Here we go again. For the fourth year in a row I’m taking part in the 12 Days of Anime. As always I’m keeping the theming kind of loose, it’s just “12 posts about anime related things I experienced this year which were interesting in some way”, but I generally try to keep things positive and highlight stuff that was good. With that in mind for this year’s first post we’ll be talking about… a show I was largely apathetic towards?

More specifically I’m going to talk about how even things which don’t really manage to be engaging can occasionally surprise you. Comet Lucifer is one of those series. A show I came across on one of my occasional trawls through the depths of Crunchyroll via the random button. I’d sort of vaguely heard of it before (I think I saw a trailer before it aired back in 2015) but it’s also something I’ve never really seen anyone discussing at all which tends not to be a great sign. With that in mind I had no real expectations for it going in and it still failed to wow me in any way. It looks nice enough but beyond that the story never quite managed to grab me at all. So by the time the final arc rolled around I had more or less checked out and was just finishing it out of obligation. And then episode 11 happened, bringing with it one completely transcendant scene that’s likely to stay with me for years.

Lets start with some very basic context, main girl/walking plot device Felia has been captured by the bad guys for nebulous reasons, so it’s up to everyone else to rescue her. Things happen, the party gets split up by a conveniently invincible barrier which everyone outside of it spends basicly the entire rest of the show trying to disable so that they can have no part in the final showdown anyways while Sogo and his robot lizard friend (who after passing through the shield spontaneously transforms into a scantily clad girl for no adequately explained reason for like the last two episodes) go do the actual rescuing. Things go badly, they’re pinned down by the facility’s guards and can’t move forward, until they’re suddenly rescued by the baker.

Out of nowhere Malvina, a previously relatively minor supporting character appears inside of the barrier and takes out all the guards with a bunch of weapons hidden inside bread. She pulls a shotgun out of a baguette. Need I say any more? Well, if you insist. Bread grenade!

While the show had already established that she was a) a soldier spying on Sogo’s family for vague reasons and b) was out for revenge after the bad guys killed her boyfriend it’s still a wildly out of place sequence that feels at odds with everything around it, she never really appears again after this scene and it’s mostly just a way of getting Sogo into the building so the plot can progress, but I love it. It’s supremely silly in a way the rest of the series really isn’t, since it tends to take itself extremely seriously and ends up feeling rather dry as a result. How did she get past the impassable energy field? Who cares! Why are all her weapons hidden in bread? Well because she’s a baker and that’s definitely enough of an explanation so shh.

This scene made me burst out laughing when it happened and that’s absolutely a compliment. Comet Lucifer on the whole isn’t something I’m likely going to look back fondly (or at all) on in the future but this scene was genuinely amazing and I’m glad I got to experience it.

Well, for all that I put a positive spin on it by talking about something I genuinely enjoyed in it, today was still about a show that I ultimately didn’t care for. So tomorrow let’s move on to something less negative by talking about… Wait… What? Comet Lucifer again?!