Scums Wish

Unrequited love is among the excruciating feelings you could ever be unlucky enough to grapple with it. Yet, Scums Wish is among the most beautiful anime love series you’ll ever have the chance to watch. Though short, it’s adorable, ironically enough, in all its bitterness.

High schoolers’ narrative using each other as emotional crutches is gorgeously animated. A touch tells it of cynicism and cold to the point where you feel empty inside after seeing the first installment. But that steely realness is just what makes it worth experiencing.

Scum’s Wish Show

The show follows 17-year-old Hanabi, who decides she’s going to”date” an elderly pupil named Mugi. Both students play at love when it’s the most volatile and vulnerable, kissing and exploring their sexual boundaries when the mood feels appropriate.

There is just one catch: They are pretending another individual is somebody else the whole time. Both Hanabi and Mugi are in love with individuals just out of reach. They have chosen to use each other as simple replacements. It is much simpler to employ someone for a stand-in for someone whose heart you will never indeed triumph, after all, or is it?

The story of Hanabi & Mugi in Scums Wish

It’s a sad lament that performs slowly and deliberately, as equally Hanabi and Mugi become entangled with others throughout the series. While their ideas toward the other person become cold and unfeeling, the storyline doesn’t often meander down the same street you could already be thinking. Both of them are involved in relationships. that promise over the”façade” arrangement they’ve assembled. It provides them with, but in the end, that isn’t sufficient to neutralize the mounting pain at both of their hearts.

Hanabi’s Battle

At the centre of it all is Hanabi’s battle as she seems deep within herself. It is to attempt to determine if she’s somebody who can be satisfied with the veneer of love rather than the real thing. You nearly have to be a masochist to enjoy the type of sadness it slowly injects into your being. I strongly recommend keeping a few tissue boxes round as the series slowly crescendos to its final acts.

Is Scum’s Wish a Sex show?

It’s also an extremely sexual show, a subject it handles with respect, though in several messy ways. There’s no”scripted” feeling to these prospective romantic dalliances.

They feel much more like moments culled from real life and all the awkward, uncomfortable moments. That accompanies each of the other memorable and loving sex you have ever had in your life. It is lovingly detailed but never feels exploitative, and it has a vital role in the series.

Scum’s Wish isn’t only impeccably written. It’s drawn beautifully with a gorgeous colour palette, and a magnificent blossom that looks and feels like depression comes to life. There’s an irresistible gloom that permeates every scene. It seems unlike anything else out there in the industry at the moment. It is the equivalent of those”lo-fi vibes” and”songs to do assignments to” YouTube channels and evokes a number of the same feelings of longing, frustration, and melancholy. Nonetheless, it is a damage that feels good and washes over you in waves that you wish would never pass.

Episode

Embark on an episode with Scums Wish and prepare to lose yourself in its unforgiving world of doubt, uncertainty, and the sometimes depressing world of young love.

History of Scums Wish

Nearly 20 years back, director Hideaki Anno published The End of Evangelion, a characteristic length capstone for his “landmark science fiction anime.” Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The show and its finale film were notorious for mashing up the giant. Robot actions with intentionally obtuse spiritual vision, Evangelion’s strengths were suspended in its exploration of human psychology, framed through its perspective angst-ridden and puberty-addled protagonist, Shinji Ikari.

Hideaki Anno utilized his private struggles with his distaste for modern otaku culture. It is to fuel the flame of his critical gaze, analyzing how teen obsessions with sex and the issues of forming healthy relationships. It set the stage for a recursive loop of self-loathing and personal sabotage.

Holding up this fractured and deeply critical mirror to an audience of unsuspecting young adults resulted in a notoriously inflammatory response upon the film’s release.

Evangelion

Evangelion was eager to embrace its descent into navel-gazing chaos. He was therefore opting to end a saga of robots and space monsters. Again it was with a few of the most quietly devastating scenes in anime history, as a young boy lashes out violently, desperate for any meaningful human relationship.

A decade and a half after, Hiroshi Nagahama released his anime version of Shūzō Oshimi’s coming-of-age manga, The Flowers of Evil.

The story focuses on a lonely boy called Takao Kasuga, whose own adventures with young boredom and sexual frustration direct him to cross paths with all the fascinating (and harmful ) Sawa Nakamura. Much like Evangelion, Flowers of Evil uses a young teenage boy’s perspective to inspect the effects of burgeoning sexuality and self-loathing on adolescent psychology.

