In an introduction video before the American premiere of the first 90-minute episode of Oshi no Ko at Anime Boston, members of the creative team discussed their reactions to first reading the manga. They describe the series as “shocking” and “controversial,” something they wanted to look away from but couldn’t. Based on the movie-length pilot/prologue, these descriptions are accurate — and that’s probably as much as you should probably know about it before watching it when it streams on April 12 on HIDIVE.
Oshi no Ko is a lot. It would be easy to split this long premiere into four separate episodes (certain perspective changes and time skips make logical breakpoints), but there’s logic to releasing all this story simultaneously. A strange mix of otaku wish-fulfillment tropes and their exact opposite in the form of Perfect Blue-style horror and social commentary, some viewers will almost certainly reject it as just too much, but by the end of these 90 minutes, any skepticism is decimated by surprising emotional involvement and the desire to know where the hell this story will go.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The first big challenge with Oshi no Ko is the protagonist Goro Amemiya, a gynecologist who is creepily obsessed with the 16-year-old idol Ai Hoshino. The show knows his obsession is creepy; one of his co-workers flat-out asks if he’s a lolicon. Goro, for his part, maintains his fandom is chaste and inspired by the memory of Sarina Tendouji, a terminally ill 12-year-old Ai fangirl who was his patient before she died — a story that makes him more sympathetic in theory but the telling of it doesn’t exactly make him sound less weird.
