Long the talk of the streaming anime scene, Oshi No Ko finally made its way to Crunchyroll and thus into my life. I had heard tales of its interwoven plot, of its fame, of its depth, of its standout success. But the general premise always kept it at arms length. That and the literal stars in the main characters’ eyes, and we will also get to that one day, but for now we can stick to the story. The premier episode has a runtime just shy of a movie and, without getting too ahead of myself, doesn’t overstay its welcome. It honestly is pretty well constructed and it drew me in. I totally understood why this show earned such a huge budget. It has a charisma that, like its initial main character, truly radiates beyond the screen. And also like the ethos of its main character, it’s a facade designed to elicit emotion by feigning depth. It is for this reason I am not quite sure if this show is genius or just parading as one.

I have two main issues to discuss here, and at the time of this writing, I only just finished the first season and have begun the second. But both of my issues actually stem from the initial episode and the way the story handles its characters’ transformations overall. In the first episode, the series introduces its three main characters as they are initially. Our prime character is Ai Hoshino, an up and coming idol of the group B-Komachi, who is struck pregnant by a man she will not name. She is brought by her agent to a hospital in the countryside where we are introduced to the OB/GYN Gorou Amamiya, who because of a recently deceased patient, is a mega fan of B-Komachi and specifically Ai. While in shock that he will be caring for his most treasured Idol, we are introduced via flashback to our final main character Sarina Tendouji, who is dying from anaplastic astrocytoma, a brain tumor. I guess being a doctor in a hospital in the sticks had Gorou look after Sarina on his rounds. In either case, they strike up an odd friendship in which, through her fervent fandom, Sarina introduces Gorou to B-Komachi and specifically Ai. After Sarina passes away, Gorou makes a promise to have this patient live on through him via their shared fandom. It would seem that before this meeting he never cared all that much for idol groups, but that this phase of his life was born of his devotion to the memory of a patient who tragically died too soon. This character trait is the bedrock of my first issue with the story, but the issue doesn’t really come to fruition until the end of the season, and to see this we need to zoom out a bit and consider what it means to be a doctor.

I am not a doctor and I don’t know very many, but I have my own impressions of what I think happens in the world of doctors. I can admit that this is probably mostly built from television dramas, but another portion comes from hearing from doctors in the larger media spheres like testimonials in podcasts and newspapers. And in general, doctors work very close to death. It isn’t to say they aren’t completely affected by it, but in general it appears as though they develop a thicker skin the longer they are in the game. Being an OB/GYN, I would imagine that Gorou has lost some patients here and there, either during birth or after. In either case, two people in this character’s life affected him so deeply as to completely change his initial character into becoming unrecognizable from where he started. Before Gorou Amamiya becomes Aquamarine Hoshino, he appears to be a person completely capable of being professional, but also has the ability to be lighthearted and fun. He is a balanced character where nuance can exist. And all the deaths he must have seen in being a full fledged doctor, from his time as an student all the way to the present time, must have steeled him better than this. Even his insistence on keeping Sarina’s memory alive by being a fan of B-Komachi is a very light and easy way to engage with the loss of a patient. It’s detached and believable. To say the least, it struck a chord with me that this show might offer something different. Fast forward, and Gorou is murdered by a man who has been stalking Ai. As he lay dying his consciousness doesn’t fade, but is reborn with all of his mental faculties into a brand new baby boy with a twin sister. And shocker, he is born to his very own patient Ai Hoshino of B-Komachi, completing the promise of the title Oshi-no-Ko, or roughly “Favorite Idol’s Child” in english. His twin sister is also none other than long dead child Sarina Tendouji.

All of this happens in under 30 minutes of the film-like first episode. Ai Hosino has two children and both of them are fans of hers who died and are reborn as her very own children. Ai never has any idea that this is the case and in a fun twist, her children, who both discover that the other is a reborn consciousness, have their own reasons for not revealing who they were in their past lives to each other. The major difference between Sarina and Gorou is that he, now Aqua, has a new mission. To protect Ai from her stalkers and find the man who killed him while Sarina simply is loving the chance to imbibe her new life as the literal daughter of her cherished idol. This is a very promising premise and again it drew me in more deeply, but what remained consistent is that Gorou was still Gorou. He was caught between light and serious. He was still very much a 34 year old doctor. I even loved that as he gets older as the child Aqua, he continues to retain the perspective that Ai was his patient and that while he needed to keep up the act of being a baby, he also needed to be vigilant. And then the premise that kept me at arms length came to fruition and Ai was murdered by the stalker in front of Aqua. While she lay bleeding, he even mentions where she must have been stabbed and why she is most likely going to die. He is still a doctor, even though by this point it has been just over 5 years since he has been reborn as Aqua. Now, it’s one thing for this to cause PTSD, but from this moment on, Gorou is transformed into a very simple jaded child who lost his mother instead of what this complex situation really demands. Aqua is a man who started his love of his soon to be mother to keep alive the memory of a girl who died of a brain tumor. The moment Ai dies, he completely transforms into a child who literally lost his mother but with the intellect to understand the complex circumstances that would have led to her murder, or put another way, a child genius who lost his mother. It is just infinitely less interesting to forget Gorou to create Aqua. By the end of the season they never answer to this. He simply is just a kid looking for revenge instead of a man trying to solve a case, and more than that, he becomes a teenager. By season 2, Gorou has been completely wiped away and it’s a tragic loss to the story greater than the death of Ai because it could have been so much more complicated and interesting.

