As an editorial writer, I can absolutely sympathize with 100 Girlfriends needing to regularly find new angles with which to approach its subject matter. New perspectives are needed to make sure things consistently feel fresh, and this week, that perspective is bird’s-eye. It’s a very top-down angle. Yasashiki Yamane is a big girl with an all-encompassing appreciation for every one of God’s creatures, and that viewpoint provides the lens through which this story of gentle giant girl gardening is glimpsed.

It happens immediately as the episode opens. Got to keep the audience guessing in all ways. Getting down to business so quickly embodies the simple order that Yasashiki operates on. As the gardening hobby indicates, she’s very down to earth, regardless of how high she stands above it. Similar to her heart-cracking introduction, the points of her personality and how Rentaro interfaces with them are cruised through quickly on her own terms. Yasashiki does have a complex about her height, but her interactions with nature already helped her accept herself and appreciate what’s unique about herself. So it’s a distinct setup from the last few girlfriends who specifically operated around Rentaro being the one to help them accept themselves.

That’s a nice shift, to say nothing of a warm way for 100 Girlfriends to start introducing more and more differently shaped girlfriends. The characters have mostly run the anime high-school harem gamut thus far (with Hahari as a moderately MILFy exception), so having Yasashiki as an extra-tall representative with thick, strong legs helps her stand out. Er, “stand out” being an especially appropriate operative here, and lord knows I’ve got to walk the line in terms of writing my own silly stuff about her character design without feeling like I’m mocking her the same way she was in her backstory. Yasashiki is great, genuinely!

It’s that genuine feeling that distinguishes the character and this episode as it finds the voice in its unique angle of approach. Yasashiki has mostly learned to love herself before she meets Rentaro (she does still have some hang-ups, as seen later), so their bonding can be shown developing via a much more grounded gardening get-together. There are still jokes, of course, including Rentaro physically breaking an onscreen text box or Yasashiki calling attention to her dedicated “weed garden” in an entendre I’m pretty sure was unintentional for the Japanese audience. But it’s a very gentle sort of funny. It eases viewers into what the appeal of hanging out with Yasashiki would actually be.

At least until the Vice Principal shows up again. Man, I’d honestly kind of forgotten about her, and she does not do any favors parallel to Yasashiki’s “everyone can be loved for who they are” concept. The Veep is, thankfully, not around too much, mostly facilitating Yasashiki’s fear of fire coming to the fore, and letting Rentaro get a save-in to really crystallize the romance. Fire indeed hot, and this romance burns hotter, even for a gentle soul like Yasashiki. Also, Rentaro’s confession of his other exponential entanglements lets 100 Girlfriends specifically term-drop polyamory (and its presence in nature!), which is always neat to get in a show like this.

The polycule thus introduced to Yasashiki continues with that distinguished perspective. She’s such a genuinely loving presence, possibly the most earnest girlfriend yet, that she notably starts immediately getting on well with several of her co-partners. She can bond over Hakari with flowers and find fun in carrying the littlest girlfriends on her shoulders. Putting these kinds of connections up front will be important as the collection of cared-for characters compounds in 100 Girlfriends. The relationship web has to be charted to show how each of the girls interacts with the others and gives those previous paramours something to continuously do and avoid getting lost in the crowd. Matching Yasashiki up with Kusuri and the other fun-size friends is naturally a great idea just for visual gag purposes (we already saw her demonstrating it with the yet-to-be-introduced extra-tiny one in this season’s opening episode) and I hope it continues. Each one of the other girlfriends is just as precious as this new one, after all, even if they have to be stacked vertically to match her in that arena.

The antics allow for consistent theming of those vibes even as the episode entertains the expected chaos of fourteen girls going through their various bits, just in flower crowns and dresses while gardening this time. Rentaro’s love-struck by all of them, as he should be, and that’s what matters. Well, that and convincing Yasashiki she’s also worthy of receiving that love. Small wonder she’s uncertain; she and Rentaro have been going out for a whole couple of hours by this point, she should know it’s real. The indication is that it’s specifically the affection-expressing element that still hangs her up on her height (nice to see her dad went to bat for her in the past though!). Of course, what she wasn’t counting on is the fact that Rentaro is a man of taste. Women are his favorite guy, no matter what differences they have. He’s a man who has so much love he’d prop all his girlfriends up so they could practice height-gap kissing like a romantically charged version of the “How to talk to short people” diagram. And yeah, this episode does indeed draw the act downright adorably.

