This Week in Anime

The Panty & Stocking Phenomenon

Chris
We'll have to self-censor enough to take it easy on editorial if we don't want Lynzee to sentence us to an eternity of hard labor in Kadokawa's isekai mines.

But hey, being the best at breaking all the rules is the kind of cartoon Panty & Stocking has always been, so it's no surprise they've found bold new ways to push the envelope fifteen years later. Between all the naughty language and the uncut screencaps courtesy of Amazon streaming, it'll be a miracle if this column gets through without being age-gated.

Really makes me appreciate the audacity that the first parody title card they did when they returned was another Disney-affiliated riff with that Spider-Man Homecoming swipe. Trigger really gives no f-uh, cares.

And I gotta appreciate how deep that drive to make things others won't run in Panty & Stocking. I mean, New genuinely exists because Otsuka, Hiroyuki Imaishi, and the rest of the funky bunch finally got the rights back to their baby away from the collapsing Gainax, who were most certainly not making this anymore. It's certainly near and dear to my heart. Panty & Stocking was the subject of my very first TWIA column, alongside the late, great Nick Dupree, right after this sequel had just been announced back in...2022?!

That announcement was seismic at the time, but between the original wait for the second season at all, followed by the three years it then took for New Panty & Stocking to actually come out, I could understand some consternation that "the Half-Life 3 of anime sequels" might not live up to its astronomical hype.

Sophomore soarings are significantly less common. I'll always be astonished that Gunbuster 2/Aim for the Top 2/Diebuster actually felt like a worthy successor to the original Gunbuster coming from better-days-Gainax.

I also hear tell that Black Butler significantly improved in the gap between its entries. But given what a rarity that kind of accomplishment is, I was fully bracing for New Panty & Stocking to hit like the latter-day FLCL sequels.

It's why it's only appropriate that Panty & Stocking found its way back to these creators before it was revived, as opposed to Gainax Weekend-at-Bernie's its then-corpse around for fun and profit. In that same roundtable, Imaishi talks about how he's had plans for ten seasons plus a movie of Panty & Stocking. Describing it as a series where he can "perpetually create" certainly paints the series as something that the Trigger team can regularly return to just to squirt out new ideas.

Similarly, I got to hear Wakabayashi speak about the series at Trigger's panel at Otakon this year. He confirmed that he and the others at the studio had been coming up with ideas for New Panty & Stocking episodes continuously over these last fifteen years, just waiting until they'd have their chance again. And The Thing is, I'd say, all that extra time in the oven is probably one of the reasons the New show has turned out as tasty as it has!

It's a series I wouldn't have thought could go as planned. I always appreciated the "twist" ending of the original as a baffling troll job designed to ruin Christmas for weebs everywhere. Following up on it, especially after all this time and a studio hop, should've been out of the question. So when the premiere finally happened, I was shocked that they didn't just pull off closing the book on that cliffhanger, they made it look easy, feeling like the long-lost climactic actual season finale of original recipe Panty & Stocking.

Being the riff that it is, Panty & Stocking has always operated on cartoon logic (or lack thereof), with plenty of episodes in both seasons having anticlimactic non-endings. With that in mind, the first-season finale was just one more joke, and New Panty & Stocking daring to follow up on it as spectacularly as it did is another escalating joke.

Not that there isn't a story and development thereof in Panty & Stocking, and that's another way I think this choice of comeback tour was a statement of intent. Because this season has been doing stuff worthy of that New in the title, a lot of it likely informed by that mentioned new blood at Trigger. And I think growing fifteen years beyond the simpler ambitions of the original is what has contributed to this new season being so strong as a sequel.

I can't tell you how many times I've rewatched that musical sequence.

"Commitment to the bit" has been the defining quality for New Panty & Stocking. Just in the second episode, Wakabayashi and recurring writer for this season Rino Yamazaki are going all-in on a TCG parody that climaxed with...this...

