Review of Mushi-shi: The Shadow that Devours the Sun

I'd break this one up, but honestly, my reviews of each season/OVA are pretty consistent. It's the story of a mushi master named Ginko who goes around investigating and solving mushi-related incidents. Mushi are a class of life that is entirely distinct from others, only visible to a select few and yet capable of interacting with the world in various ways. I'd say "often to the detriment of humans," but that's really just what we see: the places and ways things go out of whack, often due to changes in how humans interact with their environment. But it's not an environmentalist message, either. Humans, like themushi themselves, are just trying to survive and thrive. They often simply don't know about the mushi they're dealing with, or even if they do, they don't understand it well enough to deal with the problem.

As for the series, the episodes are largely independent of one another (that becomes less true as the series goes on, but it's still mostly accurate even for some episodes towards the end) and, much as there's some building of knowledge for the MC over the course of the series, there's no real order to the events. Every village he goes to is a unique experience with a unique mushi and distinct people. That limits the amount of depth they can give the characters he meets and the circumstances he faces, since they're all only 20+ minutes long. That being said, for a series that does this, it's truly incredible. The worldbuilding is fantastic, the transient nature of its protagonist lending itself to highly varied adventures that build it out, and while each mushi may only get a bit of explanation, you could accurately build out a volume of materials on the ones Ginko sees throughout the series.

There are few recurring characters, for whom we do get some more character building, but that's not really a problem, nor is the relatively weak character designs (they get better as the series progresses, but I wouldn't say that the character models have a lot of contrast from one another for the most part) that make everyone look pretty similar. It's not about them, at least not chiefly. It's about the mushi, how they interact with the world around them, and how the various mushi masters we meet along the way interact with them. Ginko is distinct in this regard, seeing them as natural forces that aren't running contrary to human desires, requiring substantial intervention or even killing, but rather entities to be respected and cherished in their own way. His ways to work with them are almost solely naturalistic, and its through his unique perspective that he can sometimes run circles around other mushi masters who seek to control the mushi through more human-derived interventions.

It's not a perfect series to be sure - doing this kind of episodic structure means that each episode stands largely on its own and is limited in its build and payoff - but it's a vibe in a way that other series I've seen just can't match. The whole direction of the series really matches its MC in a way that I've rarely seen from others. He's still enigmatic in many ways, but despite having only limited peeks into his background, Ginko's context clues give us a great understanding of who we follow throughout. And despite my issues with the pacing of some episodes, I think it's incredible how well the series manages to encapsulate whole arcs into roughly 22 minutes of screen time, often saving its more complex stories for the longer OVAs. That's impressive. I can think of few series that pull that off quite so well.

For me, this series evokes similar feelings to Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, and despite being very different, it gets a similar score.