Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Grimoire of Zero
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15457 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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He sees the rest of the magic users as barbaric, savages who blindly wield power and cause harm because they are only looking out for themselves. And he does not see that he is a hypocrite that he is doing the exact same bad things, but he seems a little broken after he lost his family to the witches.
Well the goal is still to get the grimoire from "Him", but Thirteen can also act as a contrast as being for the same thing as Zero yet going about it a different way. And we are seeing how that is negatively affecting people and continuing a cycle.
What we know about the majority standard magic people used before was from making sacrifices to "demons" which then give them the power to do something, and the new magic offers more flexibility without all the sacrifices. It could well be that the attack "Him" did on the place they live required some large sacrifices that gave him a lot of power in that attack but he would not be able to do often, and thus not reflective of the threat he would always pose. "Him" seems to be mostly now using the magic Zero developed, while it would look like Thirteen is using his own which seems have a lot of manipulation which could possibly pose a chance against someone just using someone else's magic.
We don't know yet. It could be the act of Albus to really hide her identity, it could be that she wanted to be taken seriously if a girl might not be, could have really wanted to model off of the hero of a man, could be that he was merely born female but otherwise sees himself as male. Don't know yet, but lots of possible reasons.
Part of Thirteen's deal is that he does not even that much come across as that manipulative, and he largely uses subtle manipulative magic at openings. He put Mercenary under a spell when he got an opening of shocking him over the idea that she probably used the heads of Beastfallen, which is understandable. The idea is that at least at that moment Mercenary was so scared that she might be after his head, which hurt her.
She seems to have been a symbol of peace among the witches and a focus on harmony, which as the wolf said could have been used by "Him" to whip all the other witches up and thus really creating the Zero witches. She was likely well known as self sacrificing for the average human in at least the area, but there is a possibility there might be even more to her.
The grin he gives in the OP kind of felt like he might be a more interesting character beyond a one note douchebag. True we did not see anything in his previous engagement that there was much more to him, but he also recognised something about Zero and really wanted to have her at the price of the slaves he already had, and as we learned he could smell Sorena's granddaughter on her, which happened to be Albus. He apparently could pick up something like she was a witch, but oddly there was no evidence that he had any witches himself, this could have been a hint to something. He apparently then worked with witches to track down Mercenary and all with the goal he was hoping to get something specific out of it.
You are upset we shifted from traveling buddies to a bit of trouble in paradise with the duo split up a bit. Even Spice and Wolf had Holo and Lawrence split up for a bit, it is a good way to show how the two may have grown from their time together and how they now need each other, as well as who are individuals. |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2292 |
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No, I am irritated because the storytelling has become an erratic collection of haphazardly tossed together tropes & schizoid mixes of character archetypes, while before it was a coherent whole with a skosh of depth to its primary character interactions. I thought I was pretty clear about that; I don't especially care what direction the story takes if it's told well, but it bugs me when it was executing well and departed from that to become a distracted mess. Most of your reply seems to be an attempt to provide in-universe responses to my questions, which is missing the point of my criticism. I acknowledge that it is possible to concoct in-universe explanations, and that in some cases flimsy explanations have been given; my complaint is that the execution leaves much to be desired, and that essentially from the point that Thirteen was introduced the show departed from its basic structure and started to jump jarringly and messily from disconnected plot point to disconnected plot point without any regard for maintaining a cohesive larger narrative, and that in doing so it also abandoned the one thing it had executed quite well (Merc & Zero's banter). |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23754 |
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I haven't really been enjoying the Zero/Mercenary breach, either. The most interesting element of the show for me is their interaction, so when that interaction isn't happening, I'm left to tap my foot impatiently for their inevitable reunion which, given the title of next week's episode, should be soon. I can't wait. I hope Mercenary does the right thing and grovels at Zero's feet in contrition at falling for Thirteen's lame Jedi mind trick. He better not complain the next time she uses him as a mattress, either.
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belvadeer
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It's great our wolf friend has a name and a backstory to him now, and one that at least gives us a clear image of him being a decent guy (while avoiding the stupid jerkass stereotype that other beastfallen have demonstrated thus far). Even more, Holdem's appearance standing alongside Zero, Merc and Albus in the opening song pretty much spells out that he'll be joining the party. This was a solid episode with good storytelling and some great save the day action. Now all that's left is for Zero to rejoin the team and we're good to go from there.
