Podcast / Anime Slushie

You know what TV Tropes pages are good for?^note B-b-bondage?

"Warning warning, weewoo weewoo. If you're a big fan of RWBY, and don't want to listen to people being rude about the show, you probably won't enjoy this podcast. Please, don't make yourself suffer. You've been warned."

— Cube and Feen

Anime Slushie is a podcast created by comic artist, vtuber, and cat Twitter maintainer Mary "Cube Watermelon" Cagle alongside salty weeb and Failure To Launch crewmember Phoenix Feet, where they talk about some bad anime, some good anime, and a lot of RWBY.

You can listen to the podcast here, or watch some selected episodes with visuals at the YouTube channel here.

Warning: Since Feen came out during the run of the show, some official materials from before she did misgender her. You've been warned. In quotes from such materials on this wiki, please refer to her with her correct pronouns and redact her deadname if it appears, e.g.

Cube: Welcome to the Anime Slushie! Cause I'm Cube Watermelon, and [she's] Cherry, and so t- but [she's] also Phoenix Feet, it's some mixed branding.

Note: As a lot of their episodes are about RWBY, some shorthand will be used. Unless otherwise specified, "Volume #" or "V#" refers to the #th season of RWBY, "the commentary" to the crew commentary, and "CRWBY" to the show's writers (the team of Miles Luna, Kerry Shawcross, Eddy Rivas, and Kiersi Burkhart). In addition, unmarked spoilers for RWBY will be present, due to the show's nature as a criticism podcast. You have been warned.

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Anime Slushie contains examples of the following tropes:

• Anticlimax Boss: invokedCube and Feen declare the Ironwood fight in RWBY to be this. It was an extremely underwhelming fight against the person who the writers literally sidelined previous Big Bad Salem to build up to.
• Audience Participation:
  • For the Winter 2021 taster and onward, Cube and Feen took requests from the Patreon supporters on which anime each of them would watch.
  • The Jupiter Ascending slushie was the first episode requested by the patrons.
• Audio Adaptation:
  • The episode "A Very Special DC Comic" is an audio play of the DC Comic in question, with breaks to describe the imagery.
  • Some of the Volume 8 casts begin with Cube reading an excerpt from her copy of the licensed spinoff novel RWBY: After The Fall.
• Author Avatar: In the trailer for the Madoka Magica Episode 1-3 Talkabouts, Cube's rant against headless Mami jokes is accentuated by the replacement of her normal sprite (a talking, literal cube watermelon) with a full-blown Witch design for her, consisting of a Morton salt can wearing headphones with glowing, scribbly eyes and fire wings.
• Bait-and-Switch: Cube bemoans in the Winter 2021 Taster that Wonder Egg Priority did this to her — if she hadn't seen episode four, she would have a much more charitable view than her present view of "it's irredeemable trash that baits you into thinking it's going to be good."
• Bathos: According to Cube, this is the main appeal of Cells at Work! CODE BLACK: it derives comedy from the completely ridiculous shit happening being taken totally seriously, and she deems it the best thing.
• Berserk Button:
  • Cube has several:
    • Do not make a headless Mami joke.
      Feen: [Mami] is sort of dehumanized as a character when people talk about her. Like, you rarely bring up Mami without someone making a headless joke.
      Cube: (deep sigh) I... am SO SALT... about the way that NOBODY FUCKIN' APPRECIATES MAMI. There's only two things anyone ever brings up about Mami. "Don't lose your head!" "DON'T LOSE YOUR HEEEAAAD!" And also her boobs. And, she had a lot going on, she's really interesting, she my girl, and no, everybody's just always, "oh, it's nothing to lose your head over, get it? Do you remember? Do you remember the thing? Do you remember how she died? Do you remember? Episode 3, do you remember? Did you see the show?" YES I SAW IT! [...] I'll kill you.
      Feen: I brought this up for a reason.
    • Do not bring up CRWBY's opinions on robot sentience.
      Feen: Cube I think we had an answer this episode as to the sentience of robots.
      Cube: (Beat) I'll fucking kill you.
    • Do not confuse Cinder's bug arm from the early seasons with Cinder's extremely similar but entirely unrelated Grimm arm from the recent seasons.
      Cube: This confuses everyone because everybody wants this show to make any ounce of motherfucking sense, it doesn't!
  • Feen has a few of her own, most notably Team RWBY, after arriving in Atlas, not doing the thing they literally set out there to do:
    Feen: The entire last season, was about getting here, to put it in the fucking vault! (beat) PUTITINTHEVAULT!!
    Cube: (bursts out laughing) Oh no!
    Feen: PUTTHEFUCKINGTHINGINTHEVAULT!!!!
    Cube: (still laughing) Oh no [she]'s attacking! I'm scared! I'm so scared!
    Feen: It's so s—
    Cube: Save me Daddy Ironwood!
  • Gratuitous fanservice (especially of explicitly underage/adolescent characters) tends to annoy both of them, to say the least, especially Cube.
• Bile Fascination: invokedThey can't stop talking about RWBY, to the point where the slightest adjacency in another work will immediately cause a RWBY derailment.
  Feen: And Jupiter's like, "Well, I don't trust love. I've never fallen in love, uhhh."
  Cube (singing): Open up your eyes, trust loooooove!^Explanation Lyrics to the OP for Volume 7.
• Censored for Comedy: In the V8E12 slushie, Cube's seething rage at CRWBY for ruining Penny is comedically cut off by the text-to-speech:
  Cube: If they act like she has emotions now, I will go to Austin and I will—
  TTS: Ask them to reconsider their writing choices.
• Clueless Aesop: Their episode on Yuki Yuna is a Hero discusses the show's presumably unintentional message that suffering a disability is a Fate Worse than Death.
• Compressed Adaptation: The Fate/Grand Order - Divine Realm of the Round Table: Camelot movie, which Feen bemoans in the Spring 2021 Taster is next to incomprehensible for anyone who hasn't already played Singularity Six in the game.
• Content Warnings: All of their RWBY podcasts contain a disclaimer warning fans of the show to stay away and not suffer. In addition, some of the more edgelord magical girl media covered, like Spec-Ops Asuka and Wonder Egg Priority, is given a content warning for "basically anything that could be in an edgy anime" (because it's probably in the show being discussed).
• Crack Ship: invokedIn the Madoka Magica Talkabouts, Cube and Feen talk about shipping Homura and Kyouko — who barely interact, and one of whom is canonically in love with someone else — because in their opinion, the dynamic would be extremely compelling.
• Drinking Game: invokedIn the Asuka slushie, Feen proposes a drinking game in which you drink every time the show is inappropriately sexual. Cube chastises her for such a bad idea.
  Cube: Don't kill our audience!
• Erotic Eating: To Cube and Feen's great contempt, Vividred Operation's mayonnaise obsession reads like this to them.
• Evil Laugh: The Vividred Operation slushie begins with a comedic version.
  Cube: Hehehehe, hello everyone and welcome to Anime Slushie, hehehe.
  Feen: ...I don't- I don't like this voice.
  Cube: Hehehe. It's time to tell you about... The Butts.
• Exposition Cut: Played for Laughs. In the Vividred slushie, Feen's ramblings about Neon Genesis Evangelion (specifically, an explanation of the origin of the Angels and why they appear in different places each time) slowly fades out as an Easy Listening cover of Fly Me To The Moon^note the ED in the original release of Evangelion, where the Netflix release would later use "Rei Opus IV" plays, then a robotic voice speaks:
  WE WERE JUST WAITING FOR PHOENIX TO FINISH RAMBLING ABOUT EVAN-JELL-ION SO WE COULD CONTINUE TO TALK ABOUT THE BUTT MA-WHOS.
• Gag Censor: The YouTube upload of the Vividred slushie, by its nature, contains many screenshots from the show. As these contain lots of butts, particularly skeevy shots are censored by the application of Feen's avatar.
• Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: Usually, Cube is the gleeful one and Feen is the grumpy one, though in the V8 preview episode they briefly switch so that Feen is having a great time reading from the commentary and Cube is in hell.
  • Likewise with the Marrow Problem episide
• Grief Song:
  • For Penny in V8E12. Feen sings a version of "Danny Boy" with her own modified lyrics, while Cube simultaneously recites a rapid-fire mantra about how the show and its writers are not real and can't hurt her. Even the Special Edition Title gets in on it, quoting "One Thing":
    I HAD ONE THING AND YOU'VE TAKEN IT FROM ME.
  • V8E14 opens with Cube singing a reprise of the Penny song with the lyrics modified even further to commemorate Flesh Penny's death:
    Oh Penny girl
    The fridge, the fridge is calling
    From ep to ep, and all the Rainbow Road
    The season's done, and all the kids are falling
    Oh robot girl, we loved you so
• Guest Host:
  • Corinth appears in the Lupin slushie and in some of the later V8 episodes.
  • Sketch Eddy (as distinct from Eddy from CRWBY) guest stars in the third part of the Egg slush.
• I Knew It!: invokedSeveral oddities surrounding Wonder Egg Priority's production — most notably, the way Frill seemed to have been introduced entirely out of nowhere, and the way the direction framed Sawaki-sensei as if he was obviously suspicious only for the writing to portray him as innocent — caused Cube and Feen to theorize that the writer, Nojima Shinji, was sending scripts to the production team one at a time and not contacting them any further, forcing them to have to figure out how to frame the events of any given episode without knowing the context of what happens later. Then when the first BluRay was released, bundled with it was an interview with Nojima which confirmed all of these suspicions. It was such a doozy that they recorded a fourth Egg slushie (out of a planned three) specifically to cover the interview.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Cube needed to drink to get through the V8E12 podcast (where the show ruined Penny), and Feen needed to drink to get through V8E13 (where the show actually acknowledged the consequences of Team RWBY's actions). Due to a miscalculation, though, Feen became too drunk to record midway through, and the recording had to be done in two parts, with the effect that she's completely sober for the second half of the slushie.
• Incest Subtext: This is the main reason that Steg weirds them out; there's something inherently invokedSquicky about a kid fusing with his dad to sing a love song to said dad's ex.
• In-Series Nickname:invoked
  • "Robo Bosley" for Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka's Yoshiaki Iizuka, who functions similarly.
  • "AssLily" for Assault Lily: Bouquet, owing to its incredibly blatant thigh fetish.
    • Weiss for Kaede Johan Nouvel, who really is just Weiss but gay.
    • Semblances for Rare Skills, the unique-to-each-Lily special abilities.
    • "Shit Angel" for the Schutzengel combat marriage system.
  • RWBY:
    • The Beam of Hurting Oscar for the beam used to torture Oscar in V8.
    • Rainbow Road for the narrow, winding, railingless paths that make up the portal network in V8E13-14.
• Letters to the Editor: The Mailbag episode.
• Lying Creator: invokedThe entirety of Eddy's post "explaining" Marrow's Semblance was invalidated completely by V8E12, in which Marrow just uses Stay on the Ace Ops, with their aura at full strength, and holds them indefinitely. Just to make it more hilarious? EDDY WROTE THIS EPISODE.
  Cube: It's fucking amazinggggggg.
• Mook Chivalry: Cube points out that the supposed big fight against Ironwood in V8E12 has too many combatants so people just stand offscreen being polite, especially Emerald.
• Multi-Part Episode:
  • The slushie on Puella Magi Madoka Magica is divided into ten parts, one for each episode of the original anime (episodes 1-3 get merged into a single unit for obvious reasons).
  • Because there's just so much bad stuff to talk about in Wonder Egg Priority, the slushie is split into three parts. The first released to Patreon on May 6, 2021, and covers episodes 1-4. The second covers episodes 5-10, the third covered episodes 11-13, and the surprise fourth part covered an interview with the writer, Nojima Shinji, that confirmed all of Cube and Feen's wild theories about the production.
• Mythology Gag: The thumbnail for the final The Demon Girl Next Door slushie quotes a line-turned-meme from one of Cube's webcomics, Sleepless Domain.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: Downplayed.
  • Though the podcast primarily exists to dunk bad anime - it was started in the first place as a way for Cube to vent about how frustrating RWBY was - occasionally they praise good anime they liked, such as in the Madoka Magica Talkabouts and the Wish Upon the Pleiades episode.
  • The Jupiter Ascending episode began with Cube assuming this was a break from talking about anime, and concluded with Cube emphatically stating that the movie is shoujo anime in live action form.
• Periphery Hatedom: invokedEssentially the co-hosts' relationship with RWBY.
  Cube: Yo, fuck this show. (Beat) Give me more.
• Pinball Protagonist: As RWBY goes on, the titular Team RWBY become less and less relevant until they finally stop being main characters.
  Feen: I just love that it's Team JRY and Emerald and Winter beating the shit out of Ironwood. Cause like, who's not there? Who continues to not be here to do stuff?
