No Guns Life

Episodes 13-14

Four months of lockdown, with the horizon yielding no quick resolution to this pandemic, has irrevocably affected how I think about a lot of things. I know I'm not alone in that, and that knowledge is in itself a morsel of comfort in increasingly disquieting times. In fact, generally speaking, I take a lot fewer things for granted now, and I'm trying to be better about expressing that gratitude to others. That is all to say, dear readers, that I'm so thankful to have the big gun man anime back in our lives.

Yes, after a completely understandable delay due to COVID-19, No Guns Life returns with a second season that promises more of its hardboiled cyberpunk action and intrigue revolving around a talking revolver. I wouldn't say that absence necessarily makes the heart grow fonder, but in this case, it's certainly put a certain shine on this large detective's face barrel. It helps, too, that the ugly face of our IRL cyberpunk dystopia (a.k.a. the United States of America) has been laid increasingly bare in the wake of sweeping systemic healthcare failures, increasing and racist brutality from the police, and the widening canyon of a wealth gap between a literally-dying working class and gluttonous billionaires. No Guns Life took aim at all of these issues to some degree in its first season, and the second picks up right where we left off: with Juzo staring at a self-ambulating severed cyborg hand.

Juzo, always soaked to the muzzle in noir clichés, quickly catches us up with a short internal monologue summarizing the events so far (and later, in my favorite meta joke from these episodes, lampoons his own tendency to do so). It's helpful, especially after the extended break, but beyond that the first episode of the season proves to be an overall efficient reintroduction to its main cast of characters and their motivations. Tetsuro can use his Harmony power to help his friends, but only at significant risk to both himself and others, and he's still too hot-headed to properly weigh those risks. He gets kidnapped almost immediately. Mary is a talented Extended engineer with a noble sense of justice and a mysterious estranged brother who finally enters the spotlight. She's smart enough to avoid kidnapping. And Juzo, of course, is the (mostly) unflappable lovely baritone with a giant gun for a head and a dark military past. He beats up the kidnappers.

While last season primarily focused on the high crimes of super-conglomerate Berühren—to an extent that made me memorize the Alt code for the character ü (Alt+0252, by the way)—the second season begins by finally putting some faces to the shadowy terrorist group Spitzbergen. The most striking of those is the creepy patchwork GLASGOW grin of Victor, whose visage and demeanor remind us that No Guns Life has little fear of appearing too ridiculous. And that's to the show's benefit, because it immediately makes me interested in what turned him from a talented engineer and Mary's dear brother into a cackling serial killer called the Dismantler. Whether or not the answer will prove satisfying is an entirely different story, but the creation of intrigue is just as important to a mystery as its solution, if not more so. For now, it tells us a bit more about Juzo, who only got into the Resolver business after the Victor from long ago tasked him with taking care of Mary. The question of continuity (or lack thereof) between our present and past selves is brought up in the text by Victor, and I expect that theme to be further developed next week by peeling back some more of Juzo's own military background.

Like any good noir yarn, our main characters find themselves entangled in a complex web of hostile factions taking shots at each other over some MacGuffin or other. In this case, the device Juzo received at the end of last season turns out to be the recording Olivier made of Berühren golden boy Mega Armed casually confessing to the top government-level disinformation campaign regarding the safety of Extended augmentations. Understandably, a lot of people want this very tiny MP3 player. Berühren, and by extension the government, need to cover their tracks to maintain their economic chokehold on society. This dirty work is being done by the special cyborg-focused law enforcement agencty EMS, now led by acting director Avi Cobo. Former EMS director Olivier, who almost got blown up last season, is now mostly recovered and trying to recover the recording, so she can bring Mega Armed's benefactors to justice. Spitzbergen wants it so they can sew chaos and further their anti-Extended cause. Juzo has his own plans for it, although I'm sure he doesn't know exactly what they are right now. He obviously doesn't align with the transparently evil Berühren people or the nefarious schemes of Spitzbergen, but it's important that he also doesn't trust his friend Olivier with it. She thinks she can create change within the system and let the scales of justice mete out Berühren's doom. Juzo doesn't, and I'm more than inclined to agree with him. We've seen time and time again, particularly in the past few months, how “the law” protects the people in power despite overwhelming evidence of their abuses. You can't reform something so fundamentally unaccountable.

Basically, I'm saying right now's a vindicating time for heroes who hate cops.

Character-wise, Tetsuro gets arguably the biggest shakeup when Spitzbergen leader Wachowski (almost certainly named after a particular pair of influential sister directors) reveals that he used to work for them. I'm also the least interested in his arc. Whether they're lying to him, or whether he truly does have missing memories, it doesn't really matter. Out of No Guns Life's cast, Tetsuro best fits the mold of “standard anime protagonist,” and his development through this point has been more recursive than progressive. I'm a lot more interested in what will happen to Mary now that her brother is back and apparently obsessed with vivisecting Juzo. She's always stood out, even on a design level, and I like that we're filling in some of the gaps in her backstory. Sure, I'm biased, but I typically enjoy when genre-heavy works like this one focus on the people in the periphery, i.e. taking a setting full of cyborgs and homing in on a back-alley doctor/engineer who takes care of them. And while Juzo, to be fair, is a pretty static character too, I remain amenable towards the slow burn discovery of what lies beneath his hilariously hardboiled surface.

Despite the delay, No Guns Life returns to the air with few misfires and plenty of compelling trajectories for its very shiny protagonist to explore. It's no cyberpunk exemplar yet, but it's solid, and these first two episodes have done pretty well when it comes to balancing exposition with forward movement. I wouldn't forgive myself, however, if I left this review without talking about the ED. I think it's cool! We get a fistfight between Juzo and Seven rendered entirely in Unreal Engine, set to some crunchy rock music from THIS IS JAPAN, and it actually rules. What I want, no, NEED to criticize is Mary's spectacularly terrible twerking—more accurately, her attempt at twerking. I'm sure the animators were very excited about creating something sexy, but it ends up looking like one of the saddest things I've ever seen a person do with their ass. I don't even need to touch upon its incongruity with both her character and the show at large. As a society, we need to do better and expect better from ourselves. Alternatively, send Mary back to twerk school.

Rating:

No Guns Life is currently streaming on FUNimation.

When he's not writing about sentient gun detectives, Steve can be found on Twitter probably talking about vtubers or something.