Apart from the bits where an oversexed Vice Principal sets herself on fire, this is generally a lower-key episode of 100 Girlfriends, but it’s doing so with purpose. It’s still got the funny powering it, but here, the heartwarming moments feel even more embraced and unironic, with less undercutting them. Probably because nothing’s sneaking in under Yasashiki’s wide field of view. I do think there’s a tricky line between writing all these gags around Yasashiki’s height while also acknowledging the complex that comes from her being mocked for being different. But as with the defining details of all the girlfriends, in this case they succeed at making it appreciably light-hearted. This show thrives when it knows it has to make every entry feel different, because being different is a very good thing.

Rating:

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You Season 3 is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

Chris has watched at least 100 anime, and really really really really really thought most of them were at least okay. You can peruse his thoughts and see which cartoon girlfriends he’s reposting art of over on his BlueSky.

With the first arc of DIGIMON BEATBREAK doing a good job of setting up the show’s foundations through its episodic format, and the second digging a little deeper into the darker sides of its setting through a more tightly focused plot, the stage seemed set for Beatbreak‘s third arc to start deep diving into the show’s wider mysteries that have yet to be addressed. Instead, what we get here is a bit of a cross between the first two arcs, as this stretch of the show is roughly as episodic as its first, while also having a new ongoing threat looming in the background in the form of GIFT: a cult whose goal is to liberate Digimon from oppression they face within the current social order. As those descriptions imply, these two directions are a little at odds with each other, and although there’s still a lot of good material here, it results in this arc falling just a little short of being the whole sum of its parts.

While the episodic approach seems like it would be the obvious weak link here, it’s actually where we end up getting a lot of this arc’s best material. Sillier episodes like the Glowing Dawn members getting hypnotized into becoming obsessive pet owners for their Digimon, or one about a former Tactics member named Haruomi getting caught in a cooking contest between his Digimon partners do feel a little out of place this late into the show’s run, but they’re also a lot of fun, and even at their slowest, they don’t do much to kill any of the show’s momentum. It also helps that even these lighthearted episodes tend to be interwoven with heavier sub-plots like dealing with a Digimon that starves for affection after being tossed aside by their partner, or the aforementioned cooking contest leading to Haruomi trying to make amends for his violent past, so the series never ends up straying too far from darker subjects. One of the best in that regard is an episode centering around a shut-in girl named Chihiro who finds the courage to interact with the outside world again after befriending a Digimon named Algomon, but discovers that Algomon is too dangerous to live among humans thanks to how easily it can cause power outages, and subsequently put lives at risk. While Chihiro does still find the strength to step outside even after being forced to separate from Algomon for everyone’s safety, the conclusion is still somber enough to demonstrate just how complicated the relationship between the species can be, and that the path towards co-existence that Tomoro desires is going to be difficult to achieve.

This episodic approach also gives room for much-needed focus on characters besides Tomoro, and provides some of the supporting cast a bit more room to shine. Episodes like the one with Makoto reuniting with his estranged family who try to pull him back into their business, or the one with Maki being targeted by a Digimon assassin that killed her old partner, are good for showing what their lives were like before encountering Kyo, while also expanding more of the show’s setting by using them as opportunities to showcase some of the underhanded ways those at the top of its society operate or how the current system between Digimon and Cleaners came to be. Reina also gets some much needed attention here thanks to a couple of episodes centered around her anxiety at being the only one of the Glowing Dawn whose partner hasn’t gotten to their Ultimate stage, and while the setup is a little cliche (as well as a bit unfortunate to give to the most prominent female character of the cast), the show does a good enough job of tying these fears back to her past of being abandoned by her family, that it all feels in step with her character. The extra character focus also comes with the added benefit of Pristimon and Chirpmon finally getting their own evolution, and even if it’s a bit of a letdown that they’re forced to share one, it’s still good to get a little more diversity to the show’s musical score (though I still wish these battle themes were used more regularly).

