Story Love, Part 1:Link Click
The anime that makes my heart ache
Introduction
I may have mentioned this once or twice before, but I’m a BIG anime fan. I only properly discovered anime in my late twenties and I honestly don’t know how I lived without it before then. My longest and most committed relationship is with my Crunchyroll Mega Fan subscription—a contract that I will never, ever, EVER cancel.
As with books, my taste in anime is fairly eclectic, I’ll read or watch any genre as long as:
a) it’s not trying to actively traumatise me beyond all repair (so, no gratuitous body horror, graphic crime series about serial killers, or bleak grimdark fantasy);
b) I don’t hate the characterisation1 so much that I start to hope the offending characters get violently offed before the end.
Anyway, my point here is that I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to anime—there is such a variety of genres out there that it would be hard not to find something up your street. But even I know that just because I’m obsessed with Bungo Stray Dogs, or think My New Boss is Goofy is adorably cute, or treat Haikyuu!! as the cure to all my woes and ills, not everyone will enjoy such entertainment.
However, that said, I do think there are a few anime that every person on the planet should watch, whether they’re into anime as a medium or not, because they are such freaking good stories and so well-told that it would be an actual crime to miss out.
At the top of the list is Link Click.
If you’re only ever going to watch one anime in your entire life, make sure it’s this one.
Link Click makes my heart ache in a way few other stories do. It’s the sort of story that is made for its medium, quite literally (it was written specifically as anime2 and not taken from any other source material as anime often are), and it shows. The story concept itself is so good it would be worth telling in any form, but anime is undoubtedly the best possible means for bringing this narrative, and the idea at its core, to life; and that is what makes it so, so delicious to watch.
What you need to know
Link Click is an original Chinese donghua, known as Shiguang Dailiren in Chinese, which means Time Agents or Agents of Time. I have no idea why they didn’t just use either of those translations for the English title, but someone instead decided to go with Link Click, which tells you exactly nothing you need to know about the genre or narrative, but *shrug* never mind. It’s written and directed by Li Haoling and produced by LAN Studio with assistance by Li’s own studio, Haoliners Animation League.
Here’s the Crunchyroll description: Using superpowers to enter their clientele’s photos one by one, Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang take their work seriously at Time Photo Studio. Each job can be full of danger, but nothing is more important than fulfilling every order, no matter the scale or peril involved.
Tip: If you don’t speak Mandarin Chinese, watch the English dub and forget about the sub—trust me on this one.3
The Concept
I have to warn you: the description doesn’t really do the story justice. Honestly, when I was scrolling through Crunchyroll, looking for something new to watch, and came across this description, I was expecting some corny, high action drama with over-powered characters and plenty of clichés. Instead, I found I had stumbled upon something that was incredibly beautiful in every way possible and that surprised me with its angle on the time-worn (pun fully intended) time travel concept. Link Click takes the time traveller narrative and does something fresh and smart and meaningful with it. It’s such a great twist on the genre, I’m super upset I didn’t come up with it myself.
It’s a pretty simple concept: Lu Guang has the ability to look at a photograph and see everything that happens to the photographer up to twelve hours after the photo was taken; Cheng Xiaoshi has the ability to jump into a photograph and possess the body of the photographer by clapping his hands together. The two of them can combine their powers by high-fiving, so that when Cheng Xiaoshi dives back in time, Lu Guang can telepathically communicate with him, warning him of the events that will happen in the next twelve hours and guiding his actions so that he doesn’t alter past events at all during the dive.
Whilst most time travel stories focus on changing the past to fix the future, and the consequences of making those changes, Link Click does something a little different. There are just three rules that Lu imposes on Cheng’s dives:
You only get twelve hours
Follow my lead and stick to the script
Past and Future must remain untouched
The whole focus of Link Click is that these ‘time agents’ have the power to travel to the past and alter it, and yet they mustn’t. Their job is to retrieve information for their clients using their combined abilities and nothing else.