Unlike Anno’s show, Flowers of Evil drops the whistles and bells of genre and allegory to mire us in a contemporary setting with much more grounded characters. Without giant robots digressions, we have only a sharp look at the dysfunctional lives of disenfranchised, sexy teens.

Characterization in Scum’s Wish

But in this shift to less abstract characterization in contrast to Evangelion, there’s still a space to be sensed in Flowers of Evil, a barrier separating the crowd from the observed. The show’s most controversial choice was its use of a rotoscoped.

It was a highly detailed kind of animation, which made the characters and the entire world unsettling, appearing almost-but-not-quite real. This uncanny valley effect was intentional. The team wanted to highlight the most shocking and difficult choices these damaged teens make weekly.

The viewers find these years of teenage transgression as challenging and strange and unfamiliar, almost alien into a more developed eye. All these incomprehensible animals we call teens are nearly recognizable as people we once were, but maybe not quite.

Finally, Scums Wish is a show that continues in Evangelion’s footsteps and Flowers of Evil. It offers a brutally honest and unflinching look at the sensual and psychological difficulties many teenagers experience.

Mengo Yokoyari

Albeit with some essential differences produces the experience more intimate than ever. To start with, manga writer Mengo Yokoyari gives the familiar story a much-needed feminine perspective. It does not knowingly lecture or antagonize its audience.

Evangelion might sometimes, nor does use a harsh aesthetic sensibility to produce a feeling of alienation, such as Flowers of Evil does intentionally. In case Evangelion is an extensive evaluation of teen feelings and Flowers of Evil is a bristling illustration of them. Subsequently, Scum’s Wish is something considerably more empathetic and personal. Scum’s Wish is a confession.

Background

Both of them are high school pupils in love with educators that they cannot have. It causes them to utilize each other for sex while denying themselves that the self-acceptance needed to make their relationship anything aside from deeply unhealthy.

These are teens who fall into the trap of equating their self-worth with being sexually desired. Instead of looking for a means to browse the source of those feelings, they exploit one another for sexual gratification while further indulging their particular self-loathing. Self-destructive psychology disturbs young people from all walks of existence, and Scum’s Wish understands this.

The series does not overlook the struggles of teenagers, either. Sanae is Hanabi’s one real female friend, and that she also happens to be desperately in love with Hanabi. Sanae’s have to be loved and accepted by Hanabi is similarly twisted to her growing sexual desires. It made all the worse because Hanabi doesn’t love Sanae in precisely the same manner. Since the two young ladies grow more intimate, their connection fractured in an equal amount.

What is the hidden meaning in scums Wish?

Scum’s Wish describes how your life can be when your sense of personal value looks so inextricably tied into your sense of physical security. It occurs as a result of the stigma placed on referring to sex, particularly for teens.

These emotions and feelings will not even start before adulthood for many men and women. Scum’s Wish depicts a high school experience that appears blatantly at odds with much other anime. That operates as hypersexualized comedies or only psychological romances, with few shades of grey in-between.

It is what makes Scum’s Wish, therefore, unique. It understands, in precisely the same way that Evangelion and Flowers of Evil failed, that adolescence is nothing but shades of grey. For many, their teenage identity was a messy soup from ongoing concerns, failed relationships, and plenty of sexual morals.

Scum’s Wish explores the awkward, embarrassing reality of this teenage emotional and sexual encounter with honesty and attention I haven’t seen in a long time.

Criticism of Scum’s Wish

Most importantly, Scum’s Wish isn’t out to criticize. It doesn’t mean to coldly analyze its personalities, indict or humiliate them, or examine them as nostalgic artefacts by the writer’s ancient history. Hanabi, Mugi, and Sanae are actively trying to navigate the stormy waters of young adulthood.

Also, Scum’s Wish invites its audience to take this journey together in the present tense. It is a messy and uncomfortable experience, full of mistakes and regrets—each of the tiny bad decisions that make up the teenage lifestyle. However, Scum’s Wish invites the viewer to empathize with its characters’ faults to fully understand so many confused and misguided kids’ collective confession. If nothing else, this empathy is what makes Scum’s Wish a priceless work of art.

So what do you think of this controversial anime?

I was watching Akidearest. She was reviewing”Scum’s Wish,” and only a couple of minutes into the video, I knew I had to watch it. That is saying a great deal because I usually don’t have sufficient spare time to watch anime anymore. I binged and finished it in a couple of days. I found myself crying in the final episode, but I’m not sure when I had been crying from joy, sadness, or frustration.

Summary

“Scums Wish” is not for the faint of heart. Its complex plot struggles with topics such as unrequited love and sex, and I would even go as far as infatuation. The general tone of this anime is severe, except for the occasional laugh every couple of episodes.

