single word; we hardly see their faces, and their weapons and garb are shown through a deep maroon filter that tells us everything we need to know. It’s all murderous intent now; this is the “Master Anakin?” moment right before the younglings become statistics. It’s hard not to be afraid for them, and you want to yell at the screen for someone, anyone to pay attention.

The sound design should get special mention this week. There’s a lot of giant-on-giant action which can lose some of the sense of scale needed for such big characters. But the sound design really sells the immense stature of these figures, whether it’s the satisfying thwack of Gerd’s axe hitting Road or Loki inexorably rising from his place of bondage. The scale is told audibly when the visuals might not suffice, and it’s very effective.

I’m excited but also terrified of what we have in store next week…

Rating:

One Piece is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

The official website for the television anime of Umikaze Minamino‘s Nia Liston: The Merciless Maiden (Kyōran Reijō Nia Liston: Byōjaku Reijō ni Tenseishita Kami-goroshi no Bujin no Kareinaru Musō Roku) light novel series revealed on Tuesday the anime’s first promotional video, key visual, additional cast and staff members, and October 6 debut.

Newly announced cast members include:

Fūka Izumi as Rinokis Funk

Rina Honnizumi as Hildetora Altoir

Rina Hidaka as Reliared Silver

The additional staff members are:

The anime will debut on October 6 on Tokyo MX at 9:25 p.m. JST, then on the BS NTV, and MBS channels. The anime will hold an advance screening of its first three episodes on September 22 at esports TOKYO BAY studio.

J-Novel Club releases the novels digitally and describes the story:

A great hero lies undefeated on her deathbed, regretting that she never found a foe who could take her down. She never intended to meet her fate anywhere other than on the battlefield, and her peaceful demise has her wishing desperately that things could have been different…But when she suddenly comes to in the body of the young, frail Nia Liston, she’s got an all-new fight ahead of her. Nia is a sickly child, meaning she has a long way to go before she’s in fighting form. Now that she’s been given a second shot at life, however, she’s determined to get what she wants. She’s going to live—and die—for battle this time! Make way for the Merciless Maiden!

Honoka Inoue stars in the anime as the titular Nia Liston.

Motoki Nakanishi (Love Is Indivisible by Twins, Summoned to Another World for a Second Time) is directing the anime at KONAMI animation with Haruta Segi as the assistant director. Gigaemon Ichikawa (Himitsu no AiPri, PuniRunes three seasons) is in charge of series scripts, Yūki Itō (Mob Psycho 100 II OAV key animator) and Kana Tosaoka (Kantai Collection -KanColle- film in-between animator) are designing the characters. Naoki Endō (Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, Nijiyon Animation) is composing the music, and Hiromi Kikuta (Aikatsu!, Blue Period, Haikyu!!) is directing the sound.

Minamino launched the story on the Shōsetsuka ni Narō website in 2019, and ended its run there in 2021. Hobby Japan started publishing the novels with illustration by Jishaku in September 2022. Katana Canata started drawing the novels’ illustration from its third volume in 2023. (The anime credits both illustrators for the original character designs.) Hobby Japan published the 11th volume on June 1.

Kabuto Kodai launched the novels’ manga adaptation on Square Enix‘s Manga UP! service in 2022. Square Enix published the manga’s first compiled book volume in May 2023, and the eighth volume on February 6. Square Enix‘s Manga UP! Global service publishes the manga in English.

Sources: Nia Liston: The Merciless Maiden anime’s website, Comic Natalie

Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.

Sylvia and Coop resurrect a meme to delve into the most important question about Goodbye, Lara.

The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Crunchyroll streams Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day, Draw This, Then Die!, and Goodbye, Lara.
Prime Video streams Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX.
Retro Crush streams Adolescence of Utena.
Tubi streams Baby Assassins.
Teppu is available from Kodansha.
Revue Starlight is available on home video from Sentai Filmworks.

Coop


So I’m there watching this delightful new take on The Little Mermaid from the talented folks behind Revue Starlight, and I’m suddenly hit with an anecdote about someone losing a game of chess to a dog…

Do you know what’s going on with that, Sylvia?

Sylvia


Possibly! Maybe! I’d like to talk about it at any rate, Coop. Yes, this is another installment of “This Week in Highly Insular Social Media Phenomena,” i.e., something I saw on Bluesky that isn’t too big a deal but I think speaks to an interesting anxiety worthy of examination. Plus it gives me an excuse to talk about this adorable fish some more. Win-win!

So first a little context is in order. “Losing chess to a dog” is kind of self-explanatory as a metaphor—you should possess the capacity to know/do better, in other words. Yet if memory serves, I saw it spring up in the cultural vernacular around the time when you had all those breathless articles about the latest Marvel/Disney movie “breaking new ground” in the realm of queer representation, only for the film itself, when released, to have perfunctory representation at best. This happened several times, so it got to the point where, if you were taking this hype at face value, you were, in effect, part of this image. And not the dog part.

I might still have a tough time fully processing the phrase, but I’ve seen enough performative “We’ve got a queer character in our movie!” to understand what it’s getting at. Queer audiences want to see themselves in the games, films, and anime they enjoy, but not as a checklist item to make whatever company seem progressive.