It's followed by a whole sequence that I'm pretty sure I can't properly post screencaps of in this column. One of many "Just trust me, dude, you have to see it to believe it." Going all-in on referencing something like the Black Lotus from Magic: The Gathering encapsulates that point about this season's secret sauce being the creators' unabridged celebration of what inspires them. Like from the B horror movie parody in the fifth episode to the extremely particular direction of The Thing and aforementioned Conan tributes in the tenth, you can absolutely see director Akira Furukawa's love of cinema.

The Thing parody is, incidentally, another one I can hardly post any clean screencaps of.

Similarly, you've got Kai Ikarashi's Fourth World tribute in the fourth episode, another one of those sequences I'm going to be thinking about for a long time after. Ikarashi needs no introduction here (he did the best episodes of SSSS.Gridman, SSSS.Dynazenon, and Cyberpunk Edgerunners). Still, it's genuinely shocking to see that he had such pitch-perfect recreations of Hanna-Barbera animation and Jack Kirby stylings in his toolset.

It feels like I'm learning something more about the creator and what inspired them. Sort of like that episode of the original series that made clear just how huge a Transformers nerd Akira Amemiya was, but on an even denser, more artistically technical level.

This is another place I'm talking about the commitment to the bit. Impact Cop even runs at a noticeably lower, early YouTube resolution compared to the rest of the production. Every touch is incredible.

It's also all appropriate enough given that Space Patrol Luluco previously gave Inferno Cop its due along its own tour of Trigger cameos.

Going all the way back to Trigger's origins like this also gives New Panty & Stocking a reference point to spotlight just how far the series and the studio have come. The Impact Cop segment shares episode space with that dang musical excursion we keep returning to, which simultaneously feels like something that could only have come out of Panty & Stocking, and something they never would have attempted, at least not this way, in the original season.

Who is teaching Wakabayashi these words?

Speaking of bussin, though, the bussin boy angels this new series teased at the outset also lived up to the hype. But introducing a hot new duo in an extra-action-packed sixth episode is one of those reliable recurrences I hope becomes a tradition for future Panty & Stocking seasons.

It was fun going back and confirming that she really had been hanging around in the back the whole time, just waiting to reveal herself.

Polyester and Polyurethane have been fun additions explicitly characterized by their willingness to drop in and out of the plot on a dime, but Gunsmith Bitch feels like they might be setting her up for something bigger—if not in this season's forthcoming hour-long finale, then in one of those further seasons they're hopeful for. Hell, give her her own spin-off. She feels like she'd get on real well with Luluco's "Trigger-chan" persona.

Here's a fun fact for you: Super Guy Jin isn't here to pick on Western fans. Wakabayashi confirmed at that Otakon panel that he's specifically based on an American friend of the crew! Learning that really changed my perspective on the character.

Really, Trigger can only seem to have love, in their own particular way, for the Western side of their viewership. The already infamous weed shop joke in the second episode shows how thoroughly they've got our asses.

I mean, we're getting to watch the uncensored version streaming on Amazon while the Japanese broadcast gets covered up. So when it comes to treating us on this side of the world, they aren't f-uh, I mean, messing around.

The Trigger team's broadened horizons here speak to my point about how far I think the series has come (as it were). That is, I do think that New Panty & Stocking really is funnier, nicer-looking, and more creative than its predecessor, as it should be with all that extra time and talent. But it's also showing ambitions toward being more sincere, of all things, when it can. This, too, is a sign of growing up.

And I think that commitment to authenticity effectively explains how follow-up seasons like this can avoid that aforementioned sophomore slump. It's not just about having the original creators back, since as we've covered, New Panty & Stocking is thriving thanks to the inclusion of Trigger's new blood. Instead, it's about coming at the project with an understanding of the original and a commitment to keeping everything that worked while supplanting what didn't with fresh, "new" ideas.

New Panty & Stocking is a very unique case where the show had so long to soak in its own juices that it built up fifteen years of those new ideas. But it's stayed so true to itself, like Panty and her own character growth across both seasons, it still utterly feels like itself, as if it hasn't missed a beat.

Man, if I'd known this would happen, I would have taken the opportunity to fill up that swear jar more.

I guess it just shows that we've all always got more growing to do. See you when we're released from time out in fifteen years for New Coop & Chris!