Oh My Goddess (2005) S1E1-4
This review was fast lane commissioned by Aris Katsaris.
I can't say how faithful this series is to the manga, but it's definitely much more in-depth than the OVA. The four episodes of OMG2005 I just watched only barely catch up to the ending of the first OVA episode, and introduce some major plot elements that either weren't present at all in the OVA or were brushed passed in literal seconds. The pacing of the later series definitely has a more "adapted from a serial manga" feel to it, for sure.
Now, as for the story...there's a lot of stuff going on here that I wasn't expecting. A whole framing context that the OVA completely left out, that turns Oh My Goddess into a different type of story. Well, sort of. I have mixed feelings about how it all fits together. On one hand, it's a story exploring the concept of "fate," what it would really mean to have capricious metaphysical forces deny you your agency, and how one might find self-actualization even in such circumstances. On the other hand, it's a "magical girlfriend, wut do?" story. These two components have very little to do with each other, at least in the four episodes I've seen, and you can probably guess which of them interests me much, much more than the other.
Honestly, the "u get a girlfriend" aspect is skeevier here than it was in the OVA. On top of it feeling like a distraction from better things now.
The series starts out with a conversation between the three Fate sisters, spoken over a cosmic panorama of galaxies and stars. They discuss a particular mortal, a resident of a particular country on a particular planet, who has fallen under the sway of a malignant star. He is fated to suffer, fail, and be taken advantage of, his gifts and good intentions coming to naught no matter what he does. It is beyond his power, or the power of any of those around him, to counteract this. His fate is twisted, the symptom of a metaphysical snarl with no physical solution (the cosmic system of fate is referred to as "Yggdrassil," in an extra bit of mythic continuity). In such cases, the fates typically intervene in the mortal's life at some point, trying to equalize the problem with the granting of a wish.
So, right off the bat, this changes everything. The scope of the change only gets more apparent as time goes on. Keiichi isn't just some luckless underdog here, he's literally cursed. More interestingly, his cursed status isn't ended by Belldandy's insertion into his life. The misfortune continues to pull and claw at him, episode after episode. He and Belldandy have a constant battle to fight, with her magic and his ever-more-precarious optimism and good nature pushing and pulling against conspiring fate.
Well. The sitcom-friendly version of conspiring fate, at least. Keiichi has family that seem to care about him at least a little, hasn't suffered any horrible disabling or disfiguring accidents, and hasn't been targeted by any predatory psychopath types. Maybe fate just still hasn't pulled out the big guns yet, or maybe we're just keeping this light for genre reasons.
That's not to say that Keiichi's life is great, to be clear. It's pretty unpleasant and depressing, much more obviously so than in the OVA version (his peers are outright abusive toward him rather than just apathetic, for the most part. He's constantly on the brink of being broke due to the accidents, mishaps, and lot opportunities that plague him. His unusually small size is actually noted and commented on, with clear disfavor, by other characters. Etc). Just, there are definitely people much worse off than him in the world. Then again, his badass podcycle never works properly, which means that instead of the pussy magnet he usually has to drive around on this:
...okay, you know what? I take it back. The tiny motorbike is also a pussy magnet. Different form, but they both fit the function.
The weirdo musclebound motorbike club that he lives with is portrayed much more antagonistically, and also are noted in-universe to be a bunch of cultish weirdos by the rest of the student body. They're perpetually too broke to actually do much motorcycle construction or repair, so most of the time they just lift weights, talk about the bikes that they're theoretically racing on, and act weird about women. Not in the creepy way; more of a gradeschooler-afraid-of-cooties way. This does provide some context for why Keiichi and Belldandy get thrown out of the club's dorm/townhouse/whatever for the latter's existence.
The night that Keiichi meets Belldandy, he's holding down the fort and waiting for a phone call for Boss Senpai to make up for messing up a club fundraiser earlier that day (or rather, serving as a scapegoat for its failure).
Also, the club leader is named as Toraichi here, but that's okay, he'll always be Boss Senpai to me.
Also also, after throwing Keiichi and Belldandy out on the streets for getting cooties in their MGTOW fortress, the bike club senpais start trying to woo her out from under him the next time they meet the couple. Great guys, truly.
