Spring 2021 Anime Pt. 1
There is a terrifying quantity of anime airing this season so I’m splitting this post up, no time for preamble, let’s anime!
Joran The Princess Of Snow And Blood
Our first alt-history pre-WWII series of the season takes place in a version of the 1930s where the Meiji Restoration never happened. The Tokugawa Shogunate still rules Japan, aided by a mysterious unobtanium that allows the government to wield sci-fi technology. Also, there are people called Changelings that turn into animals, and the protagonist has magic(?) powers that she uses as part of an agency of assassins that does the shogun’s dirty work, while trying to get revenge on the Changelings for some reason.
If that sounds like a teenager’s first attempt at writing an “anime-inspired” original story, then I have successfully conveyed the feeling of watching Joran’s first episode. It doesn’t explain a whole lot, and the things it does explain are a bit of a let-down given the fascinating premise they’re paired with.
On one hand, you’ve got this story about a feudal government surviving into the modern day thanks to magic super-science and gradually transforming Japan into what looks very much like a cyberpunk setting in the 1930s. That’s a baller premise, I am totally down for that. This episode plays with concepts you’d expect a completely down to earth historical drama set in the time period to tackle--the plight of women, life under an autocratic government, Japan’s fraught history with western powers--but filtered through a wacky sci-fi lens. That seems really fascinating, and the setting looks really evocative as well, using a light touch with the sci-fi elements so that they stand out against the more historically accurate backdrop (I particularly liked the billiards table that doubles as a high-resolution slide viewer).
But then you’ve got the utter snooze-fest that is the Changelings and our protagonist’s glowy blue sword magic (which seems suspiciously similar to the glowy blue sword magic from Demon Slayer, by the by). As soon as I realized this was going to be about super-powered people fighting monsters, I immediately checked out.
It doesn’t help that the heroine is a stock “vengeful ice queen” archetype. Like, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but it turns out she’s working with the assassins as part of a personal vendetta rather than out of loyalty to the government, and her superiors are worried she’s going to prioritize her quest for revenge over her assignments. Do you think they might be right? Would you believe me if I told you that she’s living with an adorable little girl who thinks of her as a sister, who she vehemently insists she has no feelings for--but you can tell she’s actually lying?
Might this icy exterior conceal a secret heart of gold?????
I’m not going to be watching any more of this for now, but I might keep an eye on what people are saying about it going forward, just in case it turns into something more interesting.
Our second alt-history series of the season takes place in a version of 1926 where there are vampires. The vampires are becoming a serious problem, as vampires are wont to do, so the Japanese government forms a secret squad of vampires to fight the vampires with.
So this is yet another “super-powered people fight monsters in History Times”, this time at the end of the Taisho era. It differs from Joran in focusing much more on the psychological interplay between the agents and their prey, going for a slow, horror-tinged atmosphere over garish violence. It manages to pull it off decently, but it might be a little too sedate and (forgive the pun) bloodless. The fact that our protagonist is once again a cold fish who shows almost zero outward emotion doesn’t help.
Still, the show seems promising. It looks gorgeous, with a neat pastel style used for the backgrounds, and the suggestions that the military is planning on using the vampire squad for darker purposes could lead to a story that spins out into something much larger in scope (there seems a vampire arms race going on between the imperial powers, which is an entertainingly goofy idea).
Apparently this is based on a play, and to be honest I think I’d be more interested in watching that over a stretched-out, twelve episode anime adaptation.
It’s a rom-com about an adult man stalking a teenage girl.
No, really.
Moving swiftly along,
The title of this series is really fun to say out loud. Tokyo Revengers! Go on, try it.
Our protagonist is Takemichi Hanagaki, a twenty-something year old dude who looks like a fifteen year old boy for some reason. But that’s hardly the worst of Takemichi’s problems: he’s stuck in a dead-end job that he hates, living in a terrible rathole of an apartment, and to top it all off he learns on the news that his first and last girlfriend, Tachibana Hinata who he dated back during his glorious peak in middle school, has been killed by the violent Manji gang that’s terrifying Tokyo.
Lamenting his shitty existence, things somehow get even worse for Takemichi when he’s pushed in front of a train. But instead of dying, he wakes up twelve years in the past, when he was dating Hinata and running with a group of delinquents who came under the thumb of the Manji gang, then a high school outfit that hadn’t yet escalated to full-on murder. Realizing that he’s been given a second chance, Takemichi sets about pre-emptively Tokyo avenging his girlfriend’s future death...but if you’ve ever seen a time travel story before, you’ll know that things aren’t that easy.
This one really surprised me. It doesn’t make the best first impression, with Takemichi post-time travel dicking around aimlessly with his middle school buddies, but the episode quickly kicks into warp speed and reaches territory that I would have expected it to take half a season to get to. I won’t spoil it, but where things leave off at the end of the episode is significantly more interesting than the “guy goes back in time, tries to stop future tragedy” angle I was expecting.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the episode’s general tone. A story like this has the potential to just wallow in nostalgia, but a big part of the episode is Takemichi realizing that he was a pathetic little shit back in the day, and that this supposed golden hour of his life wasn’t nearly as awesome as he remembers it being.
That last part actually gets pretty poignant, as Takemichi realizes that the terrible circumstances he finds himself in twelve years later actually seem to be caused by the lingering effects of trauma rather than being personal failings on his part, which is a nice little twist given how (unlike many loser protagonists in anime) Takemichi seems like a genuinely noble soul. Dude deserves a break.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.