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AnimeAddict2014
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I thought this series was related to Re:Zero series..
it started out good but got mediocre was it dragged on.... |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18179 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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What's a distracted mess about it? The only issue that you raise that I think actually is an issue is the way that they're trying to play Wolf Guy both ways. Otherwise I've found the story to be completely coherent and consistent. Now, I do find other faults with the series - the writing is too often too lackadaisical, and it's not good enough to pull that off like Spice and Wolf did - but coherence is not one of them. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2292 |
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I listed a large number of the reasons I've felt it's a distracted mess. I'm a bit busy today, but I'll give more clearly connecting them to my claim another shot tomorrow.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2292 |
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"Tomorrow" came and went, but I'm here now, so let me give explaining my criticism one more shot. Key asked me:
I think I should first clarify that I'm using 'incoherent' in a broad sense. I don't mean that I literally can't understand what is currently happening or how it it is intended to relate (or not relate) to prior events; I am not claiming that Grimoire has become just a random flurry of completely disconnected sounds and images. What I mean when I call it incoherent or a distracted mess is that it seems as if it is attempting to tell 2-3 largely stand-alone stories in parallel, and that in doing so it regularly inserts new characters / subplots / major character motivations without organizing events so that these new insertions naturally relate to or emerge from prior events and character interactions. This does not yield a random jumble of images and sounds, but it does mean that major story elements feel badly shoehorned together. The wolf character is indeed the most glaring of these insertions. We were introduced to him as a proud fool, a cruel thug, and a vicious slave-owner. Mercenary and Zero dealt with and shamed him, and it looked like a reasonably executed one-off note. But we fast-forward a few episodes and suddenly his character has changed entirely; he's now a good guy with a convoluted, arbitrarily inserted connection to the story's archetypical "good witch." It is now completely unclear how we're supposed to understand the Wolf mercenary's character, but Mission: Connect All the Story Elements as Messily as Possible is well underway. Now consider Thirteen. His introduction is fine enough; it doesn't undermine the storytelling to introduce another survivor of the massacre at Zero's cave of sorcery. The "surprising" discovery of another mysterious figure from the mysterious Zero's tragic past is, if anything, an expected trope. But trouble begins when the story hurriedly rattles off a flimsy excuse for Thirteen to be a bad guy; we're told he wants to slaughter other magic users indiscriminately, reserving approval only for Zero (and presumably his slaughtered but very dead friends back in the cave of sorcery), because he thinks other magic users selfishly abuse the power of magic to hurt people. This motivation is not entirely incomprehensible; with better character writing it could probably be connected back to the massacre at the caves - maybe that trauma caused him to see magic as evil and/or too dangerous for release in the broader world. But we don't see any serious trauma in his speeches or character interactions; he's just a largely impassive, pat bad guy who seemingly manipulates our protagonists entirely for his own ends. The show does nothing to sell us on the depth of feeling behind his motivation nor on the connection of his motivation to the presumably pivotal event (caves massacre), and it is as a result difficult to buy him as a decent, substantial character or antagonist, or to care about his interactions with our protagonists. The trouble with Thirteen being a poorly sold, poorly motivated villain is compounded by the lack of a narrative reason for his becoming a major bad guy; since he's not even an interesting character, that his introduction has arbitrarily sidelined the primary narrative is extremely hard to ignore. Prior to Thirteen's introduction, the story was focused on hunting down "Him," and on the ramifications of his Promethean theft of magic from the cave of sorcery, but we've made no meaningful progress on this storyline while dealing with Thirteen, and Thirteen's antagonism hasn't been born in any natural way from this prior storyline. Instead we've spent the current arc hyperfocused on an unnecessary, milquetoast enemy and the most contrived of subplots (cue Mercenary suddenly distrusting Zero after a minor speech, Zero suddenly becoming wildly emotional despite apparently knowing that this is what Thirteen does), while occasionally the authors remember we had a bona fide plot prior to this and give us brief, strictly verbal callbacks to it (randomly the characters remember "Him" and mention his existence, then return to the nonsense with Thirteen). I suppose a lot of my problems