Review of Ya Boy Kongming!
No, I'm not even going to attempt to justify my score. Kongming is a great anime, but by "objective" standards it probably isn't a masterpiece. What it was, though, was exactly the anime that I needed right now. The fact is, I'm getting older. Anime has moved on from me. I look at the new season lists and feel no particular desire to watch anything that's on them. Isekais universally leave me cold. So, in a landscape that feels barren to me, I turned on Kongming based on a friends recommendation and found that every episode just flat out filled me with joy. This anime hasheart, it has good character growth, and it has a very particular quirkiness that hits the right buttons. And that was honestly all it needed to make it the most fun I've had watching anime in a long time.
Let’s talk about what the show is. At its heart, it is a lighthearted breezy music anime. If I were forced to throw it in a category with similar shows, I think I’d probably pick something like K-On. Kongming is not the main character; the main character is Eiko, an aspiring pop singer and Kongming’s chosen warlord. The show is relatively drama free. Eiko has some history that’s hinted at in the early show and then relatively forgotten about; the actual conflicts driving the show are mostly characters overcoming small character flaws by finding their motivations. That may not sound especially deep, and it isn’t, but it’s clear that the show really cares about its characters, and because of that it’s hard not to feel joy as they succeed. The show really gets by on its heart.
As I said, Kongming is not the main character. He is also, surprisingly, not the author’s self insert character; a role which is reserved for the manager of the club that Eiko works at, who just really wants someone to talk to about the Three Kingdoms with. No, Kongming is the Jeeves of this story, a hyper-competent assistant (or tactician in this case) that succeeds in everything but mostly works from the background. He’s mostly absent from the second half of the series, though you can feel his invisible hand.
Kongming is a tantalizing presence in the show. There are occasional nods toward his history, the most compelling being the glimpses of Lu Bei. Kongming’s feeling for Lu Bei are deeply conveyed as we see him through Kongming’s eyes. I’ve never been hugely into history, and my knowledge of the Three Kingdoms is frankly shallow. The hints of it in this show were enough to make me start reading about it and learning some of the broad strokes. And honestly, I think that was the hidden goal of the show in the first place. It’s clear that the author really wants more people to be able to talk about the Three Kingdoms, and maybe someday, when I’ve read more about it, there will be one more person in the world that can.