This Week in Anime

Please Drink Responsibly

Chris
Sylvia, I've joked about anime "making me need a drink" in this column more times than I can count. And as some news gets stupider and more depressing, I'm feeling I might need one for real. So whattaya say?

We could do a whole column about crackin' one open.

It helps that someone ordered a double of drinkin'-themed anime this season. Granted, they're extremely different flavors, but they provide an easy enough springboard to discuss this particular vice and its depictions throughout the medium.

Plus it's been almost a year since the column on smoking. Join us in 2027 to talk about gambling in anime!

As someone who's known people who struggled with alcoholism, I can't overstate the need for responsibility. I say that as someone who quite enjoys partaking in himself! And yeah, I also quite enjoy seeing how it's depicted in anime. I have a pathological predilection for collecting screencaps of cute anime characters downing big ol' mugs of beer. Please note that's NA faux-beer in the Uma Musume screenshot. The horse girls are not of drinking age.

Now, as for this season's drinking buddies, as mentioned, they're pretty different vibes. One of them's even more like "Drinking Enemies." Ranked competitive drinking. It's Drops of God, and it perhaps makes sense with it being about the famously cutthroat world of high-end wine tasting.

Drops of God is about as audacious as one would hope for from "competitive wine anime" as a concept. These are people who take drinking wine profoundly seriously. Despite a deeply unserious way of holding wine glasses.

I need to stress that I have a partner who works in the wine industry, and when Drops of God dropped, a whole bunch of our mutuals jumped to ask them if gripping glasses by the base like that is a thing in wine tasting. At least here, it isn't.

Wine was never my preferred alcohol either, though I've picked it up a bit more recently on account of the previously mentioned partnership. That aside, I don't know that Drops of God makes for too effective a way to vicariously experience the vino experience. It's shooting for that "hobby anime" vibe with a lot of qualifying details about the making of the wines themselves thrown around that could be hard to follow if you don't have someone experienced to help you keep up.

But then the actual comments on the tastings are wrapped up in the flowery language like that music allusion you posted or other poetic descriptions, with little in the way of details about tasting notes, texture, tannins, etc. Instead of bringing audiences into this world of experiences, it actually feels like it's playing to the luxury wine tasting's reputation for hoity-toity exclusiveness.

Satelight, you know I loved your work on Symphogear, but I do not think you are playing to your strengths here on Drops of God. Maybe the series works better as it goes on and leans into that "wine sports anime" angle, to say nothing of doing more with wild plot twists like "wine-based amnesia" in the latest arc. But it definitely feels like a messy situation over a white carpet. Never mind that it, oddly, hasn't really dug into the effects of the experience of alcohol yet? Like, there's a tacit insinuation that Shizuku and Issei's dad effectively drank himself to death, but apart from the florid descriptions, you'd be hard pressed to think any of these people enjoyed drinking for its own sake.

The most refreshing yuri served up this season!

And yeah, you don't really get much more opposed from Drops of God than Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk. This show is generally grounded, welcoming, and actually looks amazing!

It's liquid swag, and she can't turn it off.

Going into Botan Kamiina, I was expecting something closer to Takunomi. (which I've mentioned previously and probably will again before this column is up), and to hear manga fans tell it that's about what this series was like originally. But the anime version of Botan Kamiina has seen fit to turn itself into an earnestly treated tale of booze-based lesbian pining from multiple angles, enhanced by a production they're explicitly turning loose to put as much sauced sauce on it as possible.

Like I almost feel bad about originally bringing it in for this column as just "the other alcohol anime airing this season," but hey, whatever lets us raise a toast and gush about one of spring's biggest surprises.

That frame's gonna get a lot of mileage in the posting factory, I can tell.

The artistic treatment of Botan Kamiina really does so much for the vibe. It's a little funny that the titular character activates her liquid courage in just a few sips, but it fits with the plot point that she's genuinely never drunk before. And the hazy effects of the drinks let them bring in high-end tech like luminescent ear blushes. This is a show that knows how to use its subject matter to juice its appeal.

Seeing all the foot stuff in episode 4 honestly went a long way to explaining why that episode looked as good as it did overall. These were perverts that cared.

At least they balance it out by bringing the aforementioned smoking vice in, but making the girl who does it clear as an absolute doofus approximately 0.8 seconds after lighting up. But yeah, Kamiina Botan makes it so easy to go on about how cool it looks that you might think the alcoholic subject matter would be incidental. But it really is interfacing with the idea of drinking as a potential social activity that Ibuki is working to navigate her hang-ups with, alongside Kamiina's experiences with loosening her inhibitions and finding out what a natural player she is. Plus, there's a strong rotation of drinks displayed. The girls were already getting into absinthe three episodes in; it's a party.

