Shelf Life

C3

Haruaki Yachi is immune to curses. As such, his globetrotting dad keeps sending him cursed artifacts so that they'll reform into ordinary girls. That's right, in this world magical objects can take the form of people, most often teenage girls. One morning, a particularly storied object arrives at Haruaki's doorstep – a black cube that can turn into a variety of torture instruments. Named Fear in Cube, she was locked away in a basement for centuries after the Inquisition. Now, however, she's free, and ready to become a regular schoolgirl. The only problem: she's cursed with driving her owners homicidally insane. Haruaki is her first chance to live a life that doesn't eventually devolve into bloody murder. This domestic setup quickly turns into a harem, as Haruaki helps out new cursed objects and befriends his classmates, who may have secrets of their own. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with an interest in these cursed tools – there are organizations who want to use them for their own purposes, or even exterminate them altogether. Haruaki, Fear, and company will need to fight these people off in order to maintain their happy high school life. But what if one of their own is a traitor?

Released in 2011, C³ is one of the earlier entries in the currently inescapable based-on-a-light-novel genre. As a setup, it amounts to something like A Certain Magical Index mixed with the Monogatari series. Milquetoast boy starts rooming with magical artifact girl and they have antics fixing problems involving other artifact girls. These things live or die on the personalities and gimmicks they can come up with for the girls, and C³ is pretty rote. Haruaki is one of the blandest leads I've encountered in a while. I honestly kept forgetting that he was in the show. The girls around him get most of the interactions with villains, so he mostly serves as a reason for them to hang out in the same place all the time. And of course, they're all in love with him. They include Konoha, the childhood friend archetype and a cursed sword. Fear herself is a pretty classic tsundere/cute unsocialized girl who Haruaki has to introduce to society. The most developed is probably Kirika, the student council president who possesses a number of difficult-to-handle cursed objects. These include magical fetish gear that heals all of her injuries (at the cost of killing her should she take it off) and a magical fighting ribbon (that compels her to torture-murder people). This gets her into BDSM antics. Because of her “condition,” she feels unable to act on her feelings for Harauki. Unfortunately, this is never resolved, as the series ends on a sequel hook. These are some pretty basic “anime girl” personalities, and there isn't much story to keep you watching in spite of it.

Lacking an overarching plot, the show consists of some pretty standard story arc-driven “boy fixes girls with magical emotional problems” stuff. And as an entry in that genre, C³ is pretty emotionally inert. The main guy's immunity to curses is never explained, and all he needs to do to fix these women is be nice in their general direction. Two of the three arcs deal more with a cackling villain than the girl's character. The dialogue is pretty bad in these – the first one's defining trait seems to be that she calls everyone “bitch.” The second one waxes some philosophic about human relationships before nearly getting torture-murdered and absconding to the nonexistent sequel. The one other story arc – about a cursed doll that compels people to fall in love with it and then kills them – is the most interesting, mostly because the plot actually engages with how the cursed object works. The Doll falls genuinely in love with its target and tries to get out of its obligation to kill her. Fortunately, our heroes manage to get her out of it (via torture porn). The couple stays together, but any emotional impact is killed by the fact that they're a yuri cliché in a show that otherwise contains some pretty bad attitudes towards women. Beneath some of the standard genre platitudes about the importance of human connection, C³ flirts with meaning, but never amounts to it.

But that's not why anyone talks about this show. When C³ is brought up in conversation at all, it's usually in reference to its visuals. Series director Shin Oonuma was a former compatriot of Akiyuki Simbo over at Shaft, and it shows. This show – made at his own studio Silver Link – borrows liberally from the visual ideas on display in both Puella Magi Madoka Magica and the Monogatari series. Most notably, these include Monogatari's quick cutaways and Madoka's collage-like fairy tale segments. (Quick disclosure: it's up to an animation scholar to determine which artistic decisions originated from either Simbo or Oonuma, but they're used to worse effect here, so I'm calling them derivative.) As an imitation, it's not poorly executed, but the rip is too transparent for me to call C³ visually inspired on its own. Silver Link does an admirable job imitating Shaft, but they're still more of a budget studio. The colors are muddier and the animation way stiffer than what you'd see in either Monogatari or Madoka. Unlike those two shows, the style also fails resonate with the material on any level besides being nice to look at. It might be worth checking out if you're interested in cataloguing the visual hallmarks of individual directors and the like, but for the untrained eye, this is just a cruder version of two already well known styles.

It's also worth noting that this show is significantly raunchier than Monogatari. Simbo is known to have an, uh, thing for young-looking girls, and Oonuma appears to share that proclivity. This is evidenced by the fact that he's directed every season of Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya, an infamous long-running lolicon show. What I'm getting at is that C³ contains shots of little girls' underpants. I think that's fair to disclose. The fanservice in general is a lot more conventional than its most overt inspiration. When Monogatari concerns itself with looking at sexy ladies, it's expressed through suggestive conversations and direction that implies more about their bodies than it shows. C³, in contrast, has a lot of people face-planting into boobs. They're superficially similar, but at their core purpose as titillation, the two shows function entirely differently. C³ also has an unpleasant torture fixation. There's a lot of women getting messed up while the camera ogles their writhing forms. Different strokes and all, but this coupled with the lolicon stuff was enough to push C³ over the line into “unpleasant” territory for me. Plenty of otaku-oriented fanservice stuff manages to have a tolerable attitude towards women, but this isn't one of them. Blegh.

Overall, C³ is a standard fanservice harem mostly notable for some stylistic eccentricities. It tires hard to ride on the coattails of some big late 2000s/early 2010s shows (Madoka's darkness and Monogatari's avant garde posturing) but fails to do anything interesting with its narrative. The nature of its fanservice put me off hard. But for as much as I disliked this show, I'll admit that I was never bored. It's snappily paced, and I can believe that this content entertains some audience somewhere. I'm not impressed by its derivative visuals, but I'll take it over something visually uninspired. That's why I'm giving this a “rental” and not “perishable” – a rating I reserve for shows that, in my estimation, fail for their intended audience. If you feel your tastes are in line with mine, stay away from this, but if you're into the Baka to Tests and Certain Magical Indexes of the world, maybe give this a shot.
-Gabriella[TOP]