1st Episode Anime Impressions: Boogiepop and Others

Japanese Title: Boogiepop wa Warawanai

Summary

A series of strange events and sudden disappearances that grip the teenagers of a Japanese city. The main character, Toka Miyashito, possesses a split personality called Boogiepop that knows about the events and fights the ‘enemies of the world’.

Impressions

Marianne

I am going to skip all the introductions and just say that Boogiepop is a weird experience that any horror-mystery anime fan would love out there. Yes, it’s the series that brought the trend of light novels into life; yes, it has been a huge inspiration for a whole generation of light novel writers like Ryohgo Narita and Nisio Isin; yes, the Persona series has also been inspired from it; and YES, Boogiepop itself is heavily influenced by Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

In the Boogiepop universe not many things make sense at the beginning and the anime seems to be following the same marvelous path. We get to experience the events happening without any explanation, coherence, or mention of the timelines that everything occurs, which makes this another beautiful mindfucking horror show that we all love and adore. Long story short, Boogiepop is an entity or the second personality of a girl named Touka Miyashima that manifests within her when it detects adversity in its surroundings, in this case the appearance of a monster within one of the students of the school that Touka is attending. Judging from the few shots of brutally slaughtered girls that are randomly thrown in the episode, it’s safe to assume that it will involve a great amount of violence, but it’s not going to be its focus. From my little experience with Boogiepop, I know that it’s a show with many profound messages about our word, society, and humanity in general, so I am very excited to see how it will carry on.

Thanasis

Ready for some Boogiepop? Marking the 20th Anniversary of Kouhei Kadono’s original novel debut, Boogiepop and Others is part of a franchise that spans 22 light novels, 3 four volume light novel spin-off series, a live-action movie, two anime television series, four manga serials, audio CDs, and other books. Dizzy? Boogiepop started as a young adult fiction book that is credited with starting the light novel trend in Japan. To characterize it as classic undermines the importance of the work and its popularity in Japan. That said, this was my first dive into the world of Boogiepop and what a weird experience it was.

Boogiepop is an entity whose sole purpose is to defeat monsters. He (and the monsters) manifests inside people and Boogiepop finds himself inside the body of a girl named Touka Miyashima. Unbeknownst to her, she takes the mantle of this weird superhero to find and get rid of the monster. All this we learn not from Boogiepop himself but from the central focus of the story which is a different character, Touka’s boyfriend, Keiji Takeda. It seems that the events of Boogiepop are given indirectly, through the memories of characters who meet Boogiepop and interact with him. Essentially, this show is about those characters. It is about their relationships and their feelings. It is about the world we live and how our society works. It is about how the world and the people in it changes. During this time, we learn about an entity called Boogiepop and his personal quest.

I am intriqued.