It centres around two figures: Mugi Awaya and Hanabi (Hana) Yasuraoka. They’re in an unhealthy relationship where they utilize each other for sex and envision the person they love as their spouse. They look like the perfect couple in school, passionate and intimate, but that is not true in any way. They use each other to fill their isolation.

That is describing the plot in the simplest terms. Since anime advances, it becomes more and more complex. So much so here’s a diagram to understand everything. It is a lot to take in.

What I enjoyed

The art style is gorgeous. I mean, consider this:
That is the art for one of those manga’s covers. It is art aims right here.
The anime’s style of drawing is elegant in its way.

The animators know how to draw the emotion in each of the character’s eyes, particularly Hanabi.
When she felt bothered, you could tell. Also, when there were notable minutes, the animators made quite detailed scenes like this:
And the end theme song (turn captions on while listening) is powerful and fits the anime well. It supplies subtle traces of the characters’ personalities, and again, the drawing style is distinctive and stunning.

There wasn’t a second in which I rolled my eyes and thought what a personality had said was vacuous.

The anime starts off using Hanabi in a vacant classroom, and she has a flashback of holding hands together with her crush. She then states, ” He was my soul mate. There’s nobody better than you.”

The artwork style, mixed with an exciting opening, instantly drew me in. I craved more after each incident, especially when it ended with a cliffhanger.

As for the characters, generally, they are incredibly human and realistic. I have noticed some anime make their characters unrealistic. So it was refreshing to see actions and personalities representative of what actual people would do, such as Hanabi utilizing Sanae to fulfil emptiness.

The character development was astounding, too. If Noriko realizes she suddenly does not want to be with Mugi anymore, I had been proud of her. While she’s quite annoying, I was happy she chose to proceed because she could certainly do better than Mugi.

What I did not like in Scums Wish

I applaud the producers for making them realistic, but I just naturally uttered them. They are terrible men and women. I often found myself shaking my head and saying, “You get what you deserve” and “That is a horrible thing to do.”

I especially had a strong dislike toward Akane Minagawa, a music teacher in Hanabi and Mugi’s school. She seems docile, amiable, airheaded, and a general a decent individual, but in fact, it’s the complete opposite.

Akane gets fulfilment of toying with men (she’s an infatuation). She tickles Hanabi’s relationship with Narumi because she enjoys the brokenhearted expressions on Hanabi’s face. Especially when Akane says she has intercourse with Narumi.

She even gets a happy ending. She doesn’t deserve it.

That is one thing I have mixed emotions about The ending.

Hanabi and Mugi, not end up together because they were a very unhealthy couple.

And the fact is that they all progress as individuals and move on. I didn’t particularly appreciate how the ending was pleasant and sudden.

Narumi and Akane wind up becoming engaged. Akane says she will cheat on Narumi. However, he doesn’t care when she does this. And the only reason he likes her is that she reminds him of his deceased mom.

Yeah, their marriage will ultimately last longer. In a sense, however, it was the sole fitting end.

Hanabi makes peace with Mugi, Narumi, and Akane to participate and Noriko versions. Sanae cuts her hair — since that is always an indication of character development — and only sees Hanabi as a friend instead of a love obsession.

That is the reason why I’ve mixed feelings regarding the anime. It’s the right way to end it, resolving different types of unrequited love, although I was slightly dissatisfied.

Also, one thing that made me slightly uneasy is when Hanabi calls Narumi”big brother.”

For a few episodes, I thought they were step-siblings, and I believed Hanabi enjoyed her stepbrother.

Japan has a propensity to make incestuous anime, so I thought this was likely similar to Oreimo, where the brother and sister like every other.

That’s not true at all. Narumi and Hanabi are just close childhood friends, like brother and sister. It’d be bizarre if they started dating. Narumi is a teacher. Also, Hanabi is a little.

Despite my criticism of this ending, I enjoyed”Scums Wish.” Even though it made me feel a little depressed after some heavy material, I enjoyed seeing each character’s viewpoints and how they grow through the anime. I recommend this anime because of its mature storyline and beautiful art style.

Even then, I was very impressed overall and expect to see the manga soon.

Multiple narrative perspectives

Among the things that I find most interesting about Scum’s Wish is its arrangement of having multiple narrative perspectives. However, the series did not waste very much time before taking a sharp twist. The character development and philosophy demonstrated this initial assumption not to be the case.

