【OSHI NO KO】

The Dark Side of the Starlight

I still am not entirely sure how I feel about reincarnation tropes in anime. Honestly, they usually make me roll my eyes. The market is so saturated with stories about ordinary people waking up in fantasy worlds that the premise has become a crutch—a lazy way to skip over character development and get straight to the wish fulfillment. But *Oshi no Ko* is not interested in fulfilling anyone's wishes. When I sat down to watch the feature-length, 90-minute premiere, I expected a quirky comedy about a small-town doctor reborn as the infant son of his favorite pop idol. What I got was a methodical, almost clinical dissection of the entertainment industry's most toxic lies.



The series, animated by Studio Doga Kobo, operates on a compelling duality. It functions simultaneously as a soap opera and a soapbox. The creator, Aka Akasaka, seems to deeply understand the mechanics of modern celebrity. We watch Ai Hoshino, the ultimate teenage idol, navigate a world where her smile is a carefully calculated commodity. She’s an orphan who got pregnant at sixteen, forced to hide her children to protect the fragile, parasocial fantasy she sells to her fans. "In the world of entertainment, lies are weapons," she says at one point. It’s a line that could easily sound melodramatic in another show, but here, it feels like a survival tactic.

There is a specific scene at the end of that supersized first episode that changes the entire trajectory of the narrative. I will not describe the gore, because the violence is not really the point. The point is the intimacy of the violation. When a stalker—driven mad by the "betrayal" of Ai having children—shows up at her door, the camera does not just watch her die. It forces us to watch her realize, in her final moments, what genuine love actually feels like, stripped of all the performative artifice. It's a gut punch. You realize then that the bright colors and exaggerated character designs were a trap all along.



Following this, the burden of the story shifts to her son, Aqua, voiced with a chilling, detached precision by Takeo Otsuka. Otsuka, who recently topped polls in Japan for his voice acting, brings a weird, unnatural maturity to the role. Aqua is technically a teenager, but he carries the mind of a cynical, middle-aged doctor. Watch how Aqua moves through the world of reality TV dating shows and theatrical productions. He does not act; he manipulates. Otsuka's vocal performance drops all the usual anime hero inflections, settling into a flat, calculating monotone that only cracks when his suppressed PTSD bubbles to the surface. He is a boy using a hyper-logical approach to showbiz as a shield against his own grief.

The show is constantly asking us to look at the collateral damage of our own viewing habits. When the character Akane gets dogpiled by cyberbullies after a misunderstanding on a reality show, the series slows down to show the agonizing, minute-by-minute erosion of her mental health. It’s uncomfortable to watch. As *CBR* recently noted, the show uses these arcs to highlight "the vulnerability and unrealistic expectations associated with the profession." We are made complicit. We consume the drama, simply like the faceless internet commenters in the show.



Does it always work? Not perfectly. Sometimes the tonal whiplash between a goofy comedy beat and a serious critique of industry exploitation feels a bit clumsy. (It’s hard to take a monologue about the grueling reality of child acting entirely seriously when it’s delivered by a character wearing a giant, cartoonish bird mask.) But maybe that friction is the point. *Oshi no Ko* does not let you settle into a comfortable rhythm. It wants you to feel the artificiality of the whole enterprise.

In the end, what makes the show linger in the mind is not the supernatural mystery or the revenge plot. It’s the quiet, tragic observation that in order to be loved by millions, you often have to sacrifice your own humanity. It’s a bitter pill, coated in bright, glittering sugar. I swallowed it whole, and I am still feeling the ache.