The Panty & Stocking Phenomenon – This Week in Anime

But hey, being the best at breaking all the rules is the kind of cartoon Panty & Stocking has always been, so it’s no surprise they’ve found bold new ways to push the envelope fifteen years later. Between all the naughty language and the uncut screencaps courtesy of Amazon streaming, it’ll be a miracle if this column gets through without being age-gated.

And I gotta appreciate how deep that drive to make things others won’t run in Panty & Stocking. I mean, New genuinely exists because Otsuka, Hiroyuki Imaishi, and the rest of the funky bunch finally got the rights back to their baby away from the collapsing Gainax, who were most certainly not making this anymore. It’s certainly near and dear to my heart. Panty & Stocking was the subject of my very first TWIA column, alongside the late, great Nick Dupree, right after this sequel had just been announced back in…2022?!

That announcement was seismic at the time, but between the original wait for the second season at all, followed by the three years it then took for New Panty & Stocking to actually come out, I could understand some consternation that “the Half-Life 3 of anime sequels” might not live up to its astronomical hype.

I also hear tell that Black Butler significantly improved in the gap between its entries. But given what a rarity that kind of accomplishment is, I was fully bracing for New Panty & Stocking to hit like the latter-day FLCL sequels.

Similarly, I got to hear Wakabayashi speak about the series at Trigger’s panel at Otakon this year. He confirmed that he and the others at the studio had been coming up with ideas for New Panty & Stocking episodes continuously over these last fifteen years, just waiting until they’d have their chance again. And The Thing is, I’d say, all that extra time in the oven is probably one of the reasons the New show has turned out as tasty as it has!

So when the premiere finally happened, I was shocked that they didn’t just pull off closing the book on that cliffhanger, they made it look easy, feeling like the long-lost climactic actual season finale of original recipe Panty & Stocking.

Not that there isn’t a story and development thereof in Panty & Stocking, and that’s another way I think this choice of comeback tour was a statement of intent. Because this season has been doing stuff worthy of that New in the title, a lot of it likely informed by that mentioned new blood at Trigger. And I think growing fifteen years beyond the simpler ambitions of the original is what has contributed to this new season being so strong as a sequel.

The Thing parody is, incidentally, another one I can hardly post any clean screencaps of.

It feels like I’m learning something more about the creator and what inspired them. Sort of like that episode of the original series that made clear just how huge a Transformers nerd Akira Amemiya was, but on an even denser, more artistically technical level.

It’s also all appropriate enough given that Space Patrol Luluco previously gave Inferno Cop its due along its own tour of Trigger cameos.

Going all the way back to Trigger’s origins like this also gives New Panty & Stocking a reference point to spotlight just how far the series and the studio have come. The Impact Cop segment shares episode space with that dang musical excursion we keep returning to, which simultaneously feels like something that could only have come out of Panty & Stocking, and something they never would have attempted, at least not this way, in the original season.

Speaking of bussin, though, the bussin boy angels this new series teased at the outset also lived up to the hype. But introducing a hot new duo in an extra-action-packed sixth episode is one of those reliable recurrences I hope becomes a tradition for future Panty & Stocking seasons.

Polyester and Polyurethane have been fun additions explicitly characterized by their willingness to drop in and out of the plot on a dime, but Gunsmith Bitch feels like they might be setting her up for something bigger—if not in this season’s forthcoming hour-long finale, then in one of those further seasons they’re hopeful for. Hell, give her her own spin-off. She feels like she’d get on real well with Luluco’s “Trigger-chan” persona.

Really, Trigger can only seem to have love, in their own particular way, for the Western side of their viewership. The already infamous weed shop joke in the second episode shows how thoroughly they’ve got our asses.

The Trigger team’s broadened horizons here speak to my point about how far I think the series has come (as it were). That is, I do think that New Panty & Stocking really is funnier, nicer-looking, and more creative than its predecessor, as it should be with all that extra time and talent. But it’s also showing ambitions toward being more sincere, of all things, when it can.

This, too, is a sign of growing up.

New Panty & Stocking is a very unique case where the show had so long to soak in its own juices that it built up fifteen years of those new ideas. But it’s stayed so true to itself, like Panty and her own character growth across both seasons, it still utterly feels like itself, as if it hasn’t missed a beat.

I guess it just shows that we’ve all always got more growing to do. See you when we’re released from time out in fifteen years for New Coop & Chris!