with the direction the last handful of episodes have gone is that Thirteen is an incredibly uninteresting, poorly developed antagonist with no meaningfully developed connection to the primary narrative, and that he has been arbitrarily given 'bad guy' characteristics for no apparent reason (he's an evil manipulative wizard who plays on your distrust of others!). And it is frustrating because I don't think he has to be that way; he could have given some really well-motivated, deeply felt speeches about the caves incident convincing him that most people cannot be trusted with magic or some such. That could give him a genuinely compelling motivation born naturally of his prior interactions with "Him," make Thirteen feel like a real person, and not cheapen his already bland character writing by giving him arbitrary "evil dude manipulation powers." That would help maintain the narrative's structure and avoid the current arc feeling like a jarring shift from the primary story. There are also a few other things (notably the entirely unnecessary 'Is the kid a girl or a boy?!' nonsense) that bugged me because they seem to evidence the authors' love of arbitrarily introducing convoluted layers of tropes rather than focus on decent character or plot writing, but I've already been too wordy so I'll just leave off there for now. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23754 |
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Very well put, NeverConvex. You have articulated clearly what I had been dimly feeling but lacked the interest to actually work out in my own mind. I'm not as down on Wolfie as a character as you are, however. Even back when he was first introduced, there was a whiff about him that suggested he wasn't completely an irredeemable douche-canoe. Sadly, since those events happened several weeks ago, I can't remember the specifics of why I felt that way and I lack the energy to go back and rewatch them. Also, I can retroactively trace Wolfie's actions back then based on his backstory. No doubt he was severely bummed by Good Witch's death and so I can imagine him saying, "eff it, I'm going to really embrace the monstrous side of myself since this is clearly a shitty world in any case."
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2292 |
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Thanks Blood-, glad I'm not alone in feeling that way. I honestly am still not happy with how I articulated my frustration, but it came out better than the first time I think.
I think Wolf-chan's character & backstory could be salvaged if they were willing & able to invest a lot more time into it. Unfortunately I think the pivot from "charming rake loyal to the good lady-witch" to "actively keeps lady-slaves" and back again sounds itself like a show's worth of content to tell well. Doing that backstory justice in the tens of seconds of actual character development Wolf-bro's gotten just seems impossible (though it would have been nice for the show to at least try to acknowledge and explain the shift instead've just sorta having it happen). Your reply reminded me of something else something I forgot to mention that's also Wolf-related: is it just me or did the show invest 0 effort into emotionally selling his decision to become a beast? Not that being a known adulterer is totally unimportant, but his leap into physically transmogrifying himself to fix the problem seemed comically casual. |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18179 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Starting a rebuttal by refuting an unreasonably-literal interpretation of what I said cuts into the credibility of your argument. Just sayin'.
Yep, and I already admitted that he's a problem, and for exactly the reasons you said. In fact, I'd say his situation is the series' overriding problem at this point.
I have, and I don't have anywhere near as much problem with this character as you apparently do. I entirely agree that he's bland and dull, but that's it. Frankly, I don't think that we have seen all of his true agenda yet. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23754 |
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@ NeverConvex - I can't argue that Wolf-bro's (heh) decision to become beastfallen was handled in a cursory fashion, but again, I feel able to fill in the blanks on that one. I got the sense he had a certain amount of self-disgust towards his ne'er-do-well human existence. It is a simplistic one to one pyschological construct, but I get the, "I have the instincts of a wolf, I might as well be one." Absolutely, this outlook could have been made clearer and more emotional resonant had more time and care been taken with it. But as long as I can piece things together myself, even on scanty evidence, I can live with it. I dunno, I just kinda like Wolf-bro.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2292 |
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I'm not sure what you think I'm rebutting, Key; you didn't really make any specific claims or arguments that I can recall - you just sort've stated how you feel about the show as a whole. And that's fine, but I don't think there was enough specific content to your earlier reply for me to try and dig into it to try and refute specific bits of argument or anything, or for my reply to be read as some kind of counterargument to your post.