Look, one of the secondary girls is an indie rocker with her own bespoke backstory they indulgently detail in the episode credits, you physically cannot restrain this crew from spinning up as much as possible with this seemingly humble source material.

It's not hard to see why Botan Kamiina already popped off on the social media timelines just in the intervening weeks since we talked about it for the seasonal romcom flight. That surprise rise and recognition of its inspiredly loose adaptational sensibilities solidify that Bocchi the Rock! connection you mentioned.

It also makes for an easy segue into discussing some of our other favorite anime alcoholics, starting with probably the most obvious one.

My sister and I absolutely had to take the opportunity to try some of that Nihon Sakari Onikoroshi sake in the red box when we saw it in the wake of watching the anime, and yeah, it was not bad!

For such an unhinged character, Hiroi hits a surprisingly strong balance of hard-drinking portrayal. She's a mess who is not idealized, and you would not want to wake up as her. She's probably not going to make it to forty. Yet her chemically induced lack of inhibitions turns out to be a real right-person/right-time combo to be the perfect mentor to the terminally anxious Bocchi.

It wasn't even the alcohol itself Bocchi needed; she just needed to be taken along by the effects of it.

As I said, I've made a whole thing of collecting beer-drinking anime screenshots, I get it! I'm pretty sure my first attentive appreciation for this archetype was actually Kitsune from Love Hina. Auspicious, to be sure, but I'd argue her secondary role status has kept her as an appreciable artifact of that time capsule of a series. Aunt Haruka's pretty cool, too. Of course, as far as vintage lush anime ladies go, it behooves us to recognize the woman, the myth, the legend.

Forget all the additional layers of mecha deconstruction from would-be imitators; this is Evangelion's real legacy.

In addition to that Lancer mug, my other piece of beloved anime-themed drinkware is a glass bearing the Yellow Flag sign from Black Lagoon. I'm here for this.

Black Lagoon is cool too, because it shows other ways drinking can be used to reveal things about characters. It's easy to guess that Revy's a hard-drinking badass just by looking at her. But seeing Rock show off his own salaryman-honed abilities makes clear early on that there's more to him than meets the eye, and the kind of dynamic he might forge with Revy.

Everything about Chainsaw Man's drinking party scene is a boozy blanket made from a tanked tapestry. Himeno's cool exterior is melting under her inglorious alcoholism. The fact that it's arranged for her and Aki to try to ply information out of Makima. Makima then effortlessly drinks everyone under the table. Some of the post-powerfully plot-relevant, puke-worthy pint-pounding I've seen in anime. Also, similar to later developments with Misato, Chainsaw Man is perfectly fine with showing the decidedly less glamorous side of this alcoholic archetype. Himeno seemed cool! Her getting blackout drunk and dragging a sixteen-year-old back to her place for a poorly considered indecent proposal after vomiting into his mouth helps to drive home how messed up she actually is.

These are the sorts of earnest engagements with the craft of these libations that I wish Drops of God could chill out and give more focus to. It also reminds me about P.A. Works's film Komada - A Whisky Family and makes me wonder when we're ever going to get it on our side of the world.

It's educational! This informative tack is the one that a lot of anime on this subject take. It can be of the more introspective variety, like Bartender and its 2006 anime. Nicky and I looked at that one, and it got a reboot a couple of years ago that went in a different direction, but at least knew to include office ladies throwing back big mugs of beer.

And on the more basic side, you've got my aforementioned Takunomi., which is...effectively what I expected Botan Kamiina to be. I don't love it any less, though, even as it's now soundly been outclassed in the realm of alcoholic yuri content.

I love the idea of the alcoholic girl in a slice-of-life anime being an inherited mantle, like a legacy superhero identity.

Huh, now I'm wondering if that Iron Man anime included Tony's alcoholism...

This time it's the thinly veiled author self-insert. I wonder if they're trying to tell us anything.

Ah, the divine synergy in the name of Hiroi's bass.

I feel like real-world connections fuel many of these sloshed shout-outs to some degree. Bang Brave Bravern famously negotiated product placement with Kona Big Wave. Not for any major marketing deal, but simply because Masami Ōbari really, really liked the beer!

I think that speaks to some difference between smoking and drinking in anime. Yes, there are going to be hard reflections on the effects of alcohol from some series. It was certainly jarring when BanG Dream! of all series dropped in Sakiko's dad as a darkly realistically portrayed alcoholic, for instance.

But for a lot of them, the people behind these are writers. They enjoy drinking and writing what they know and like.

Hey, that's what Rock was talking about in Black Lagoon!

It's what makes it such a natural fueling element of stories, whether it's the classical history behind tasting wine or the crisp, lemony flavor inciting the modern marvel of Vtuber performances.

Even with all the artistry in the world, there are some things anime can't fully communicate. Sometimes we have to learn the hard way to drink (out of our Archer-themed mugs) responsibly.