#shingeki no bahamut: virgin soul for ts

[ladyloveandjustice]

Summer 2017 Anime Overview: Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul and The Reflection

My classic anime overview posts are making a comeback! I watched 7 different anime in the Summer 2017, so we’ve got a lot to talk about- so much so that I’ll do a couple anime each post rather than just doing one giant post.

I fully believe in saving the best for last, so we’ll rank and review these anime in order from worst to best. Which means we’ll be starting with the anime I found the weakest out of what I watched this season. Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul and The Reflection. Are both of them bad anime? Or are they just not quite as a good as the other fare? Let’s dive in and find out!

Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul

Yep, this was easily the worst anime I watched this season. Not animation-wise, the art was very nice (though not quite as good as its prequel). But story-wise? WOW. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an anime- or a story period- end that badly.

And unlike a lot of people, I didn’t really come into this anime expecting much. Rage of Bahamut: Genesis, the first season, was a beautifully animated but incredibly shallow adventure romp with a messy ending that managed to be both cliche and nonsensical in how it fridged the main female character. It was fun for the most part, but also eyerollingly trope-y and sloppy storytelling wise, with fairly 2D characters. I came into this season expecting much the same. And for the first half-ish of the anime that was what I got. It certainly wasn’t well written, it was sexist, it was cliched, but it worked okay for what it was, which was a silly swords and sorcery story where you could just turn your brain off and enjoy the eye candy. 

There wasn’t much to the characters, but they were pleasant and likable enough. Nina, the lead of the story, was just kinda dragged along by the plot and didn’t have much going on (her main conflict is that when she gets turned on by a dude she turns into a dragon yes i’m serious), but her gung-ho attitude made her fun to watch. There was also an wacky all-lady prison break midway through the show that was kinda awesome.

 (I should note though, one of the characters is a very fantastical take on Jeanne D’Arc. And she’s portrayed  as someone who sucks at fighting if she doesn’t have the gods on her side because women are weak or whatever I guess! She finds some fulfillment only when a god pulls a Virgin Mary on her and forcibly impregnates her with an angel son. After this, her whole character revolves around her son. I had a lot of problems with that for obvious reasons).

But then. OH BUT THEN. I thought the first season’s denouement and end was messy, but I HADN’T SEEN NOTHIN’. Not only was this ending horrendous, it managed to damage all the characters involved (except for the zombie girl, Rita, who is too cool to be ruined by anything) and even basically damage the first season. If I cared enough to go back and watch that season, this ending would make it a sour experience, basically, just from how thoroughly the plot and characters from that season were mangled by this follow-up. Nothing redeemable was left in its wake.

Basically the whole story was overtaken by one of the most poorly conceived love interests I’ve ever seen. Nina’s beloved, Charioce, was a super sexy dude who had a few tiny flaws, like how he’d, y’know, massacred an entire race and also slaughtered, enslaved and tortured yet ANOTHER race (even putting them in gladiator style death matches for entertainment) and unjustly imprisoned a literal saint of a woman and told her he was only keeping her alive so he could murder her small child in front of her. 

But you see guys, he danced with Nina a couple times and is super hot and his mom’s dead which is sad so it’s okay that he did a little genocide, tried to kill all Nina’s friends (one of whom was ten) and threw her in jail. I’m serious. That was the shows logic. Turns out the reason for all this was it was some plan to unseal the dragon a character had been sacrificed to seal for the next hundred years in Genesis. (So he effectively rendered her death totally meaningless). He unsealed it just so he could kill it for good . The only explanation we get for his double dose of genocide was that ONE of the races has a superweapon he needed to kill a dragon. Yep, no explanation given as to why he needed to do kill all those beings or enslave them or put them in death matches or personally torment a woman who did nothing to him, but the show sure treated it like it explained everything and meant we were totally supposed to forgive AND feel sorry for this sexy, sexy tyrant.

(In the end, the genocide and slavery ends up being a footnote: everyone loves Charioce because he killed a dragon, the demons are being payed low wages instead of being enslaved so everything’s fine now, no justice for those who were slaughtered, no consequences for the oppressors, no reparations made, no word on whether the death camps and many other atrocities even stopped happening, nothing.)

