Akiba Maid War is 2022’s best anime about gun-toting maid waitresses

“The violence is part of the job,” says Nerula, an alien-themed service worker in the maid cafes of Akihabara, in a moment of nonchalant, offhand absurdity that the new original anime Akiba Maid WarI have learned to love what is expected of me. In a series with an outrageous display of bloodshed, it might be the show’s commitment to a straight-faced matter-of-factness about the violent lives of cafe maids that makes it even funnier, its characters internalizing “moe moe kyun” as the guiding principle for which they bleed (“moe’’ has a broad meaning, but mostly connotes a “cute” vibe). It feels like there’s more anime than ever this season, but even amid a season filled with high profile shows like Chainsaw Man, Bleach, Mob Psycho 100, Akiba Maid War deserves your attention.

Directed by Sōichi Masui (Sakura QuestP.A. Works (also responsible for this year’s Kongming, Ya Boy!) and Cygames, it’s a strong contender for the funniest anime of the season, an original managing to hold its own in a season packed with heavy hitters. It pays homage to other Gangster Pictures and yakuza movies. Akiba Maid War supplants criminal brotherhood with maid cafes dotted around Akihabara, each operating as the arm of one of two wider groups — the animal-themed “Creatureland” and the sci-fi themed “Maidalien” group — competing for control of the area and bristling against a tenuous peace treaty.

Image: P.A. Works/Sentai Filmworks

It somewhat (and that’s extreme emphasis on “somewhat”) recalls works like Kinji Fukasaku’s yakuza films, like if someone threw a frilly apron on his despairing and influential Battles Without Honor and Humanity This is a different story, but it follows the history of warring gangs and their transformations through decades. The Creatureland Group’s bid for business dominance contains echoes of the Yamamori gang building themselves into the capitalist conglomerate Tensei Group. The show explores what it takes to be a human being in Japan. moe mob, The underhanded political maneuvering is Added to echoes of the bloodiness of Takashi Miike’s work (the mind will also wander to Tarantino, considering the shared inspirations). The main difference in this episode is that the gangsters also decorate omelets withketchup faces.

Akiba Maid War It contrasts these homages to the sweetness that its characters represent so earnestly. You could say it’s in close proximity to this year’s Lycoris Reoil, This As the plot unfolds, the narrative reveals a conspiracy of teenager assassins who use a cafe to conceal their true identity. Both of them enjoy the cute-but-deadly gulf that is evident in subgenres like girls-with-guns. LycorisContemporary surveillance and authoritarianism are used as their set dressing, rather than criminal enterprises. Akiba Maid WarYou don’t need to laugh at these things.

Image: P.A. Works/Sentai Filmworks

The idealistic Nagomi is the audience’s route into this absurdist history. She is unaware of the barbarism of her profession and struggles to learn from rival cafes. They engage in squabbles over animal-themed threats. Nagomi, a pig-themed Oinky Doink Cafe hoste, makes friends with Ranko (an older maid who has just been released from the cafe for a not revealed crime).

Nagomi and Ranko’s first outing together is nothing short of a disaster, however — Ranko introduces Nagomi to the reality of maid work, massacring a rival cafe on an errand originally intended to offer the two up as sacrificial lambs to appease an age-old beef. The result is a deranged set-piece for the ages, with the episode spiraling out of control following an incredibly dark gag where blood from a headshot whistles out of the wound and onto poor Nagomi’s maid outfit not once, but three times in delayed succession.

As episode director Tomoaki Ota explains, the shock turns into complete chaos. A shootout ensues and spills onto the streets. cuts back to Oinky Doink Cafe, where Nagomi’s coworker Yumechi is performing a high-energy number called “The Pure Maid’s Master-Killing Kiss.” The intercut sequence times Ranko performing elaborate feats of gun-fu with wotagei (basically a kind of dancing done by idol fans) to the resultant uptempo and vaguely threatening insert song about exploding hearts, with Ranko popping off rounds in time to the beat while knives and guns both take on the role of glow sticks. It rips, to borrow some critical terminology.

