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Since I’m feeling kind of burnt out on Albert Barillé’s Once Upon a Time… series, we’re pausing it for three weeks to watch some fanime instead.

What is fanime, you ask?

A fanime (etym. blend of fan + anime) is basically when someone makes an anime-style cartoon show by drawing frames in MS Paint; compositing them in Windows Movie Maker with pirated music, stock sound effects, and dialog recorded in one take on potato microphones; and posting the result to YouTube. This isn’t necessarily accurate of all fanime, but the throughline is in any case that fanime is a form of democratized amateur animation combining anime aesthetics with “Internet Ugly”. The style is most associated with the Western anime fandom of the mid-2000s through mid-2010s, where it was often difficult to distinguish sincere fanime shows from parodies of the genre.

As we will soon see, though, sincerity and parody are not mutually exclusive, and although the heyday of fanime was 15 years ago, fanime is today still far from a dead genre.

What’s the chef cookin’ tonight?

SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl (also styled Sparkle On, Raven!) is an ongoing action-comedy magical girl parody webseries with strong slice-of-life elements. It premiered in 2022 and is described by TV Tropes more specifically as “an affectionate parody of late-2000s fanime presented with a steadfast earnestness, playing around with anime tropes and clichés while forging its own identity at the same time.” (paraphrase)

Plot description: Raven, a high school senior, has a split life of a student and a magical girl. Her best friends are her classmates, Berrycream Frosting and Dark Shi. This year, a school down the road blew up and its students had to transfer to her school, bringing many new faces to their lives with new potential friendships to form. Raven’s biggest goal is to have the most perfect school year for herself. Unfortunately, someone with more sinister motives has her eyes on her, with the wish to ensure they get the best school experience instead.

※Plot description courtesy of Fanime Realm and the Sparkle On Raven Wiki; TV Tropes has its own plot description.

We will be watching all the currently released SPARKLE ON RAVEN official content tonight:

  • Episode 1: “The Perfect Perfect School Year” (runtime: c. 10 mins)
  • Episode 2: “Knife to meet you!” (runtime: c. 14 mins)
  • Minisode 1: “Half-House ~ ★☆SPARKLE ON DARK SHI☆★” (runtime: c. 4 mins)
  • Episode 3: “DrillGirl Saves Santa Claus!” (runtime: c. 14 mins)
  • Episode 4: “Room 424” (runtime: c. 17 mins)
  • Episode 5: “What the Heck Happened to you, Berrycream?” (runtime: c. 22 mins)
  • Minisode 2: “🎃 ~ ★☆Sparkle On, Scare Club☆★” (runtime: c. 8 mins)
  • Minisode 3: “The Life of Raven ~ ★☆SPARKLE ON DRILLGIRL☆★” (runtime: c. 6 mins)
  • Song: “WALKING TALKING MAN” (runtime: c. 3 mins)
  • Episode 6 trailer (runtime: c. 1 min)

≈ 100 minutes of scheduled content.

I don’t know what we’ll do when episode 6 comes out. The SPARKLE ON RAVEN YouTube channel has also uploaded the show’s convention panels at Kalawacon 2023 and 2024 — we won’t be watching those videos since they’re super long, but I figured they were worth mentioning.

Content warnings and accessibility

Audio description: Not available.

Sign language: Not available.

Captions: The first episode has subtitles available in Albanian, German, Korean, and English. The second episode has subtitles available in Korean and English. The remaining episodes, as well as the first minisode, only have human-made subtitles in Korean; if you need English subtitles for these videos, you will either need to use auto-generated captions, or machine-translated subtitles from Korean. The other videos we’ll be watching only have auto-generated captions.

Content warnings:

This series seems to include:

  • Blood spurting
  • Children fighting, fake-out killed, or otherwise in peril
  • Buildings exploding
  • High school bullies
  • Implied use of a recreational substance by a child
  • A non-human sapient is killed

This is based on the plot descriptions as well as skimming the TV Tropes page, although I couldn’t read it too closely to avoid spoiling myself. I’ve already seen the first episode and would describe it as pretty tame, and I expect this to remain the case for all the other episodes. So keep in mind that these content warnings are all for very cartoony scenes played for laughs.

♫ Uniting nations at the speeeed of liiiiight ♫
[epic sax solo]
♫ Station of the '20s — TV☆3SIS! ♫