Animeposting 25.1.

I'm taking a pickaxe to my anime backlog, continuing from Planet With to Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight, and I'm once again forced to admit that everyone who said this would be my exact shit was super duper right.

To explain the whole premise would be to spoil the plot twist of episode 1, but just the setting of a highly-competitive all-girls performing arts school competing for the lead in the play of their extremely prestigious school festival play was already super fucking appealing to me as someone who loves a good rivalry and is always thirsty for female character centric battle shows and loves magical girls.

What I didn't expect is that the highly symbolic magic system of this show would be so appealing. I tend to be annoyed by allegory, always finding it overly ambiguous and never delivered in the right range of anvil-on-the-head. However, the magic in Revue Starlight being both place-dependent rather than character-dependent, and also theater-based made it interesting until I actually started to comprehend the underlying metaphor -- which I'm always slow at picking up in maybe-mundane-maybe-magic stories. If anything, I think it could be taken a little further. Like, I don't think these girls are old enough yet to have this kind of keen understanding of the limitations of theatre as medium, I would imagine they still have eyes bigger than their hands when it comes to the creative potential of whatever it is that they excel at.

I'm not quite done yet, I just wanted to get these feelings out now because I don't actually care how the final conflict between individual ambition vs the inherently collaborative nature of performing arts is resolved. I don't think whatever Revue Starlight actually has to say about that will change my mind about how good this show is, a rare for a show that wears its metaphor right on its chest like this. I'll be reporting back if it screws it up somehow, but for all the airtime is spent on character interactions, I do think this show understands its own messages well enough.

My only real gripe is that once again a show about theatre is stuck in the frame of the "single perfect performance" rather than really contending with the fact that out of all the performing art forms, theatre is the most alive and most immediate. It doesn't have second takes because it doesn't have to, because you don't run a show just once. I had this same problem with the theatre arc of Oshi no Ko, and I think it's just the problem with doing stories about characters dabbling in theatre rather than a show about a real theatre company. A school festival play is a thing you do just once, and I'm not gonna say that's not "real stage acting" or whatever -- it totally is, I'm not a snob -- but it's a fundamentally different kind of stage acting than the kind you perform over and over during a season, which I've yet to see a good representation of.

Further Animeposting 25.1.

Having finished Revue Starlight, I will say that the metafictional aspects would have probably annoyed me a lot more if I hadn't been marinading in the Alan Wake swamp for like a solid year now, and I can definitely see someone being annoyed what with what this this show as to say about stories and adaptation. :'D