#Wagnaria

[cute-girls-from-vns-anime-manga]

Mahiru Inami by やわらかおぜう

[speecy-spicy]

It really is a mystery~

[rollanan]

Hana Miyakoshi!!

[ho-le-dai]

[grailfigure]

Taneshima Popura // Working!!!

1/7 Scale by Ques Q

[bokujou-gif]

[constermonster]

Working!! Fans finding my art aaa I wanna draw more fanart!!

[sliceofdices]

Welcome to Wagnaria!!

[flieder-house]

[samipekoe]

Sorry to hear you don’t like the look of the ranma remake. Will you watch it nonetheless or skip it ? Wish you a good day

iiii am torn on it. I love ranma so I would very much enjoy watching ranma and akane fall in love in a new iteration...but I also really hate how it looks!!! more so now that I'm rewatching the OG bc it's soooo gorgeous.. I'll have to see how I feel by the time it's out!

[cute-girls-from-vns-anime-manga]

The short girl with the ponytail from Working!

POPURA

[funny-anime-face-world]

WWW.Working!! (2016) S01 E01 · Part-Time Jobs Can Change Lives

[rollanan]

angy Popura-chan!!

[animekity]

shoutout to romances where the two Main Characters don't end up together / the protagonist doesn't end up with The First potential love interest introduced, bc there's another character with less screen time who's a way better match for them

[wanderersrest]

Some Idle Thoughts About Working!!

Hello, and welcome to Wagnaria!!

So today, I'd like to take a swing at talking about something that's not giant robot-related. Like at all. I want to talk about Working!!, an anime about the part-time staff of the fictional restaurant known as Wagnaria. This is going to be much shorter than I had planned, and it's also not within my regular ouvre of giant robots. But hey, I said I was going to talk about Working!!, and by gum am I going to talk about Working!!

It also helps that the next thing I'm going to work on is going to be much heavier than this. So let's sit for a little and talk about Working!!

I Doubted Satou-sama. (Also, I Am Very Meta)

I remember a common criticism of Working!! was that Popura does not show up a whole lot despite often appearing front and center in a lot of the promotional material. And while it is much more likely that this happened because the anime cuts out a lot of the stories that actually do focus on Popura, I'd like to argue that that's kind of the point.

Popura exists primarily to draw the audience in, much like how she convinced Takanashi to work at Wagnaria. Outside of her shortness, Popura exists mostly as a normal girl, and this is backed up in the manga when the "very much a normal girl" Matsumoto assesses the rest of her coworkers. To me, that provides a pretty reasonable reason to move the focus away from her to the more eccentric female leads like the androphobic Inami or the sword-wielding Todoroki.

This is not to say that Popura is, by any stretch of the imagination, unimportant. If anything, Popura being relegated to the background helps to signify that she is actually pretty normal (outside of that dream where she became a magical girl). This doesn't even touch on the fact that, as the show goes on, Popura being out of shot helps to clue the viewer in on the fact that she is working hard. This is what informs a big decision towards the end of the series.

But it's not just Popura's lack of screentime that the anime relies on in order to be very meta. The series, both in anime and manga format, are in conversation with the fourth wall. Granted, Working!! is not at the level of fourth-wall breaking as, say, Gintama, but I don't think most works are at a level of fourth-wall breaking that Gintama is at. One of the more infamous, and funnily enough Gintama-like, jokes pulled with the anime was the running gag of the production committee constantly saying "Oh the show has been cancelled" only for Season 2 to premiere immediately after the fake announcement.

There's also the fake preview for the anime finale "The Lord of the Takanashi," which imagines Inami's journey to rescue Takanashi as a sort of Dragon Quest/Legend of Zelda pastiche. If you pay attention to the fake preview and what actually happens in "Lord of the Takanashi," you begin to notice that the fake preview is true in a broad strokes kind of way.

There's the fact that the web spinoff occurs in the same span of time as the original series since Higashida gets recruited at the same exact time as Takanashi. Or for that matter, there's the fact that technically speaking, the web series is the original Working!! and the serialized manga is the true spinoff...

Okay, okay. That's all I really have to say about Working!! I just think it's a pretty neat series where, despite how zany the cast can seem, the series itself is very grounded. Granted, the anime cuts out a lot of things that add additional context to the series. And while things like Maya's backstory or Izumi's training arc are cut out, the anime does a pretty good job of adapting this strange series in a way that still captures the vibe of the source material. Working!! really is a series that I find to be weird in a good way. I think this series also helped ease me into the sheer insanity that is Gintama, which I will talk about one day.

[directivexero]

As someone who owns more than a few anime blurays, DVDs and even old VHS tapes, y’all should just pirate that shit. I cannot complete any of my collections because they stopped making that shit in like 2018. Maybe someday, they make a big box set so that I can have the whole thing in one place and *maaaybe* aniplex remembers that Wagnaria exists, but it’s not likely. Just take that shit, experience it, love it. Shit sucks, but that doesn’t mean you can’t watch something beautiful (or trashy, up to you).