Spoilers ahead for Oshi No Ko’s pilot. Trust me, you don’t want to ruin this one for yourself.
Honestly, I’m not sure where I even start with the absolutely wild ride that was theOshi No Kopilot. From beginning to end, the hour-and-a-half-long first episode was completely insane, and that was the beauty of it. I went into it with absolutely zero knowledge of its story: no character info, no plot synopsis, nothing to spoil the twists and turns ahead of me. The only thing I did know was that it was from the creator of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, and that meant it was sure to be good — but I had no clue justhowgood it would be.
I’ll admit, the first twenty minutes were almost off-putting, but I was determined to see the show through til the end. The show opened on Gorou Amemiya, a gynecologist working at a countryside hospital and a huge fan of Ai Hoshino, a sixteen-year-old idol. Obviously, a grown man who’s that obsessed with a teenage girl is a bit hard to stomach, and that creepy little gaucherie is pointed out to him by a coworker multiple times. I almost stopped watching there — was this going to be some weird love story between a grown man and a teenager? I couldn’t watch that, or fathom why it was so popular.
But then, Gorou explains why he follows her career: A few years back, he lost a patient that was about the same age as Ai who was a huge fan of hers. The young girl, named Sarina, ended up dying of cancer, but before she passed, she would watch Ai’s videos over and over. Gorou subconsciously transferred his love for his patient onto Ai; in his words, he wanted Ai to succeed because it was like watching Sarina live the life she always dreamed of living.
That made his obsession with Ai much sweeter in theory, but it was definitely still a little weird. And it got even weirder when Ai walked into his clinic five months pregnant with twins. To his credit, the doctor was very professional, and the two had a long conversation about what Ai wanted: To maintain her idol career and still give birth to her twins. She’s well aware that her idol fan base would disappear in an instant once the news of her pregnancy breaks, especially considering her age, but she sees being an idol as a collection of lies anyway. She’s prepared for the risks. Ever the determined supporter, Gorou promises he’ll help her give birth to healthy, normal babies.
Unfortunately, no part of that statement ends up holding true.
Oshi No Ko’s pilot kept me guessing the whole time. The genre shifted literally four times over the course of the episode, and the first shift arrives in the form of man who had tracked Ai to the hospital shoving Gorou off a cliff. I’ll give you a second to sit with that — I know I needed a few. The kind-hearted doctor is literally murdered while chasing down a psychopath who was after his patient, but his story doesn’t end there, because the next genre shift arrived in the form of an isekai-like twist.
Gorou is reborn as one of Ai’s twins, a boy named Aquamarine. The real kicker (as though that isn’t enough) is that his twin sister Ruby is the reincarnation of Sarina, who had died four years prior. Together, the twins get up to some truly insane antics because, of course, they can already walk and talk like adults — they still have their memories from their previous lives, you see, and they’re still massive fans of their mother. Together, they blackmail a woman into keeping their mother’s secret under the guise of being gods, engage in stan wars on Twitter, and, at a concert, perform a synchronized dance that goes viral.
Each and every one of their antics serves to boost their mother’s career, and by the time the children are toddlers, they have already started to find their paths in life (lucky little things): Aquamarine is cast in a movie by a director who takes a shine to him, and he finds he has real promise for the career. Ruby, meanwhile, finally has the functional body she’d always wished for — and has thousands of views on idol music videos stocked up to help her kickstart her dancing career.
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This is where I began to settle into the swing of things. I was fully prepared for a wonderfulslice of life animeabout the antics of these reincarnated twins and their mother, all trying to pursue their careers in show business in their own ways. There would be more poignant takes on the dangers of the entertainment industries, more commentary on how so much of it was just performance and lies. The family would have a few close run-ins where their secret was almost revealed, a couple of sweet moments together to tug at the heartstrings, and the inevitable drama of revealing the identity of their father. I could see it all laid out before me, and I was excited.
Oh, what a fool I was.
If you’ve been keeping track, that was only genre shift three, and the final shift was the craziest one of all. See, Oshi No Ko lulls you into a false sense of security. It makes you think you know exactly what’s going to happen. Ai calls hersecret baby daddy? Sure, that’s just fodder for a little bit of drama, and that’s what makes a slice of life anime good. She goes on a monologue about how she’s never truly loved or been loved by anyone, and how she’s too afraid to tell her children she loves them, lest she find out it’s a lie? That’s all just the backstory we haven’t seen from her yet! She’s finally getting her time in the sun. Everything is just laying the groundwork for the rest of the season, which will be fun, and normal, and heartfelt, and —
Ai getsstabbed in the stomachby her stalker, who has found her years after killing Gorou. And as she’s bleeding out, she tells the stalker she always wanted to love her fans. She even wanted to love him now, and she’d always thought that if she just kept lying, someday the words would be true. Aquamarine clutches to her as the lightliterallyleaves her eyes, and finally, she tells her children she loves them and weeps that it’s the gods' honest truth. By the end of it, I was weeping, too.
When I tell you I was absolutely shell-shocked? That I couldn’t believe what I had just seen? That I was literally screaming at my friend who had put me through this madness, not that he had had any more information than I? That’s when it hit me: This show is a murder mystery. This is a revenge plot. Aqua realizes that the only person who could have told the stalker where his mother was — not once, but twice — is his biological father, and he swears at hismother’s funeralthat he’ll find the man and kill him. The episode ends with the twins heading off to school at age 16, the same age their mother had been at the start of the story.
Oshi No Ko’s pilot was a mind-boggling piece of art. Apart from its insane twists and turns, it also shed light on the idol scene in Japan and the hate and harassment female celebrities receive just for existing. After Ai’s death, some people suspect she was murdered for falling in love, and some even say she deserved it. It’s the perfect expression of the absolute entitlement some male fans have towards their female celebrity crushes; they’re allowed to love her, but she can’t love anyone but them, or it’s a betrayal.
I cannot wait for the next episode of the show. I’m excited to see how the story continues to unpack these themes of stardom and fan entitlement. I’m eager to know how these characters have developed over the past thirteen years, if they’ve continued to pursue their suspected careers, and what progress (if any) Aqua has made towards finding his father. Oshi No Ko’s new episodesair every Wednesday, and starting now, that just be my favorite day of the week.