Born from this is also my second issue. When they abandoned the rebirth storyline, they essentially absolved themselves of having a complex conversation. By the time Aqua and Ruby are teenagers, they would essentially be about 50 and 28. And if they are just teenagers, they don’t have to have complex perspectives about their circumstances, like Aqua dating girls “his own age” and Ruby, although less dubiously fraught with moral issues, doesn’t have to grow at all. Imagine if instead of taking up acting as his vessel of access to revenge, Aqua used more of his age and medical knowledge to solve his problems. The story could engage scenarios in which that knowledge would come in handy, but instead, he is simply a detached, angsty teen with complex PTSD. The way his PTSD is manifesting and being used in the story just ends up making him a boring character. I think it’s meant to create tension or intensify his revenge plot, but as long as he is devoted to the revenge, we don’t need him to be so completely emotionless. 

Also this PTSD isn’t actually the type born of losing a mother as it would appear to outsiders. To the viewer, it should be recognizably about losing the person who was the conduit of Gorou’s devotion to Sarina’s memory, which the story seems to have conveniently forgotten. Essentially, by having Aqua and Ruby actually act like a child who has lost his mother the story has transformed into the tale of two children, precocious and talented, who lost their famous mother to a stabbing. This alone is good enough as a story, so why didn’t they simply start there? Remember that at this point, Ruby and Aqua still don’t recognize that they knew each other in their past lives, and as time passes from one season to the next without revealing this, we are even further erasing the link to the reincarnation plot. Most likely the reincarnation is going to rear its head again later, but that is so much less satisfying than simply engaging in the story you started with from the beginning. It’s even more aggravating that the story we get instead is an internal takedown of the business of being in all sorts of performative media in Japan, which they do well, but it’s still a completely different story with a completely different tone.

There are other issues with choices made by the first episode, but i’ll just throw out one more. They seem to have completely abandoned that Aqua and Ruby trick Ai Hoshino’s agent’s wife Miyako Saito into reluctantly being their surrogate mother. Miyako is the wife of Ichigo Saito and she expected to be the wife of a rich agent much sooner than it took for B-Komachi to become famous, and when Ai got pregnant and had kids, the duty of caring for her kids while Ai worked fell on her. It was a thankless job, and at a certain point she had enough and planned to sell the pregnant teen story to the papers and use the money to start a new life after divorcing her husband. But Ruby and Aqua, still just toddlers at the time, reveal that they have the intellect of adults, and shock her by speaking full sentences. As the shock begins to wear off, they up the stakes by pretending to be gods, because how else could babies talk. They promise that she will be rewarded in the future as long as she sticks around. Now, after Ai dies, it does explain that she decided to stay devoted to the kids, even after her husband left, but they never speak about the gods aspect again, which is a huge loss. Maybe they do in the Manga, but as far as the Anime is concerned, it’s as abandoned as the kids should have been.

It is undeniable that Oshi No Ko is an absolutely well written and received show. I hope it goes the whole 9 yards. But it did so with a very odd bait and switch, one that I can’t stop thinking about. Worse is that if it comes back to the initial premise, I know for me it won’t carry as much weight because it’s been disengaged for so long in favor of a completely different show that made it easier for the characters they created to engage in the lives built for them. It’s actively manipulative and in a way it’s probably one the greatest magic tricks I have ever seen an anime pull off. It does whatever its doing in the moment all to make you forget the last thing it did so that it can pull off an emotionally manipulative feat that gets you even more invested than you were before. I could go on, and will soon, as to how Ai Hoshino is a very interesting and well realized character that takes a back seat for the sake of the show, but that will have to wait for next time.