In any event, I only meant to give clearer voice to the problems I have with the direction Grimoire has taken. When I elaborated on what I meant by 'incoherent', I exaggerated a bit in describing how a show might be incoherent (in part to contextualize where my use of incoherent is on a continuum from the absurd to the completely coherent, in part because exaggerating with florid language is fun); I guess that's what you're taking issue with as an 'overly-literal interpretation?' If so, I didn't intend to suggest that no show can be incoherent and to set that term up as an unreachable strawman. I just wanted to explain that I didn't mean "I can't follow what's going on" but rather "The story seems to have fragmented into several at-best tenuously and arbitrarily connected substories, each of which is populated with a cast of weakly developed & arbitrarily intertwined, inconsistently told tropes". You're certainly welcome to disagree, of course. If there are particular reasons you disagree and you want to elaborate on them, I'd be interested in hearing some of the details of your apparently very different experience of Grimoire.
Yeah - I mean, I can sort've interpolate a compelling background for him. I just think most of that is the show's job. There's certainly a balance to be struck between letting the reader's imagination do some of the work and directly building up a character's personality and background, but I think Grimoire missed that balance really hard in this case. This conversation kind've reminds me of the talkback thread for one of last season's better shows - the one with the high school romance going on, where a bunch of us ended up arguing about whether the male and female teachers were compelling characters or poorly characterized. I think that show was a lot closer to hitting the right balance (although I still fell on the side of thinking they didn't characterize or motivate the male teacher very well by the show's end). |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18179 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Poor choice of words there. "Response" might have been more accurate.
Yes, that's exactly the case. My initial impression was that you were setting up a strawman, but I didn't want to say it because I feel that term is vastly overused in these forums.
Disagree? Yes. But it's not something that I feel passionately enough about to want to get into a long-winded discussion about it. |
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DuskyPredator
Posts: 15457 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Do you remember why the wolf got involved? He instantly took an interest in Zero, a reason that was not fully confirmed. The main assumption was because he knew she was a witch, she was someone he was willing to trade three more fully bodied women for. If that was it, why was he not really some master witch slaver if he could pick them out so well, but really he was willing to trade 3 slaves just for one? He wanted it to stay a bit down low, but as it was he was calling the girls that were with him a witches, he was not hiding that lie. It kind of did not make sense the more you think about it, it was not because Zero was a witch, it was because what she smelt like, something that he could not smell on Mercenary because apparently Beastfallen smell too strongly. I do see where you are coming from that it has not really tied all the narratives as strongly as it could, but calling it incoherent is too strong a word. All the story elements are interconnected, at first they don't seem related but they are all connected. The three plots you would say would be Zero's quest for "Him", Thirteen's conflict with the group, and Wolf's joining the group, and all three are actually part of the whole. What starts the story off? 1: Zero left the cave. Why did she leave? 2: To find her grimoire that was taken. Why was it taken? 3: "Him" took it and killed cave people. What is the first conflict? 4: Albus is after Mercenary What happens next? 5: Albus joins because he can solve 2. Why can 5 happen? 6: Because he joined group to be strong, this is why 3 happened. Why did 6 happen? 7: Because good witches like Sorena died. What is a new conflict? 8: Wolf shows interest in Zero? Why does 8 happen? 9: Because of 5. What is the next conflict? 10: Town is destroyed. Why did 10 happen? 11: Thirteen is killing all witches. Why does 11 happen 12: Because of 3. Why does he come into conflict with group? 13: Because 1 happened, he is protective of her because of 3, and wants to do 2. 14: He causes rift for reasons in 13. How does wolf re-join story? 15: After 14, the reasons in 8, which itself was because of 7. What are Him's relevance to the story? 16: Him caused 3, facilitated 6, caused 7, escaped 10, and can solve 2. From this you see that the story of Thirteen(13) and wolf(15), are just underneath the umbrella of Him, which 16 actually encompasses, causing both the other stories. It is one plot, not three. Thinking that it is three stories is just expecting that only the end goal be focused, while the two other stories have not just come out of nowhere and link to the events of the first episode. Again I admit it is not as tightly bound as it might be, but it is not three large stories only loosely connected. Reading just the sixteen points I wrote above without necessarily the question next to it pretty neatly ties it together. Finding it just a mess because the original goal has not been fully addressed yet while getting into other long stories is ignoring the relevance those plots have to the original goal. |
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