Im not sure if this was true or if its just how I remember it but Fireball seemed like a mustwatch 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 couldnt tell you. 880https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/fireballanime.jpg Nonetheless. Fireball is such a strange thing that speaking personally I rank it up there with contemporary purposebuilt WTFcookers like Ai Mai Mi Teekyuu Pop Team Epic and Himote House as far as some of the most outthere comedy in the medium. Not bad for something that is at its heart basically a bokke/tsukkomi routine. The basic premise of Fireballs short 2minute episodes is thus: Drossel who is the duchess of a manor will call upon her loyal putupon 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 its parodying.something. But its hard to put your finger on quite what. If it didnt predate the game by almost a full decade Id 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. Its 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 dont speak particularly well. You can figure out the broadstrokes of whats going on and catch the occasional detail but most of it will inevitably be lost on you. Which might be frustrating if it didnt seem like the point. Large swaths of both the original Fireball and sequel series Charming seem like theyre supposed to be sendups of the highly symbological finales no small number of scifi 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 theyre birds it starts to feel almost weirdly revelatory. In Fireballs finale where Drossel and Gedachtnis prepare to face off against the human army that were 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 its hard to convey the emotions that Fireball tries to bring out of you. Its parody of an ambiguous loaded finaleboth in the original and in Charmingjust 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. Its not a mood many series go for. In fact the only thing I can name Id put in even remotely a similar category is the twoepisode 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. Theres really not too many like this one.