Quite a number of people are trying to break Keiichi and Belldandy up, actually. The senpais. Other random jealous boys. Other random jealous girls who don't like Belldandy getting all the attention. Etc. In all cases, they are stopped by a combination of neither of the two being interested in breaking up, and by the intervention of the "system force." The system force is a binding, metaphysical power that ensures that the recipient of Belldandy's wish gets what they asked for, in this case for Belldandy to be with Keiichi forever. The system force does confuse me a bit with how it defines its terms. In some situations, it seems to take the wording of the wish literally, causing events to conspire to stop Keiichi and Belldandy from ever physically being out of sight of one another. In others, it interprets their "togetherness" romantically, and punishes would-be homewreckers with twists of cursed fate like an overprotective parent when they get too meddlesome. This actually serves as another source of comedic drama; the system force causes more and more dramatic events the longer the threat to Keiichi and Belldandy's togetherness persists for, so the two of them sometimes need to scramble to prevent it from literally collapsing buildings on people when they get pushy enough.
So, that gives the whole thing more of an actual plot with conflicts and stakes. And it's a clever setup that allows for all sorts of shenanigans and gags, ranging from merely silly to dramatic and spectacular.
The themes of fate, luck, and karma interplay heavily with both of the leading personalities. From the beginning, Keiichi lives up to the Norns' opening descriptions of him as a man who gives and gives without ever being given anything in return. Despite his terrible luck, low-to-nonexistent social status, and beaten-down-to-the-point-of-meekness demeanour, Keiichi remains proactively kind and helpful to everyone around him. Granted, in some situations this comes across less as him being good and more as him being spineless. A lot of pop culture from the 80's and 90's, on both sides of the pond, had trouble distinguishing between these two things. In other situations though - such as when he goes out of his way, despite being in a bad situation himself, to help a little girl find a wallet she lost on the other side of the stripmall - he really does seem like a guy who truly deserves a break. In fact, part of what Belldandy's magic does is allow Keiichi's positive energy to rebound back on him as it should rather than dissipating into the ether due to his star-curse. The wallet incident happens the day before Belldandy's appearance. The following day, when her and Keiichi are homeless and hungry, Belldandy casts one of her spells, and that same little girl's family happens to run into them, and treats the two of them to lunch for helping their daughter last night.
It's an interesting philosophical premise. We *should* live in a just world, but there's some kind of metaphysical corruption that prevents it from being so, with entities like Belldandy doing their best to keep the corruption under control. It's a premise that would have a lot to answer for if you zoomed out and showed more of the world with all the horrors and injustices it contains, but FOR a small-scale supernatural sitcom about this struggling college kid it's much more palatable.
As I said before, there's also a thread running through the story about agency. And...well...here's where my feelings get more mixed. Keiichi's side of this is fine, for the most part. Him learning how to meet the powers of fate halfway, using the breathing room afforded to him by Belldandy to make decisions and stand up to people and dealing with potential System Force reactions in the manner of his own choosing, is pretty nice stuff. As for Belldandy though...yeesh.
Belldandy gets to show a lot more sides to herself in these episodes, and she comes across as a much more complete (if not quite human) entity. She makes her own observations and draws her own (often bizarre, but also oddly insightful) conlusions about the human world as she gets used to it. Her ability to read people's minds and nonchalance about this invasion of privacy keeps an unsettling edge about her, despite the unrelenting sweetness (though the effect would be stronger if the show was more consistent about her being able to do this, heh). For her, the laws of fate are as intuitive and natural as the laws of physics are for us, and - while she herself is bound by it via the System Force in some ways - she also sees herself as its master. She's like an engineer, and her spells are akin to her building machines of destiny.
This subtextual commonality between her and Keiichi is embodied by the scene where she magically soups up his podcycle (the major repairs were actually done on it by the senpais, as a rare gesture of genuine kindness before they threw him out) and switches her goddess regalia for a conjured biker outfit (which she rocks, by the way). Them riding together on a machine that they both had a hand in bringing to life is a pretty solid symbol.
The Norse trappings might go a little further than they did in the OVA, but Belldandy is still more of a Shinto-style kami overall than she is a Norn. The particular style of animism she often interacts with is very Japanese flavored. For instance, the story of how they end up living in that shrine is the subject of one and a half episodes in this version, and starts with her invoking the resident spirit of a two thousand yen note to guide them to further prosperity.