They want to see characters like themselves just existing, without their queerness being displayed as a marketing gimmick. Preferably, something like these two lovable doofuses just hanging out and experiencing the universally known pain of living in late-stage capitalism.

Precisely. And I think it’s worth remembering that (again, if my memory is correct) this sentiment originally stemmed from the largest media conglomerate in the world being weenies about queerness (a problem, I’ll note, that certainly hasn’t gotten better in recent years). There’s an argument to be made that every little bit of exposure helps, but I think that’s a far cry from expecting Disney to “challenge” its broadest target audience in that way, let alone praising a faceless corporation preemptively for potentially doing so.

Fast-forward to the present, and now we have Goodbye, Lara, a modern iteration on The Little Mermaid that has already become a critical darling with a devoted audience, myself included. Moreover, it seems to have some pretty gay components. Some homosexual subtext. Some highly yuri overtones.

Or does it? Who’s in control here? Us, or the dog?

That’s a good question, because I’m not totally sure. Especially after I noticed the intro’s emphasis on not only Punch Girl, but her family and friends.

It’s natural to assume that there’s a romantic spark between our main pair. We’ve been conditioned to look for it not only as an audience, but as human beings. Many of us jump to the conclusion that “love” only refers to the romantic kind, but it’s a much more granular concept than we’re programmed to believe. There’s familial love, platonic love, romantic love, and perhaps other forms I’m not fully aware of myself. In fact, this week’s episode even touched on this idea.

There could very well be a romance budding before our eyes, or perhaps Lara is discovering all the different shapes love can take while searching for her true love. It could even be both!

What we do know for sure is that Goodbye, Lara is not interested in doing a straightforward adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen‘s original fairy tale, and it is very interested in exploring and commenting on the nature of the “true love” Lara seeks. To expand on this week’s episode as an example, Lara finds a couple so stereotypically storybook that their names literally contain “ouji” and “hime.”

Yet the episode pairs this with Lara’s current obsession with corny romance films and the lack of a “happily ever after” between Himeka and her childhood friend. On one hand, you have the hyperreality of the movie industry, and on the other, you have the bittersweetness of an unrequited crush.

Neither of those is “true love” in the real and romantic sense that Lara is searching for, yet Himeka’s narrative stirs something in Lara all the same.

And just as that experience leaves its impression, another one pulls up around the corner in a sedan. However, Lara’s upcoming family reunion is looking to be more intense than touching.

Speaking of frosty relationships between siblings, our editor, Rebecca Silverman, was eager to point out how even the mouse has slightly flipped the script on “true love” with Frozen. The film was keen on playing with the romantic conceits calcified by Disney’s creatives, exploring how love isn’t just romantic. There’s no way that Goodbye, Lara was made without The Little Mermaid, the Disney Renaissance, and Frozen in mind. Dear god, I can’t believe Frozen is over a decade old now.

True! It’s also interesting that Goodbye, Lara has already made some alterations to its origin. In The Little Mermaid, the prince ends up betrothed to somebody else due to a case of mistaken identity, after which the Mermaid casts herself into the sea rather than kill the prince and regain her mermaid nature. In this version, though, the prince holds the blade and cruelly rejects Lara after seeing her mermaid nature firsthand.

If there is an argument to be made about the Lara & Mari endgame (and I believe there is), I think it lies in the inversions on this relationship. Mari meets Lara after she falls out of the sky, which is the reverse of how Lara met the prince. Mari sees Lara’s mermaid form right away and does not reject her. And Mari ends up saving Lara from drowning, which is how Lara met her prince originally. Clearly these are intentional framings meant to be contrasted against the story we know and/or have already seen in the premiere.

That might be a (depressing) topic for another column…but let’s bring it back to the chess dog issue. Goodbye, Lara is basically an original anime. We know its source, but we have no way of knowing where the story will go. We must, therefore, follow it in episodic chunks, one week at a time. This creates room for discussion and speculation. And thus, a mode of anxious speculation emerges: will the show be gay or not in the long run?

I saw this reach a kind of fever pitch after last week’s episode had this very romantically charged interaction between Mari and Lara, complete with an over-the-top cinematic gushing of emotions (and possibly other things).

KABLEWSH

But the question of “Will it Gay?” has been on viewers’ minds quite regularly as of late. Bandai Namco‘s pussyfooting around the status of Suletta and Miorine’s relationship at the end of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury became the infamous poster child of these anxieties in the anime space. Which becomes laughable when you’ve watched the entire show and see those wedding rings on their fingers. Not to mention that G-Witch‘s creatives more or less made their intentions queer in a fan book published following the series’ conclusion.

GQuuuuuuX looked be going a similar way, and “Will it Gay?” was seemingly answered with a “no.” Folks had strong feelings about that given the kerfuffle around G-Witch.

Somehow it always comes back to Gundam. But yes, those are two recent and apt examples. Speaking for myself, my estimation of Witch from Mercury rose thanks to the canonical wifery at the end, while I believe GQuuuuuuX dropped a few balls by pulling its focus away from Machu and Nyaan after the first several episodes. Granted, they are both flawed series with other positive and negative points, but I cannot pretend my thirst for yuri was not a factor in my appraisals.