And this is where the tension and the themes of the story lie. As Cheng inhabits the body of the photographer and relives their past for twelve hours, he is faced with facts he cannot change, even if his conscience and compassion demand that he should. Fixing the past is one kind of challenge, but leaving it be is a far greater one—and one that takes a huge emotional toll on Cheng as the traveller who gets to experience the lives, thoughts, feelings and memories of his host whilst he possesses them. It’s Lu’s job to remind him of their rules and the consequences if he breaks them. And it’s the focus on this moral dilemma that makes Link Click far more than your average time travelling story. Cheng is forced to be a passive witness to events that often cause suffering and pain, and, against his nature, has to stand by and let it all happen without acting to prevent any of it.
Although each mission seems simple, sometimes even frivolous, on the surface, by the time you’re only a few minutes into it, you know its going to break your heart. And we can never be entirely sure whether Cheng is going to slip up and alter a seemingly insignificant detail that will end up dramatically changing the present. Honestly, you need a defib on hand when you watch this… the tension frequently reaches dangerous levels.
The Style
Both visually, and in its storytelling, Link Click has its own distinct style that, again, is surprising when you consider the superpower-based concept. Contrary to what we might expect, Link Click isn’t loud or flashy, bold or brash, aggressive or epically inclined. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: simple and quiet, understated and gentle, steady and grounded and so, so compelling for those very reasons. Now, I love loud and flashy, and I’m an absolute sucker for epic. Give me big over-the-top power transformations, brash characters and in-your-face action sequences any day—especially in anime. I love all that stuff, as cheesy and over-used as it often is in this medium. That’s a large part of the fun.
But Link Click has a completely different style in its story-telling, as well as its visual elements. Visually, it is an absolute work of art. Of course, all anime is literally a work of art— there are anime out there with utterly breath-taking visuals—but Link Click’s animation is so distinctly like painting on screen, and the animators, especially in the second and third season, really lean into different paint styles to enhance the themes and narrative. It’s Spider-man: Across the Spider Verse but to a slightly lesser degree. The art style is part of the story-telling, it sets the tone and themes and focus of the narrative. The story wouldn’t be the same without it. For example, one of the things the art does best is reflect the importance of photographs, not just as time-travelling plot devices, but thematically—how they capture not just a moment in the past, but also memories and relationships that are fragile, fleeting, precious and worth holding on to.
The storytelling elements are much more ‘quiet’ too than your typical anime, but done so cleanly and effectively. The superpower elements are subtle but slick: a simple eye-colour change, a single hand clap and no fanfare at all when Cheng dives into a photograph—he’s simply there one minute and gone the next. It’s incredibly understated but all the more powerful and compelling for it, because the story isn’t really about the powers: there’s no levelling up, the characters are already familiar with their abilities and have been using them for a while when we are introduced to them, we get no backstory or explanation for how these powers were obtained or how these two characters ended up working together—we’re told the three rules of photo-diving right of the bat and then that’s it. This means the focus is all on how the power is used and the risks and ethical implications of the kind of work our money-strapped duo do as a side gig to running their photography studio.
Serial Storytelling at its Best
Link Click, especially season one4, sets the bar sky-high for serial storytelling. There’s some really interesting conversations happening at the moment around serial fiction, and I recommend checking out the following from
: Pacing, monotony & cliffhangers and : Is there more than one kind of serial fiction? who both write serial fiction and know what they’re talking about more than I do. Personally, my own inspiration for writing serial fiction comes from anime, because I think—potentially controversial opinion here—that on the whole it manages episodic storytelling better than most examples in western media.5And Link Click is the example I aim to emulate with my own serial fiction. I’m only just starting out, so I have a long way to go, but if I could one day produce a fiction serial that is structured and paced as tightly, effectively and addictively as Link Click, I could die happy. I don’t think I can be satisfied until I’ve made at least one reader froth at the mouth and shriek ‘Give me the next episode right now, or heaven help me I will come for you’. I’m not saying that every serial fiction has to be like that in order to be successful—heck, that would be exhausting, my little reader heart would collapse from the emotional exhaustion if every serial I read did that—but I would love, one day, to be the creator of THAT series.
Look, I just want to make other people suffer the way I have as a story-consumer. Got to have goals, right?