It begins to shift in episode two, which finishes from Ecchan’s point of view. From then on, it slowly but steadily breaks free from convention altogether. Half of the episode is seen from Mugi’s standpoint, followed by episode four told by four distinct viewpoints. It only grows more sporadic out there. As the series continues, entire episodes are devoted to exploring the individual tales of everything. Any other show would consider”side characters,” making any semblance of narrative consistency completely non-existent.

Scum’s Wish could have been better.

It is hardly unusual for a string to devote entire episodes to creating the characters and backgrounds of their side characters. In fact, amongst critics that hold concepts like character development in high regard, the show has to be considered high quality.

However, storyline consistency is also an essential factor for many of these same critics. Background characters required development but also shouldn’t distract from the central narrative.

Scum’s Wish blatantly defies these essential standards. We would consider being the show’s”side characters” aren’t only given a momentary place in the spotlight before being pushed apart to return to the established narrative standpoint.

Most series are featuring large casts of characters among whom it would be hard to differentiate a single protagonist. It typically takes a much broader narrative approach, telling the story from an outsider looking in rather directly from the character’s perspective.

Nonetheless, in Scum’s Wish, the story becomes more about them all together as long as they focus. They eventually become the protagonists of this series, blurring traditional character functions completely.

The downfall for many viewers: Scum’s Wish

While being among the show’s most audacious ventures from a story perspective, it also became its downfall for many viewers. After the narrative took the viewer to different Hanabi from the protagonist’s function to allow the view to change to the other characters, it created some confusion and ambivalence amongst some viewers.

According to the MAL figures, this aspect of the show’s arrangement was not too detrimental to most of its viewership. Still, as the show entered its second half, I started discovering people becoming more vocal about their criticisms of the sequence. The story begins and ends with Hanabi.

Which, for a lot of these audiences, made her inseparable from the function of the protagonist. Regardless of how the view would change during the series, it feels incorrect for a better term. Even without sharing this opinion, it is not tough to comprehend why some viewers would feel this way.

It supplies us with very little time to get to know and care for every one of the characters individually. But maybe more fundamentally because it’s radically different from how we are experiencing daily life.

How did others look at Scum’s Wish?

As people, we are only able to observe the world through a singular lens, our own. We’re incapable of fully understanding what the world looks like through others’ eyes.

It explains why the best stories centre on developing a protagonist that overall viewers can easily relate to and root for, and possibly most importantly, that they can vicariously live through. By removing the function of the protagonist, Scum’s Wish produced a void in its narrative structure that is tough to fill and justify with plot and characterization.

I might as well get it out there. I wasn’t a massive fan of Scum’s Wish, primarily because I don’t relate to or connect with any of the characters personally as a few audiences can. Its multiple narrative perspectives certainly did not help in this regard. I understand that the names are not likeable.

It’s not that I can not become spent in or enjoy a series with unlikeable characters. It is that it didn’t give me the time required to become invested in them. With that in mind, I can agree with many of the criticisms I see of the series and understand from my own experience how it abandoned some audiences unable to associate with it.

The storytelling is exceptional in Scums Wish.

Despite its narrative perspective being the source of my disconnect with the series, I think this exceptional style of storytelling reflects and enriches its conclusion’s social character. As a result of the show’s multiple perspectives, we explored how every character saw themselves as the protagonists of their stories throughout the series.

Each had their own unique individual goals and wanted to experience a traditional “heroes travel” to reach them. However, by the end of the series, none of the characters achieved their goals or didn’t gain the result they would have chosen. But their stories did not end because they didn’t receive the happy ending they desired.

In the final episode, each character prepares to move on with their lives. All go with all of the emotional baggage they picked up along the way. At this moment, I was eventually able to generate a personal connection with them.

Each of them seemed to say, “Yeah, we made some errors, and now we have to carry their weight, but that is fine.

We are going to live on”. And the show’s structure of having no protagonist allowed me to understand what this realization was supposed to all the characters individually. Deciding the story to feel almost private, which I can’t say for most of the show.

Other Reviews of Scums Wish

Maybe I am too romantic about all this, given I had been happy to put the series to rest when it finally concluded. But paradoxically, the part of Scum’s Wish that has caused me to feel indifferent towards it as a whole is the very same thing that intrigues me the most.

Its multiple narrative perspectives illustrate a fascinating and audacious storytelling style, which I rarely encounter outside of the literary area. Despite some of my critiques within a specific series, I would like to view it done again.

I would be interested in seeing how I’d respond to a show with a similar structure featuring characters that are a little bit easier for me to connect with and understand. Please share your comments and review regarding scums wish.