Image: P.A. Works/Sentai Filmworks

While the first episode was a shock to the system, it proved too much and the show re-emerged. The humor premise is just that, and violence in the narrative itself is not unexpected. After a genuine tragedy, the seventh episode launches into all-out warfare with a classical soundtrack. Sax solos score blood feuds. In keeping with the long-standing anime tradition of baseball episodes, this eighth episode features extreme roughhousing, and, yes, double murder. An early favorite of mine is the third episode’s journey to a fight club, which quickly turns into a riff on Ashita no Joe, evoking Osamu Dezaki’s classic 1970 boxing anime with freeze frames of cross-counters and other iconic poses, as well as the manager turning into a sleazier take on Joe Yabuki’s coach, Danpei.

The third episode also makes for an excellent introduction to Zoya, a Russian expatriate who struggles to fit in due to her stoic appearance, who fights Ranko physically and ideologically over whether or not the two of them can even be considered “cute” or worthy of being maids. She switches to Russian and reveals her history in a flashback. The episode surprises viewers by showing how meticulously it takes the details. Zoya’s voice actress, Jenya, intentionally leaned into her native Russian accent to get the role on point, aggressively rolling her R’s).

Image: P.A. Works/Sentai Filmworks

Aside from the action, the personalities of its goofy lead cast are enjoyable on their own — Ranko is an obvious standout from the moment she arrives, as she earnestly and very seriously conducts maid work with glorious monotone cadence. Just as there’s more to Akiba Maid War than its surface absurdity, there are also compelling complications to Ranko, who is both ruthlessly violent but also the most receptive to Nagomi’s naivety and quixotic pursuits of peace.

Then there’s the manager, an eminently watchable weasel who never stops trying to press whatever minor advantage she can get, exploiting everyone in her care; she’s so awful she comes back around to being utterly watchable as she continually sinks to new lows. The Oink Doink maids also count Okachimachi among them, an arsonist dressed in a panda costume and who acts silently like a real panda.

While there’s a lot more going on in terms of the show’s smart comedic timing, the surface touches are a delight to experience in and of themselves. Every episode begins with a shotgun blast of ’90s ephemera through the dingy video textures and The Prodigy-esque rave sounds of its opening song, “Maid Daikaiten” (sung by the cast). Its grimy synths suddenly transform into the kind of sugary pop song that one would expect from a maid cafe, in an extension of the show’s fun clashes of tone. (The ending, by contrast, is a hilariously soulful traditional enka track sung by Ranko’s voice actress, Rina Satō).

Image: P.A. Works/Sentai Filmworks

Within the context of the episodes themselves, there’s a fun clash of rough brushwork and colorful glitz amidst some surprisingly well-choreographed fights, all of which help to place the show within this insane parallel-universe take on this period of time. It helps that the writers also know when to be sincere and when to be foolish, when to uplift the maids of Oinky Doink as well as when to make their victories self-defeating — as well-meaning as a couple of them are, as they defend themselves they also blunder their way into multiple turf wars and standoffs that threaten to tear their livelihood apart. Such moments also display the writers’ smart commitment to deepening a sense of history in its The absurdist The district was reconstructed, and this is in line with how Akiba Maid WarAs the story progresses, it expands on other genre parodies. It depicts an adorable criminal colony with stone-cold murderers dressed as farm animals.

Akiba Maid War As mentioned above, Incarceration This is an ordinary part of Oinky Doink’s job. In the process of creating its alternate history, 1990s Akihabara is fusing its references to yakuza films with an array of genres and anachronisms (in this world). Akiba Maid WarThere is an entire festival celebrating the 200 year-old tradition that maids have with violence. You can also find cosplay maids fighting in fight clubs and gambling rings. There is nothing more you could want.

Akiba Maid WarHIDIVE is able to stream the video.