Nina being in love with him damaged her irreparably as a character too, even though she was perfectly okay before that- it was just so infuriating that she could set aside all the people he killed and the fact he’d tormented her friends because he was a smexy dancer. I get what they were going for-a kind of starcrossed Disney ~love isn’t rational~ type thing. And “love isn’t rational” is just the laziest writing copout ever, I’m so sick of it. 

You can sell a romance where one party has done horrible things and the other one loves them anyway if you have the writing skill. But in order to sell that romance as understandable, you need to make the audience like that character too. The character needs to be actually endearing and interesting in some way.That way when so-and-so is tormented about how she loves him despite the things he’s done, the audience is tormented for the same reason. But there was no reason for Nina to be hopelessly in love with Charioce. Dude had the personality of a wet paper towel- I don’t think he emoted once the entire anime, even when he was on the verge of death. He didn’t offer her any invaluable support or guidance to Nina either. Yet she at one point said she’d choose the ENTIRE WORLD over him if it came down to it. A guy she danced with like twice! 

The worst thing about the Nina/Charioce romance is how a bunch of characters were literally sacrificed for it. One of the main characters of the show got himself killed shielding Charioce from those he had wronged, despite the fact Charioce had done absolutely nothing to warrant such devotion and said character didn’t even have a meaningful relationship with him. It was a comically anticlimatic death too, it was out of nowhere, the other characters barely emoted about it with even his supposed best friend basically shrugging it off. 

The other person sacrificed solely to add drama to Nina and Charioce’s lurve was Nina’s ten year old friend, who was unceremoniously shanked from behind  after being a major character for most of the season. It was so cruel and pointless, I felt sure a magic resurrection was coming for the kid, but nope- he was killed off solely to cause some drama between the good guys and Charioce because the genocide apparently wasn’t enough to make our heroes mad at him. Nina does finally get mad at him, but only for ten minutes, then she and almost everyone else instantly forgave him upon learning he didn’t TECHNICALLY directly kill this one kid.

 Even though he HAD been trying to kill the kid ALL SEASON and the bounty he put on this kids head was still pretty much the direct cause of his death. But nah,he didn’t like, specifically tell the killer “hey go murder this small child” , he just heavily implied anyone who did it would get a reward from him, so it’s all fine. Even the kid’s grieving mother and father figure eventually forgave Charioce about this for no apparent reason. 

Speaking of pointlessness, the cherry on top of the shit sundae was that the dragon all these characters were sacrificed to kill? The one whose death was supposedly the payoff worth all this genocide and melodrama? It was revealed in the last minute of the story that Charioce DIDN’T EVEN MANAGE TO KILL IT. Rendering the entire mess of a narrative COMPLETELY MOOT.

Seriously, if you want to see how overfocusing on badly written heterosexual romances can destroy an entire narrative, this series is a prime example. If you want to see an example or writers thinking a male character can be forgiven for any atrocity and win the female lead’s heart as long as he’s stoic and sexy and manly about it, this series will show you. This show demonstrates the worst pitfalls of romance narratives- writers seem to think as long as it’s an attractive man and woman getting together, they don’t have to bother with characterization or logic to sell their connection.

it’s a real shame- poor Nina could have been a compelling lead. There was stuff there that could have been developed into something cool had the writers cared at all- she could turn into a dragon, it was mentioned she was looked down on for not being fully dragon, she came from a rural village and was fairly innocent and didn’t know much about the world, her father died tragically- but rather than explore any of that, it was decided because she was a woman, her entire arc should be about her swooning and crying over Bishie McKillsaLot, never mind anything else.

Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul could have been a shallow but entertaining show like its predecessor. In the end though, the only thing entertaining about it by the end was how hard it crashed and burned. 

The Reflection

The Reflection isn’t quite as bad as it’s reputation in the anime community right now suggests. Which is not to say it’s a good show. It’s not good. But it’s definitely far from the worst anime I’ve see and has a few interesting aspects.

