Remember that big news I mentioned yesterday? Here it is! I recently applied for a reviewer position at The Fandom Post, and now I’ll be writing reviews for them (under my real name, no less). For this season, I’ll be doing episode reviews for Land of the Lustrous and the occasional series review. Everything I write for them will go up here shortly after, and hopefully it won’t interfere with my usual posting schedule. Now, enjoy the review!

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This review was originally published on The Fandom Post.

What They Say:
“Metamorphosis”

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Note: I’ll be referring to the gems as “they” since they’re all implied to be genderless.

Three episodes in and Land of the Lustrous continues to impress. On the surface, not much happened in this episode. After a short, if exciting, battle against the snail-like creature, most of the episode is just Diamond mistakenly believing that Phos was turned into a snail and asking all of the other gems for help. Most of them react by saying that Phos is probably better off that way since they’re not causing trouble for anyone else. These moments are pretty funny, but also hammer in Phos’ own inadequacies. Every other gem has a purpose, but Phos still hasn’t found something that they’re able to do to help. You get the sense that Phos’ pushiness and exuberance comes from a desire to prove their value to the others. Throughout the episode, Diamond’s own desperation to find someone who actually cares about Phos and can fix them is contagious; I found myself wanting to see Phos fixed just as badly as Diamond, even though the episode was generally light-hearted.

The dramatic peak of the episode is easily Diamond’s encounter with Cinnabar. This is the first time we’ve seen them since Phos promised to find something that Cinnabar could do to be useful, and now we see the result of that. Much as Cinnabar denies it, Phos’ declaration clearly left an impact on them. While they’re more capable in battle than Phos, Cinnabar suffers from the same sense of isolation and uselessness as Phos. As they’re listing all the ways that Phos is useless, it almost seems like Cinnabar is describing themselves. There’s a real kinship between them, whether Cinnabar admits it or not. When Cinnabar actually makes a helpful suggestion for how to fix Phos, it shows that they’re not as uncaring as they pretend to be.

The episode ends with Diamond finally finding a way to reconstruct Phos, and Phos being the same goof as before. The reveal that Phos can now communicate with the snail has interesting implications for later, but the real meat of the episode was the further development of Phos, Diamond, and Cinnabar.

In Summary:
Land of the Lustrous continues to be a beautifully animated show with great action and a compelling core cast. Episode 3 only cements it as one of the season’s best new shows, and I’m eager to see where it goes from here.

Grade: A

Streamed By: Anime Strike