Oshi no Ko episode 17

Rating: A-

Episode 16 cast its net wide, addressing all the subplots feeding into the debut of Tokyo Blade and even a few peripheral points, too. Episode 17, which actually begins the play, is almost the polar opposite: its second act narrows the focus almost exclusively to one character, for better or worse.

And on paper, I certainly expected the “for worse” option. This season has made some effort to flesh Melt out, but he still remained one of the series’ least compelling recurring characters coming into this episode. However, that starts to change as his backstory fills in more during his featured scene in act 2 of the play. Women, popularity, and attention came effortlessly to Melt, so it never occurred to him that acting might actually require serious effort. Watching Aqua and Kana’s performances in Sweet Today forced him to realize, for the first time, that he was in an arena where he couldn’t just skate by on looks and charisma. Whether in sports or performing arts, you can’t succeed at a pro level if you’re not giving it your all, if you’re not finding a way to bring out your best, and the particular play he’s in now demands that more than most. The acting disparity between him and the others isn’t something that can be bridged with just a few months of lessons, either.

But like any good performer, Melt finds something about his role that he can connect to – the sense of being beaten because of overconfidence, the frustration of just not being good enough – and is able to channel that beautifully for his feature scene. Despite what Aqua claims, some of it is, indeed, Aqua’s tactics (i.e., focus on one mind-blowing scene rather than trying to improve everything), but Melt is the one who makes it happen, and the production team members are the ones who turn it into a glorious phantasmagoria of abstracted imagery and animation. Intense emotions go hand-in-hand with anime, but instances where you can feel it as much as what’s seen here are rare indeed.

We can’t overlook the episode’s first act, either, which provides a condensed version of the play’s first act. Its staging skillfully shows off the wire works which go into such dynamic fight sequences and all of the theatrical effects in a series of remarkably robustly-animated scenes. It left me really, really wanting to see a play like this in reality and eager to see what the rest of the play will look like.