A show comes on and the first thing you see is a panty shot. You find a description of the show and it goes as follows: “if Iridatsu Yuuta, the high school protagonist, sees panties, the world will come to an end.” You watch a few episodes and there are enough panty shots to make you want to destroy the world too, and you figure it’s about time to chuck this one to oblivion. But then Iridatsu Yuuta really does see panties, and the world comes to an end. And by Yuuta I mean the disembodied spirit of Yuuta, who passed out on a riverbank after a bus jacking and got his body dispossessed by a random spirit from the sky, who locks itself and Yuuta’s body in his room and plasters talismans to keep Yuuta’s spirit out. Putting all these facts together is a bit dizzying, and quite unlike a show that exists for the fan service. So you watch on. And slowly the panty shots slow down and the pace picks up. We haven’t left Yuuta’s boarding house in seven episodes and yet nothing is dull, nothing is repetitive, and absolutely nothing is predictable. And suddenly, amidst a series of thrilling plot twists, heartbreaking character development, high tension, and a few panty shots, it’s all over.
How did Punch Line make it all happen in twelve episodes? How did we connect so much to these characters, who started off looking like two-bit villains and walking sets of underwear? Even with time travel entering the show—the point where any consumer of fiction gets worried about the integrity of the plot and continuity, let alone originality—no ends are left truly unresolved. The plot begins veiled in mystery, and as backstories collide the hidden tangled threads start to show themselves, and begin to weave a truly amazing tapestry. There is always time for the members of the boarding house to come together to shoot off fireworks, drink under the kotatsu, fight over rent and lifestyle and everything else and come back together again in the end, even if all their bonding is doomed to fade with the next jump back in time. They forget the true character of the people they are surrounded by and are fated to bond with once again, but we don’t have to forget; seeing them celebrate with one another renews our hopes that they all find their way back to one another.
Narugino is the pink haired idol who moonlights as a masked superhero, putting her mysterious strength to work. No one knows where the power comes from, and only one knows her identity as Strange Juice. That one is Meika, the landlord with the most comically absurd amalgamation of Kansai dialects conceived in the recent history of anime. She puts her hacking skills to work for Narugino, and together, they fight crime. Ito used to be a high school student but eventually became a shut-in gamer, who played online with Yuuta from time to time. Rabura is a failed psychic, always looking for recognition, a job, and a guy. And Yuuta…Yuuta is a student who we never see at school, with the same mysterious power as Narugino, but that manifests itself when he finds himself seriously turned on. Does this even begin to touch on their true personalities, their lives up until this point? Absolutely not, but saying anything further would be pulling the hidden threads to come out into the open, and Punch Line has the timing for revealing down to the last detail, and so to talk about them is to ruin the effect.
But what I can say is that they all show incredible bravery and self-control, as well as the willingness to bond with one another over things as little as impromptu karaoke and as big as their reason for being on the earth. That last part is surprisingly concrete, as it slowly comes out why they joined the boarding house, and the figures who have dictated every detail of their lives before they settled down in the corner of society. And the boarding house truly feels like the outskirts of civilization; all other buildings are outlines on the backdrop, behind an impenetrable wall of trees. We never see where road back to the city leads after the first few steps from the house. The five of them share a microcosm of society, completely cut off from the outside until the wayward spirit kicks Yuuta out, and with it comes the demons of the past, the threats of the present, and the nightmare of not having a future. And yet against all this the five—no, the six of them—slowly find the path towards resistance, at the real and present risk of having to choose a future where not all of them will live to celebrate together.
There is no real greater meaning to Punch Line, and comedy and panty shots are ever present against the serious backdrop that builds episode by episode. But watching it with a week in between each new installment was pulse-pounding. No plot point is contrived, and no plot twist falls flat. Each one is a message that there is something we are overlooking, another piece of the puzzle that could solve it altogether, or even ruin the puzzle entirely. Or maybe that piece will be another detail in the lives of the boarding house members that gives us another little way to enjoy watching them pass their days. I don’t count it as much of a spoiler that the very last shot of the show is one big panty shot. That’s how it began, after all. And when it came I found myself wondering what the point of it all was. A show this strong could have done away with the fan service altogether, and absolutely nothing would change. It is an inevitable flaw that a show with plot-centric fan service will thus provoke irritation in simply trying to advance the story.
It is a flaw, but it is a flaw that faded and faded until it was completely out of sight, something I never thought I could say about excessive fan service. But in the end all it took was a show so confident in its characters, in its design towards making a complex and interwoven story with the simple purpose of finding a happy and peaceful ending; in the end that was all it took to be sucked into Punch Line, into an enrapturing show that slowly sunk its teeth into my mind and ultimately refused to let go until the absolute last moments of resolution, leaving nothing but an itch to go back in time and start it all over again.