  Cube: RWBY?
  Feen: RWBY!
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: At the beginning of the Nanoha slushie, Cube asks Feen what impression she has of the series going in. Her response is that it's "a really early magical girl property from around the same period or before Sailor Moon," and is surprised when Cube informs her it's from 2004.
• Punny Name: The podcast itself; since both Cube and Feen have fruit names (Cube Watermelon and Phoenix Anna Cherry), the podcast was named Anime Slushie after a fruit drink.
• Running Gag: There's a few:
  • For the whole podcast, there's the inevitability of someone mentioning RWBY even on the non-RWBY episodes. Friend of the show Saa keeps track of how long it takes to get to the first RWBY mention in each episode, and in part one of the Egg slushie, the hosts make a big deal of how long it took them to get to the first RWBY mention.
    Feen: And one of the mannequins says back to her, "How do you solve anything by just running away?" And I was just like... "oh goddamn it it's RWBY again." (An image of Blake rapidly slides on screen, covering Ai in the screenshot.)
    (Later...)
    Cube: Also hey Saa. Did you hit that timer to- with the stopwatch to- (Cube and Feen burst out laughing.) record when RWBY came up? (On screen, in giant flashing letters, is the text "00:46:51:01 - first unrelated mention of RWBY.")
  • For the Daybreak Illusion cast, throughout the episode Cube says "you know what X is good for?" where X is the thing the show is currently using for completely unsexy bondage, to which Feen replies with variations on "b-b-bondage?"
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the Volume 8 Preview episode, Cube reacts harshly to the commentary's claim that there are no retcons in the show:
  Feen: So this is one of my favorite lines from all of the commentary. "Many things that seem like retcons are actually not, and instead is just Kerry and Miles learning how to tell a story while simultaneously telling the story. So things were not always explained well early on."
  Cube: I'm leaving.
  Feen: Guys,
  Cube: I'm walking away.
• Sequelitis: invokedTheir stance on the Madoka franchise: namely, after the original anime, it all sucks, including Rebellion, but possibly excluding The Different Story.
• Show, Don't Tell: The crux of the issue in "The Marrow Problem": Eddy's Reddit post defends the position that Marrow's semblance was explained well enough implicitly and thus didn't need to be explained in the text. Cube and Feen take issue with this.
  Cube: "Pure showing doesn't always communicate certain things," well that means that you showed it wrong!
• So Bad, It's Good: invokedEX-ARM, as Cube gushes in the Winter 2021 Taster. It's such an unbelievable trainwreck and it looks so awful that it's the best thing.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The Eddy Rivas theme, from the episode "The Marrow Problem;" a chill elevator music tune that plays over the bad Eddy posts being dissected.
• Special Edition Title:
  • All of the RWBY episodes after the original Volume 6 Postmortem (collectively titled RWBY SLSH) follow the Content Warnings with a short buttrock riff and (with the exception of V8E14) a sentence or two played on a text-to-speech synthesizer, to match the tone of the material being covered.
  • All of the Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story episodes after the original Season 1 Catch-up have the music in the title sequence replaced by Connect -Game inst.-, the version of the original Madoka Magica OP that plays in the in-universe Dog Drug Reinforcement rhythm game and in some scenes in the game. Until Season 2, because the Aniplex copyright incident automatically claimed all their YouTube mirrors and it was easier to just not include any MagiReco music.
  • The Wonder Egg Priority cast has the music in the title sequence replaced with the "i love egg" song.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Ren and Nora in V8, who Cube and Feen literally could not care less about.
• Sting: In the Volume 8 Episode 1 cast, Hazel's appearance is marked by the grand ending of Holst's Mars.
• Suddenly Shouting: At 27:27 in the V7E2 slushie, Feen gets so infuriated by Team RWBY suddenly deciding not to put the Relic in the Vault — which was the entire reason they came to Atlas in the first place — that she snaps and starts screaming at them to "put the fucking thing in the vault!"
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: invokedCube states in the Winter 2021 Taster that she really wishes Wonder Egg Priority had been immediately handed off to another writer after Episode 1 was completed. Once it's "finished" (i.e. all but the true finale has aired) as of part one of the Egg cast, she elaborates that she recommends watching the first episode, by itself, as a 25-minute OVA, and then making up a better show that actually logically follows from it.
• Tomboy Angst: Cube and Feen recognize that some fans might really want to think of Momoe as a transgender girl, but note that in the text, she is this.
  Cube: She's Itsuki from Heartcatch PreCure but shit.
• Too Hot for TV: Cube believed that the absurd bath towels in Assault Lily: Bouquet were there as censorship for TV broadcast, and that they'd be removed in the Blu-Ray. They weren't. The towels are still there and just as silly as in the broadcast version. The YouTube release lampshades this with a text overlay saying "THE WEIRD TOWELS ARE IN THE BLURAY I DON'T UNDERSTAND."
• Unfortunate Names: Cube points out in the Volume 8 Episode 2 slushie that the team of Yang, Jaune, Ren, and Oscar can be spelled "Team ORJY."
• Waxing Lyrical: The text-to-speech quotes over the buttrock that opens the RWBY episodes are all lyrics from actual RWBY music.
  • Until V8E13, that is. That episode's quote is "WHO CARES ABOUT LYRICS, THIS SHOW SUCKS." V8E14 has no quote at all.