Well, Link Click manages to pull this off effortlessly, which again makes me sick to my stomach that it isn’t my story. For a start, the first episode takes you straight into the plot in the most efficient way possible. We open with the focus on a ticking clock, we see Lu reminding Cheng of the three rules as they sit on a sofa together, then there’s the hand clap and we cut to the OTS. After the OTS, there’s the briefest of flashbacks to the moment they’re assigned their current mission and then we’re straight into the dive after just five minutes (OTS time included). This is the perfect way to demonstrate how the time-dive works without info-dumping on the audience—we figure it out as we go along—and to quickly establish the dynamic between our main characters and they type of work they do. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another anime get into the plot as quickly or as seamlessly as that.
Link Click is also the master of both the twist AND the cliff-hanger, which is honestly just greedy. Every episode has a really clever twist and/or a cliff-hanger. The pacing is even and smooth, nothing is rushed and nothing drags. Each time-dive mission is its own contained story, but also provides details that come together for a bigger over-arching story in a way that ramps up the stakes at just the right moment, and doesn’t feel contrived or in contradiction to the world and rules that have been established. The first season leaves you on a cliff-hanger that is as agonising as a knife’s edge (putting me through the longest wait of my entire life for a second season) and then the second season ups that by landing the audience with a huge twist at the end that shakes up everything they thought they knew about the Link Click world and its characters. And somehow it manages to do this whilst staying true to the heart of the story.
And what is the heart of Link Click?
Character Dynamics
Which is my fancy way of saying that the heart of Link Click is the relationships.
Relationship is the thread that weaves through every aspect of Link Click. Each time-dive mission has a relationship focus: parent-child, lovers, best friends, siblings… there isn’t a single one that doesn’t place value on a relationship of some kind. Anchoring all of these missions, the theme and focus of the whole narrative, the blood pumping through the heart, is the friendship between Lu and Cheng. These two are your classic anime duo, although their dynamic is nothing like Dazai and Chuuya from Bungo Stray Dogs—this is no rivals-turned-frenemies, we-love-to-hate-each-other’s-guts situation—Lu and Cheng are openly best friends, who live and work together in the Time Photo Studio. They are, for various reasons, each other’s only family, along with Cheng’s childhood friend and ‘landlady’ Qiao Ling, who lives next door.
As is typical, they’re opposites in character: Cheng is out-going, exuberant, impulsive and compassionate to a fault; Lu is reserved, stoic and disciplined but gentle. They complement each other in both their personal lives and in their work as time agents. Cheng’s inclination to act impulsively, even with good intentions, is tempered by Lu’s level-headed wisdom; whilst Cheng draws Lu out of his shell and gives him a place to belong, through his persistent warmth and kindness. It’s really hard not to like them as individuals and as a pair, and the anime works best when they are together, either physically in the same scene or telepathically during a dive. They are probably my second favourite One Great Duo, because, like Dazai and Chuuya’s Soukoku6, they are made for each other: the fact that they can link their abilities (and here is where the title Link Click actually makes sense) through a simple connection of their hands highlights how there is potentially more connecting them than coincidence. I’ve tried really hard to not spoil anything about the plot so far, so I’ll only add that season three picks up on this theme and runs full speed with it, answering some of our questions and raising quite a few more in the process.
Music for the Heart Strings
There are two important parts to the music in any anime: the soundtrack that underpins the story, and the OTS (opening theme song) and ETS (ending theme song). Link Click has not only one of the best musical scores of any anime, but also consistently excellent OTS and ETS in each season.
The soundtrack for the anime is produced by a compilation of artists7 and it’s honestly gorgeous in its distinction, variety, range of feeling and the way it expresses the intensely compelling narrative beats of the whole series. The score does exactly what a good score should do and lifts the entire anime, especially the most emotionally powerful scenes, to a whole other level.
I’m a music magpie, and I will steal music from everywhere and anywhere to add to my writing playlists. But the music in Link Click is so evocative of its own story that I’ve had to ban it from my writing playlists—particularly Keep in Mind by BaishaJAWS, which plays in the background of one of the most poignant scenes in the entire series. I can’t listen to that song without feeling like someone’s reaching into my chest and ripping out my heart, and that’s exactly what a great soundtrack should do: it should ruin itself for any other story.
I could easily wax lyrical (pun fully intended again) about all of the OTS and ETS, but I’ll just highlight two and why they’re absolute *chef’s kiss* perfection.