When the bill gets blown out of Keiichi's hand by the wind, Belldandy's spell hiijacks that bad luck and turns it into good luck. Driving after the flying bill leads them to the temple, where the overworked priest initially hires them to help him restore the building and grounds, and then yeilds it to them entirely when he catches a glimpse of Belldandy's true form when she goes out to (literally) stretch her wings one night.
He very reasonably concludes that this literal divine being and her companion are probably better suited to this job than he is, especially when he's already fallen behind on its upkeep in his age.
Unfortunately, there's also another side to Belldandy's relationships with both the forces of fate and with Keiichi. Mostly apparent in one particular scene, but given that it's arguably the most important scene in the entire series it casts a very long shadow. So...honestly, this might ruin the entire thing for me.
When Belldandy first appears to Keiichi in the Motorbike MGTOW fortress, he's much further into the side of actually believing her when he makes his wish. She shows him a few displays of supernatural power before he makes it, and he's engaging in her scenario at least half-seriously. And then, when he wishes to have her by his side forever, she looks absolutely horrified.
Then, while Keiichi is trying to figure out what he just did and what the consequences of it actually are, Belldandy hurries to the phone and asks her divine father (in both series, you can apparently call heaven via landline) if such a wish really is valid. When the answer is affirmative, she tries to argue with him, tries to extend the conversation, but then he just says goodbye and hangs up.
For a moment, she's just crouched over the phone with her back to the camera, completely silent. Then, when she turns back around again in a few seconds, her face looks like this:
She tells Keiichi how happy she is that she'll get to spend the rest of his life with him, and he immediately starts freaking out over how he's going to be able to handle this.
At no point, in this scene or afterward, does he ask if she's really okay with this. Even after her initial reaction making it really, really seem like she's NOT okay with this.
Is she putting on a brave face and affecting cheer in order to avoid triggering System Force consequences? Does her worldview simply force her to accept twists of fate that she can't change and make the best of them, even if it's painful? Or was her personality actually just rewritten in order to turn her into the thing Keiichi was wishing for, regardless of her previous self's strong desire for that to not happen?
For the rest of the ensuing two and a half episodes, Keiichi is always worrying after Belldandy's comfort and accommodations. But he never even questions whether or not she wants to be here with him in the first place. Or shows any acknowledgement that that's a question that should - or even can - be asked. He shows concern for the wishes and agency of minor female characters who they encounter along the way, but the series itself doesn't seem to think that Belldandy's position here falls into the same category. The strong impression I get is that the story thinks that women are people unless and until they belong to a man. Then, they're people except where their commitment to the man they belong to is concerned, and there's nothing that even needs to be questioned or considered there, it's just an intuitive fact of life. There are periodic moments in the later two episodes where the story reminds you of this. When Belldandy's unfamiliarity with the human world makes her need to lean on Keiichi for guidance, and he worries about being able to ensure her happiness, and the question of "should she even be here with you at all then?" seems like it's begging to be asked, but no one asks it. That's on top of the creepiness of the "born sexy yesterday and you're her daddy" vibes that these sequences had for me in both versions.
When it comes to a man's view of romantic relationships...another thing that bothered me in the first episode and change is Keiichi periodically bemoaning his lack of a girlfriend, and imagining that having a partner would make life worth it. On one hand, having a significant other is awesome, sure. On the other hand though...I remember being a put-upon teenager who thought that romance was what my life needed. I remember my first relationship in college, and how it didn't change who I was, or my problems with myself, or the broader difficulties of my life. That relationship and the one after it would have both been longer and more successful if I'd prioritized my nonromantic social life and broadened myself as a person for its own sake, instead of thinking of getting a girlfriend as The One Thing I Really Needed. It's a mental trap that a lot of younger AMAB people fall into, and it's a bad one. And, here, it's just rewarded.
Combine these two issues, and then have the girlfriend *actually* be able to manipulate fate to improve his life for him, and the whole setup gets...creepy. To the point where it hangs over the entire story like a toxic miasma and prevents me from taking the rest at face value.
There's a great story in here about luck, fortune, and agency. It being bound at the hip to "submissive magic girlfriend, wut do?" in this particular way is deeply unfortunate. I'd like it a lot more if Belldandy was a more conventional guardian angel or wish-granting genie instead of a girlfriend, and the story tackled all the same themes and hypotheticals from that base.