This show is a collaboration between an anime studio and Stan Lee, (who I guess really likes being involved in anime- he’s done this before with Heroman) and it follows a group of superheroes. The basic premise is that three years ago, a strange light and smoke hit people around the world. Some were killed, some gained superpowers. Those who gained powers were called ‘The Reflected”. The world hates and fears them, in true Marvel style. Now a villain named Wraith is kidnapping people for mysterious reasons. 

The Reflection is a messy show, which is apparent just from the animation. The colors are very flat and the lines are very thick, which seems to be an attempt to capture the classic comic book feel. But the thing is, old comics chose to have a bright color palette, or at least a highly contrasting one, for good reason. if you do that kind of style with a dark color palette, it ends up looking very muddy. Unfortunately, that’s what The Reflection chose to do. This was especially egregious in the last episode, where having the darkly colored characters against a dark sky made it very hard to tell what was happening.  On top of that, the animation was very limited in general.

There’s also a lot a standard superhero stories here that are not given a fresh spin- we have the angsty product of a lab experiment, the shallow, show-offhero who learns superheroing is SRS BUSINESS after his loved ones are killed due to his negligence and most disappointingly, a main villain whose only motivation is that he wants to plunge the world into a vague, generic sort of darkness.

Some stuff is just straight up not explained, which made the finale confusing- we see a flashback that is supposed to make us forgive a character for his actions, but it’s so incoherent and quick it reveals nothing. Nor is the villain really explored in a way that makes sense (save for an extremely on the nose message about “darkness”, which was repeated so often in the episode I got sick of hearing it), his actions are unclear and the whole thing is just generally clunky. It seems like they chose not to explain a lot of stuff (and end on a cliffhanger) in hopes of getting a sequel, but you can leave mysteries and openings for a possible season 2 without being opaque and hard to follow. In fact, a final episode like The Reflection’s is way more likely to turn fans off than leave them wanting more.

However, The Reflection does have a few interesting ideas and good moments. One of the main heroes, Lisa, has a wheelchair that transforms into a giant robot, which is rad as hell and should be included in every superhero narrative from now on. Her personality is also endearing- she’s a determined, fiery, geeky girl who loves comics. Her whole storyline where her father is all protective of her due to her disability and she tells him doesn’t consider her condition tragic and proves she’s actually the one who can protect him is fairly heavy handed , but it’s a very positive narrative, and I’m especially glad to see it in an anime after being burned HARD by the ableism in Yuki Yuna is a Hero. She’s sadly sidelined after her introductory episode (it’s especially strange that her comic book fandom never comes up again), but still remains a good character.

There’s also a character who was blind, except he can see the silhouettes of people who have superpowers and thus pick out when when people are superpowered that way- that’s another good concept and I liked that his wife was the physically strong and imposing one of their partnership, though she didn’t get as much characterization as I’d like (in fact, she pretty much had none outside her relationship with her husband). The episodes revolving around Lisa and this pair were definitely the strongest of the series.

The lead of the story, Eleanor, also had a lot of potential. She had the heart of a hero, but she was desperate for validation and because of that desperation she ended up having an identity crisis where she developed an alternate personality. If her psychology had been explored more, that could have been a really interesting concept- but it wasn’t really explored at all beyond generic “this personality is the darkness within me” so it ended up being more on-the-nose and boring than anything. Still, I appreciated Eleanor’s scrappiness and in the hands of a more competent show, she could have been really great. 

The other characters were duds though, unfortunately- the villains were generic and kinda just there. The hero X-On drove a lot of the plot, yet we learned pretty much nothing about him and he had no personality other than being kind of a dick. The magical girl squad was a fun touch and I loved seeing them kick ass and save the day, but they didn’t have distinct personalities from each other or much thematic significance to the story.

Basically, there’s nothing offensive or repellent about The Reflection. I have to give it points for trying something different stylistically from the usual anime fare. It’s a show that could have been good if it had been executed a little better and given more room to breathe. However, it wasn’t, so it ended up being a very clunky, forgettable anime.