The first is the ETS for season one, Overthink by Fan Ka, simply for how this song + cliff-hanger = the audience dying at the end of every episode. Literally, just the first fifteen seconds playing in the last moments of each episode, with the phone dial beep.beep.beep.beep effect at the end, had me screaming ‘Nooo!’ at the T.V. screen and scrabbling for the remote so I could hit the ‘next episode’ button as fast as possible. You really have to watch an episode to appreciate the impact it has, so I’m actually not going to add a link here.
The second is the OTS for the second season, VORTEX by BaishaJAWS who provide quite a few of the songs for Link Click and are now one of my favourite bands. VORTEX is clever because it is designed to also be played in reverse. The middle chorus is literally sung backwards, as in the lead singer literally learnt to sing the words backwards so that when you play the song in reverse you can hear the words as they would normally sound. And he did that, designed the entire song, its lyrics and its structure, with the whole concept of the anime in mind—this idea of going back in time or time reversing itself. Paired with the visuals of the OTS sequence, the whole thing—the creativity and the dedication to the bigger narrative vision—is mind-blowingly impressive.
Heartache
I said at the start that Link Click makes my heart ache. It makes it ache because its such a beautiful example of what many talents combined can achieve: from the script and story, to the direction, animation artistry and musical composition. Each element dovetails to create this story that is an absolute feast for the senses and the story-loving soul, and in a way that is entirely unique to the anime medium.
I makes my heart ache because I wish it was my story, that it had been my idea, or that I could have been a part of creating something so special.
It makes my heart ache because I care about the characters and their intertwined stories, and the narrative isn’t done yet; I’m both excited and terrified to see where it goes next. Season three just released and it did NOT disappoint, but there is at least one more season to go and I’m honestly a little scared that the pretty perfect foundation that’s been built so far might be destroyed by the next instalment. I’m scared that my poor little love-struck heart is going to get broken to pieces.
At the end of the day, though, a good story is worth the risk. Like they say, it’s better to have loved and lost then to never have loved at all. And I can’t say I’m not glad that this anime made me fall in love with it.
I apologise for shamelessly gushing like the total nerd that I am, but thank you for bearing with me if you got this far.
I would love to hear about a story or stories that made your heart ache, whatever medium they are told in.
Let me know in the comments below and I’ll do my best to check them out.
PJ
Characterisation not characters. I love an unlikeable character as much as the next weirdo. What I object to are characters that we’re clearly supposed to like, but whose characterisation is so egregious I start rooting for their downfall. For example: I spent the second Twilight film hoping that the Volturi would put me out of my misery by killing both Bella and Edward. No such luck.
I am aware that the correct term for Link Click is donghua and not anime, but since more people are familiar with the latter term, and I am comparing Link Click to the entire medium of animated shows, whether they’re produced in Japan of China, I’m going to stick with anime to avoid confusing things.
I don’t normally have a preference for dub or sub, but the dubbing for Link Click is done by Bilibili and their dubbing is always really suss. The whole thing will make so much more sense if you stick with the dub and then you won’t have to also keep pausing to read the crazy long translations when they flash up on the screen for 0.5 seconds.
Season 2 is a whole other thing when it comes to structure and pacing. It’s highly experimental, which, on the one hand, I admire; but on the other, I’m still not entirely sure if it worked as well as it could have. But then I did originally watch it in the sub, and that confused the hell out of me on its own. Trust me—watch the dub.
I’m going purely on my subjective experience here. Some theories I have is that a lot of anime takes manga as its source material; and the anime industry has been in the serialisation game for a very, very long time. I’d love to do a deep-dive, properly researched piece on this one day.
I wrote about these two for
’s MangaCraft. If you enjoy talking manga and/or story craft, you should check out the publication.
You can find this on Spotify here:
Great read! I’ve been so leery of time traveling stories for so long, but this may be just the one to give me hope again. It sounds fascinating. I love the concept of the drama coming from how they can’t alter the past. That’s tension!
And thank you for the shout out!
Adding it to my watch list. I have not ventures far into anime since I was a kid (Battle of the Planets, I think it was called?). And yeah, Asian series are generally so much better paced.