My familiarity with that thirst also prompted me to join in on some of the dog-posting last week, albeit in my usual insufferable tongue-in-cheek fashion.

And in all fairness, I think most people doing this bit are also doing so with their tongues in their cheeks. It’s not all that serious, and I’m not calling anybody out specifically. But when there are a lot of people making the same joke about the same thing, there’s a nugget of genuine concern at the center of it. And the concern, potentially, is whether Goodbye, Lara will be a lesser show should it not follow through on consummating Lara and Mari’s relationship.

While I too would be thrilled if yuri is in the cards for Goodbye, Lara‘s endgame, I’m fine with it simply being a thoughtful exploration of the forms love takes. That alone has already gone a long way in endearing me to this show.

However, Sylvia, you also know that I’m feral for the gradually building queerness of the Baby Assassins films and their television series. Some might say it’s a great action series about a pair of misfit assassins, but I GREATLY DISAGREE. I dunno, I don’t think you just casually stop a knife with your bare hands for the homies, vow to crush anyone who torments your beloved, or break out into a giddy and exhausted “I love you” while on a post-victory beer run. Mahiro and Chisato’s relationship naturally grows over time, and is so satisfying once that “I love you” leaves the latter’s lips. The series doesn’t make a big deal about it either—their queerness is simply a part of who these two are.

I also think that a preemptively defensive attitude in response to the possibility of queerbaiting causes some people to forget how subtext (and in some cases, just plain text) works. I won’t recapitulate all my arguments from our column on Sound! Euphonium a while back, but focusing only on whether a work meets some nebulous criteria of “queer enough” tends to produce myopic readings, in my experience.

Regardless of its endgame, Goodbye, Lara already has notable lesbian subtext that’s integrated into its narrative and characters. Whether or not it becomes explicitly romantic, Lara and Mari already share a mutual love that’s paramount to the series’ core theme.

The idea of “queer enough” is harmful too, placing it right back into the same sort of “checklist item” territory we mentioned back when the dog entered the chat. Being queer isn’t a quantifiable thing for other people to gauge; it’s much more personal than that. And if Goodbye, Lara chooses to keep its lesbian themes as subtext, I understand. The audience isn’t always owed an explicit “I’m gay!” answer. Whether that happens should be on the character’s own terms. Just like it would be for anyone else.

Additionally, I’d assuage some fears with the reminder that Goodbye, Lara‘s director, Takushi Koide, was a vital creative voice on Revue Starlight and its sequel film. While none of those Stage Girls smooch each other onscreen, that doesn’t stop Revue Starlight The Movie from being one of the most powerfully sapphic works of art committed to film. There is no heterosexual explanation for a single second of its runtime.

Like, we’re not talking about Disney here. Fool me once and all that. This is a production from a studio and director who possess yuri bona fides. They know what they’re doing. If they are a dog, they have an Elo above 2300.

This dog can, in fact, hunt.

You’re not kidding! The composition in one of those shots is almost the same as the one above. But to jump off another of your Goodbye, Lara musings… We do need the Teppu anime. Which has also gone through its fair share of “Will it Gay?”

This scene certainly made me think so. Back when I first read through Teppu, I knew it as the “cool comic about buff girls fighting,” but I couldn’t help but feel the yuri flickering underneath the surface upon revisiting it last year. In reality, Teppu‘s a little more about self-discovery through sport, but who said that didn’t include discovering that you love WOMEN? Even if the other women around you are not. Given the way Natsuo talks about Yuzuko and a few other folks, I can see it. Even if it’s not seen explicitly as yuri by many who’ve read it. I could see a degree of “Yuri is in the eye of the beholder” at play here. Also, did I mention buff girls fighting?

I have very normal feelings about Teppu, I assure you. And while I will defend the merits of subtext to my dying day, we also need explicitly queer narratives, characters, and moments. From this season, for example, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day is textbook yuri. And apparently Draw This, Then Die! just joined the girl smooch club too.

And you can’t forget how THE FOUNDATIONAL TEXT slid back into theaters last month either.

Of course! Goodbye, Lara is, in many ways, the latest inheritor of Utena‘s legacy by way of Ikuhara’s influence. And that applies not only to its sapphic qualities and fairy tale commentary, but also to its striking and drop-dead gorgeous compositions with a flair for the surreal.

And I guess that’s what I fear if people put all their cards into whether or not Lara kisses Mari in the end. Goodbye, Lara has a smorgasbord of strong qualities that deserve praise and analysis. It’s my favorite show of the summer so far. I already cannot wait for next Sunday’s episode.

Unfortunately, you might not be able to break into next week’s fish right away. It’s looking like we’re going to be busy this weekend.

But I can guarantee you this: we will be talking about lesbians.

That’s my secret. I am always talking about lesbians. And in that spirit, and to be clear: I do very much want to see these two idiots grow old together.

Trust the process. Trust the pedigree. Trust the dog. Or don’t! I think Goodbye, Lara will be an anime to remember either way.

Bark bark, woof woof!