I’m not sure if this was true or if it’s just how I remember it, but Fireball seemed like a must-watch in the early Youtube era. The fact that you could knock it out in an afternoon probably helped, but there was definitely a time in the western anime fandom where this utterly weird little show about a robotic Hatsune Miku (Drossel) and her oversized boxy companion (Gedachtnis) seemed like it was worth mention. I rarely see it discussed anymore. Simply because it was never as big a deal as I thought (the western anime fandom was much more splintered even ten years ago), or because the medium has moved on, I couldn’t tell you.

Nonetheless. Fireball is such a strange thing that speaking personally, I rank it up there with contemporary purpose-built WTF-cookers like Ai Mai Mi, Teekyuu, Pop Team Epic, and Himote House as far as some of the most out-there comedy in the medium. Not bad for something that is at its heart basically a bokke/tsukkomi routine.

The basic premise of Fireball’s short 2-minute episodes is thus: Drossel, who is the “duchess” of a “manor”, will call upon her loyal, put-upon servant Gedachtnis, to whom she will give some task or another. Comedy will ensue. Usually in the form of nonce word association chains, visual gags, the occasional fourth wall break (one memorable instance being a very literal one), and from time to time, deeper, marginally more serious moments. Which themselves might be a gag too.

Indeed, Fireball often seems like it’s parodying….something. But it’s hard to put your finger on quite what. If it didn’t predate the game by almost a full decade, I’d toss out Nier: Automata as a loose possibility, but even then, Fireball defies even the broadest easy categorization. The show really is best watched by just letting it wash over you. The characters pun, gabber, prattle, and babble for 2 minutes, and then the credit screen smacks you across the face like a brick. It’s really quite a unique watching experience.

The bokke/tsukkomi stylings present the skeleton of a familiar framework, but the jokes only intermittently actually “connect” in the way jokes are traditionally supposed to (even if you understand the wordplay going on). But this actually seems intentional, and the prevailing feeling of watching Fireball thus, is a bit like trying to read a novel written in a language you don’t speak particularly well. You can figure out the broadstrokes of what’s going on, and catch the occasional detail, but most of it will inevitably be lost on you.

Which might be frustrating if it didn’t seem like the point. Large swaths of both the original Fireball and sequel series Charming seem like they’re supposed to be sendups of the highly symbological finales no small number of sci-fi anime written all throughout the 90s and 00s had. By the point in the original where Gedachtnis releases a bunch of butterflies, and Drossel accidentally predicts a meme 9 years before it took off by asking if they’re birds, it starts to feel almost weirdly revelatory. In Fireball’s finale, where Drossel and Gedachtnis prepare to face off against the human army that we’re assured is positioned just outside the manor, ready to win the day, you do start to feel genuinely affected.

I keep using words like “weird”, “unusual”, and “peculiar” because it’s hard to convey the emotions that Fireball tries to bring out of you. Its parody of an ambiguous, loaded finale--both in the original and in Charming--just is one of those, which leaves you laughing, sure, but also with the lingering phantom of feelings that watching similar, real finales has given you in the past. It’s not a mood many series go for. In fact, the only thing I can name I’d put in even remotely a similar category is the two-episode run in Ai Mai Mi where it becomes a fairly straight story about a runaway supersoldier for a little while. Before flipping back to its usual nonsense. Outside of anime, I might mention 12 Oz. Mouse. The fact that the seeming brains behind the operation, a Disney of Japan employee named Wataru Arakawa, has apparently never done anything else in the medium, just adds another layer of mystery. There’s really not too many like this one.