Call of the Night Season 2

Episode 12

Anko is right: being normal is hard. They keep moving the goalposts of what “normal” even is, and the benefits of adhering to it are slippery and ill-defined. Luckily for her, Call of the Night has never been a story about celebrating normalcy. Everyone in Ko's sphere is weird in one way or another, whether they are vampires, queer persons, insomniacs, or some other mélange of misfit. Even you, the person using their spare time to read an anime review, are statistically likely to be weird. And that's a good thing to recognize. We weirdos have to stick together, arguably now more than ever, as the vanguards of “normalcy” use their power to flatten society into their ideal shape. We have a duty to enjoy being sore thumbs and crooked nails.

Thematically, that's what this season finale is about. With Anko's arc wrapped up, the adaptation elongates its denouement with a mostly anime-original episode that allows its various creatures of the night a chance to reflect and party. The show easily could have plowed ahead into the next arc and teased us with a cliffhanger, but this feels like a far more appropriate note to end on. It's laid-back and gently thought-provoking, and it gives these characters plenty of time to simply exist as themselves. Ultimately, that's what most of them want anyway, and I think they deserve it after the intensity of the showdown against Anko.

Anko, of course, is front and center here. In her liminal state between drinking too much and aching from the resultant hangover, she's the most vulnerable we've seen her. While she maintains enough wiles to get Ko alone and tease him with some cuddling, she eventually drops all of her guards. She echoes many of the sentiments she told him last week—she feels empty, having wasted the past decade of her life—but this time, her sadness is far more palpable. Curled next to Ko, she isn't the steely detective and vampire hunter who menaced Nazuna's coven for months. She's a touched-starved twenty-something who never allowed herself to grow up and reckon with her own pain. Combined with Miyuki Sawashiro's generational performance, Anko finally grasps a morsel of catharsis as she cries into Ko's shoulder. It's a beautiful scene.

On the other hand, Anko is also a very funny drunk. The animators have fun drawing her in various states of belligerence and suffering, and this too paints her as very human and fallible. In the manga, we don't see her again that night after she falls asleep, but the anime expands on it. She wakes up alone with her hangover setting in, but the sight of the plastic bag full of water tells her that she has friends now. Even if her revenge plot didn't accomplish anything she intended it to, she's come out the other side in a healthier space with plenty of room to grow. In her final scene, she puts away her cigarettes and smiles gently at the sight of the busy city at night—the very thing she was trying to destroy. She has a ways to go, but in that moment, she knows she's on the right track.

I hope we get a third season, and I hope this team is able to go all the way with this adaptation (we're at about the halfway point in the manga). Truth be told, though, I'd be content if it stopped here. Anko's arc was the part I most wanted to see in motion because she's a character I love and relate to a lot. When I first read the manga, she stood out to me in the way that many messy and queer anime women had, although I never fully interrogated why that was. Reliving her arc now, I understand. I'm early into the process of reckoning with and transitioning my gender, which has been a difficult journey about a decade in the making, and I'm nowhere near any kind of endpoint. I feel the same kind of regret, depression, and self-loathing that haunts Anko in the aftermath of her own reckoning, but if she's able to move forward, I can too. That's why she, alongside Call of the Night as a whole, is so special to me, and that's why I feel especially lucky and grateful that this adaptation is smart, sensitive, and superlative.

Intense personal feelings about Anko aside, I love that the rest of the episode feels like a party. Nazuna and Ko check back in at the maid café and shoot the breeze with LG. The vampire crew enjoy some celebratory champagne on the roof. Ko reflects on all of the surreal and educational experiences he's had with Nazuna and the others. Nazuna shows her friends that she, too, has matured, coolly flying off with Ko and closing out the episode with a romantic nightcap of his jugular juice. And in a very cool move, the anime brings back the first ED sequence, which includes a new and fantastically toothy illustration of Nazuna from Kotoyama himself. The series began with Creepy Nuts' song of the same name, so it's only appropriate for us punctuate this season with it, whether that punctuation mark is a period or a comma.

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Call of the Night Season 2 is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

Steve is on Bluesky for all of your posting needs. They like Anko Uguisu a normal amount. You can also catch them chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.

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