Where these episodes struggle a little, though, is with this arc’s central plot and how it generally handles GIFT. With how much the first two arcs of the show highlighted how the social hierarchy created by the World Union abuses both Digimon and humans in various ways, introducing a group dedicated to taking them down in the name of wanting Digimon to be treated as living beings rather than glitches seems like it would be fertile ground for good commentary. Despite this, GIFT never evolves beyond the cult-like status they’re introduced in. While their presence is used to expose some of the World Union’s worst abuses, like using a shipping company to discreetly delete all of the Digimon the government has captured, they otherwise fail to come off as much more than a fairly generic group of bad guys. That issue is further exacerbated by the fact that while we get to enjoy Rose from the Five Stars and her posse, as recurring antagonists (with said posse being loving homages to Haruka and Michiru from Sailor Moon with the serial numbers filed off), the members of GIFT are mostly used as background villains in the more character-focused episodes, resulting in them being far less memorable. While the episodes featuring them do at least still paint the World Union as bad enough that it never feels like the show is asking the audience to root for its current status quo to be upheld, seeing as this is the only group we’ve met so far dedicated to taking it down, there’s certainly a lot more that could have been done with them.

The sole exception to this issue is with the group’s leader Miharu, who ends up forming a bit of a connection with Tomoro. Like him, she’s also lost family as a byproduct of the World Union’s attempts to maintain their secrets, and in her case it was her sister, who wanted to expose the presence of Digimon to society at large in an effort to find a way for the two species to coexist, but was ultimately silenced and driven to suicide after having her partner taken away. It’s a lot for a kids’ show to digest even by Digimon standards, but Beatbreak manages to parallel Miharu’s rage against the system at the injustice her sister suffered with Tomoro’s violent outbursts from back when he only cared about saving his brother in a way that feels generally well earned. At the same time, for as good as Miharu’s personal story is, she’s still only a single character, and it doesn’t quite do enough to make up for how underwhelming her followers are. This also isn’t helped much by the fact that Miharu’s attempt to forcibly expose the existence of Digimon to the public ultimately falls flat. While a failure to disrupt the status quo isn’t exactly a step for a cyberpunk story, it does still come off as a little anticlimactic. Since following through on it likely would have made for an easy setup for the show’s final arc, it’s a lot harder to tell how or how well the series will manage to stick its landing.

Despite some of these hiccups, DIGIMON BEATBREAK remains a pretty solid show on the whole. While the more episodic approach of the GIFT arc and its limited use of the group as antagonists do hold it back from being as strong as it could have been, there are enough good individual episodes here that it all mostly balances out in the show’s favor. It remains to be seen if this series will manage to go down as one of the Digimon franchise‘s best entries or fumble before it gets to the finish line, but for some of its faults, its willingness to continually engage with heavier subjects has at least served to make it the most interesting.

Play runs from September 16 to November 29 at Plus Theater in Seoul

A stage musical adaptation of the webtoon Your Letter will premiere at Plus Theater in Seoul, running from September 16 to November 29.

Soo-ah Kim is writing the the production, with Sang-ah Pyo serving as adaptor and director. Hye-joo Jeon, A-jin Lee, and Dan-i Kim have been cast in the lead role of Sori Lee.

The webtoon’s feature-length animated film adaptation originally debuted in Korea last year. Yong-Hwan Kim directed the film. The film has already won three awards at the Bucheon International Animation Festival and has been invited to both the Ottawa International Animation Festival and Poland’s Animator International Animated Film Festival.

The movie will also screen in Japan on September 25 with a Japanese-language dub starring Nako Yabuki and Kenshō Ono. Internationally, the film has been selected for Crunchyroll Anime Nights and will screen in the U.S. and Canada on August 17. Ticket sales began on Monday.

The story of the webtoon reads:

Sori is a special young girl – kind, caring and principled well beyond her years. Unfortunately, these are NOT the personality traits generally celebrated in middle school – especially Sori’s, where she’s bullied mercilessly for defending the defenseless until she herself becomes a target. To escape, she transfers to a new school where the same old problems begin to play out all over again – that is until a mysterious trail of letters leads Sori on a magical scavenger hunt through the hidden world that exists right below the surface of her new middle school. The mail trail is the work an anonymous guardian angel, whose mission seems to be to provide a soft landing for Sori at her new school. But who is this person? And why did he choose her? With each letter, secrets are revealed and bonds are formed – as Sori learns about friendship, flora, fauna and finding the good in people in this strange new environment.

The English version of the Your Letter webtoon is available on WEBTOON. Hyeon A Cho drew the series, which ended in 2019. Your Letter earned a near-perfect 9.98 rating during its webtoon run.

Ize Press released the series in a single-volume print edition in July 2024. The series is nominated for a Harvey Award this year.

Source: YNA (Ji-hyun Kwon)

---

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.